With his bizarre and fearsome images, the enigmatic master of apocalypse still speaks to us across five centuries. A half-millennium ago when Europe was moving out of the Middle Ages, Hieronymus Bosch, a prosperous painter and landowner in the duchy of Brabant in what is now the Netherlands, was widely admired as one of the cleverest, most pious, most perceptive, most apocalyptic masters of his times. He then slipped into several hundred years of obscurity. The symbolism and message of his terrifying masterpieces seemed bizarre and unsavory and even heretical. But he has been rediscovered in the 20th century. American tourists, who have little Bosch at home, now crowd through the museums of Europe to be awed by his great triptychs or to track down his smaller masterpieces...

Riot police swinging truncheons rushed into the Bank of France before dawn Wednesday and forced aside a mass of striking workers to lead two besieged bank officials out of the venerable building. The show of force, which, ironically, came on a day when workers throughout France were electing representatives to traditional courts that try to settle labor disputes peacefully, infuriated French labor unions and seemed to harden the nine-day-old strike. It also reflected the poor state of relations between the labor unions and the conservative government of Premier Jacques Chirac. Jacques de Larosiere, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who is now governor of France’s government-run central bank, said he had called on the police because the strikers were holding two bank officials against their will...

Only one restaurant in all Paris prohibits smoking. Only a handful, mostly American fast-food outlets, have nonsmoking sections. Premier Jacques Chirac rarely talks to reporters without waving a cigarette for emphasis. A stranger can always identify the high school in any Paris neighborhood by the cluster of teen-agers outside puffing awkwardly on cigarettes. The French government spends far more every year on promoting smoking than on discouraging it. There are other countries where smoking is more prevalent. Anyone who has ever listened to the raspy voice of a bartender in Madrid or choked at breakfast in a Polish coffee shop knows that. But few countries are as puzzling as France in their attitude toward smoking...

When the U.S. and Soviet leaders meet this week in Washington, Western Europe will be looking on like a bashful cheerleader, too nervous to cheer very loudly but too loyal to let the side down. This ambiguity has led to some confusion. In public pronouncements, all the West European leaders welcome the summit meeting and endorse its probable main achievement--the signing of a treaty to eliminate American and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapons, the kind that could strike at the Soviet Union from Europe and at Europe from the Soviet Union. But many European government officials in private, and many newspaper and strategic analysts in public, say they are resigned to the treaty and express worry about where it will lead...

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia now in rebellion, and Premier Hun Sen, the leader of its Vietnam-supported government, signed an agreement Friday that could lead to a negotiated end of the long civil war in their country. Much depends on whether the Khmer Rouge, the powerful partner in Prince Sihanouk’s rebel coalition, will heed the call of Sihanouk and Hun Sen to join them in future negotiations. The agreement, signed with great ceremony before television cameras, does little more than set the ground rules for future negotiations. But there was an optimistic air in the secluded chateau in Fere-en-Tardenois, 75 miles east of Paris, where the 65-year-old Sihanouk and the 36-year-old Hun Sen signed the document after meeting over the last three days...

Two opponents at war, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia, and Hun Sen, the present premier of Cambodia, met Wednesday in a secluded hotel in eastern France for negotiations aimed at leading their small Southeast Asian nation out of its bloody morass. The talks, which many Cambodians described as historic, were the first such negotiations since Vietnam invaded Cambodia nine years ago. After the session ended almost seven hours later, there was muted optimism. No agreements were announced, but both sides said they will meet again today and perhaps on Friday. They also announced that they will hold another round of negotiations sometime in the future at Sihanouk’s home in Pyongyang in North Korea...

Premier Jacques Chirac of France faced bitter condemnation from Britain and growing suspicion within France on Tuesday over his deal with Iran for the release of two French hostages in Lebanon. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, commenting on the French concessions that brought the two hostages home, told the House of Commons in London that “treating with terrorists only leads to more kidnappings and more violence.” “That is the way we will not do it,” she went on. “The best defense against terrorists is to make clear that you will never give in to their demands.” Even before Thatcher spoke to Parliament, an aide to Chirac said in Paris that “we are a little astonished” at reports of the fury of Thatcher and British Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe and at editorials in London newspapers that accused France of “betrayal” and of “a cynical compact with terror...”

James Baldwin, a renowned writer who spent a lifetime in literature trying to explore his identity as a black and as an American, died Monday night at the age of 63 in his home in St. Paul de Vence in the south of France. His death from cancer was announced Tuesday morning by Bernard Hassalle, a longtime companion and secretary. The eldest son of a Harlem preacher, Baldwin, a small, slight man, was looked on for much of two decades both as a distinguished young American novelist and as a black essayist with the extraordinary, almost uncanny power of making his black experience meaningful to a white audience. But, after the 1950s and 1960s, his reputation waned, perhaps because he had become too strident a black for white audiences, perhaps because he failed, like other American novelists of the 20th Century, to maintain the excitement and freshness of his earlier work...

The French government allowed Wahid Gordji, the Iranian official suspected of helping terrorists in Paris, to leave the besieged Iranian Embassy and return home to Iran on Sunday as part of an obvious trade for two French hostages released by their captives in Beirut two days ago. The office of Premier Jacques Chirac, in a carefully worded statement, also held out the hope that Iran would now use its influence to help arrange the release of the three other French hostages in Beirut. The departure of Gordji, holed up in the embassy for five months, also appeared to signal an end to what the French press had called “the war of the embassies” and could signal an early resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries...

Premier Jacques Chirac, welcoming two former hostages home to France from Lebanon, acknowledged Saturday that their release represents an improvement in France’s relations with Iran but denied as “a pack of lies” a report that ransom had been paid. The report had appeared only hours earlier in the influential and usually authoritative newspaper, Le Monde. In a front-page story, Le Monde said, “The payment of a ransom contributed to the liberation of the hostages.” But Chirac used strong language in denying the report at a news conference at Paris’ Orly Airport. “I deny as emphatically as I can the pack of lies that claims France paid a ransom,” Chirac said. The controversy over how France gained their release did not dampen the emotional welcome at the airport for Jean-Louis Normandin, 36, a television lighting technician, and Roger Auque, 31, a free-lance photographer...

Islamic extremists, citing assurances of an impending change in France’s policy toward the Middle East, freed two French hostages in West Beirut on Friday. Jean-Louis Normandin, 36, a television lighting technician, and Roger Auque, 31, a free-lance photographer, were released from separate cars outside the seaside Summerland Hotel, about 50 yards from waiting French Embassy officials and Syrian secret servicemen. The cars sped away quickly and the two men were rushed to the French Embassy in Christian East Beirut in bulletproof vehicles, with journalists and photographers racing behind. Normandin later told ABC News he was imprisoned with two Americans. “I was with two Americans--Joseph Cicippio and Edward Tracy--since the 12th of February,” he said. He gave no indication as to whether the kidnapers planned to release the Americans...

The region of Burgundy was once an independent state, a powerful rival of France, boasting the most elegant and fashionable court in Europe. But all that power dwindled away half a millennium ago, leaving Burgundy with little more than memories and wine. Since then, Burgundy has had its ups and downs. In his 1934 novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller described Dijon, the ancient capital of Burgundy, as “a hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking little jars.” Its past glories as the seat of a great duchy were lost on him. Today, no one can accuse Burgundy of wielding imperial power. But its wine--prized throughout the world at breathtaking prices--has made Burgundy one of the richest regions of France...

Hardly a week passes nowadays without a new political scandal in France. The air is charged with accusation. There are so many smears, in fact, that it’s hard for all of them to stick. The sound and fury is actually the unofficial opening of the campaign for next spring’s presidential election. The most serious scandal--or, as the French prefer to call it, affaire-- has echoes of the U.S. Iran-Contra furor because it involves illegal sale of arms to Iran. By all logic, that affair should have damaged the political standing of President Francois Mitterrand. But Mitterrand, a Socialist, seems to have wriggled out of the affair somewhat easily, leaving behind a trap for his conservative arch-rival, Premier Jacques Chirac, who in turn seems to have slipped the trap...

History hangs on most Spaniards in ways Americans can hardly understand. That difference is at the heart of the repeated failure of Spanish and U.S. officials to negotiate a new treaty allowing the United States to keep its military bases in Spain after May, 1988. After the seventh round of talks ended in failure early this month, an American spokesman insisted that U.S. negotiators understood the problems posed for Spain by a treaty dating back to the days of late dictator Francisco Franco. But when pressed by journalists to amplify this understanding, the American protested, “Look, you’re talking about something that happened just two years after I was born.” Americans do not like to look back...

The people of this North African country are quietly proud these days of what seems like a revolution without pain, their ability to end the long reign of elderly Habib Bourguiba without bloodshed, without fanfare and without panic. “It was a great historic event,” Khemais Chamari, long known as an opposition leader, told a group of American journalists Sunday, “but it has passed as if it were no event at all.” “People are very proud,” said an international foreign aid specialist who knows the Tunisians well. “For years, everybody was worried about what would happen to Tunisia after the end of Bourguiba. Now they know, and they are happy...”

Zine Abidine Ben Ali, a 51-year-old army general serving as premier, took over the presidency of Tunisia smoothly and peacefully Saturday after removing an aging President Habib Bourguiba at dawn from the nearly absolute power he had held for 31 years. Citing a report by a medical commission that the octogenarian Bourguiba was senile and ill, Ben Ali, appointed premier by Bourguiba only a month ago, announced to the nation that the politician who had led Tunisia to independence in 1956 was “absolutely incapable of assuming the duties of president of the republic.” A few hours later, Ben Ali was sworn in before Parliament as the new president of Tunisia. The Tunisian constitution provides for the premier to succeed to the presidency upon the death, resignation or physical incapacity of the president, but it lays down no rules for determining that incapacity...

Spanish and U.S. officials failed again Friday to reach agreement on a new treaty to keep U.S. military bases in Spain, sending their negotiations into a critical final phase that will determine the bases’ fate. Both sides sought to minimize their failure and emphasized that they have decided to meet next month for an eighth round of talks on the bases, which grew out of a joint defense agreement signed in 1953, when Gen. Francisco Franco was the chief of state. But Spanish officials said they will formally notify the United States by letter next week that they do not want the present treaty automatically extended for another year when it lapses next May 14. That, in effect, sets a six-month deadline for the two sides to agree on a new treaty...

No one can be sure whether Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has the will and imagination to quiet the deep, long-standing fears and suspicions that many in the world have about the Soviet Union. But there is little doubt that Gorbachev, with great charm and tact and flair, has managed in a relatively brief time to push Western diplomats and their old assumptions far off balance. Despite protests from the White House that he has done little more than seize old ideas of President Reagan’s on arms control, much of the world sees Gorbachev as an innovator and a pragmatic compromiser, a statesman whose initiative and determination are responsible for the forthcoming treaty that would dismantle and destroy some nuclear weapons for the first time...

A visitor to the Soviet Union these days finds a myriad of voices and images that reflect the headiness of change, the thrill of hope and the fear of failure. The angry, elderly man, a black cap snug on his silvery hair, stared at the painting on a stand in Moscow’s Izmailova Park on a recent Sunday morning and demanded that the artist pull it down. “This is not art,” the elderly man said. The commotion prompted onlookers to crowd around the critic. They laughed at him, jeered at him, thrust their fingers at him to make their point. “Who the hell are you?” someone demanded. The elderly man finally gave up and stormed off...

France called Thursday for an urgent meeting of the finance ministers of the seven leading industrial democracies to keep the dollar from sliding further. In a speech to the French Economic and Social Council, Finance Minister Edouard Balladur said a meeting of the so-called Group of Seven--the United States, Japan, West Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and France--is needed “very soon” to reinforce the accords of last February that had kept the dollar stable until this week. Reagan Administration officials, however, said a meeting was unlikely until budget negotiations with Congress were completed in Washington...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and thus the founding father of the Soviet Union, died in 1924, his widow, Natalya Krupskaya, implored his followers: “Do not let your sorrow for Ilyich find expression in outward veneration of his personality. Do not raise monuments to him or palaces to his name. Do not organize pompous ceremonies in his memory.” The followers turned their backs on the widow’s plea. They turned from her, in fact, like a furious whirlwind and created out of Lenin a prophet or a saint or even a god on earth. No other hero of the 20th Century anywhere is venerated the way Lenin is venerated in the Soviet Union...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] The Great October Revolution began here in St. Petersburg in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized the reins of a battered Russia in a frenetic time that the American journalist John Reed called the “10 days that shook the world.” Leningrad, as St. Petersburg is now known, is thus a kind of holy city in the Soviet Union, the city of the vanguard of the revolution. Yet now, 70 years after the revolution, the Soviet Union’s second-largest city hardly seems in the vanguard of anything. Leningrad is, in fact, a little out of date and out of step with the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

Most foreigners believe that the French Revolution has a glorious image in France. After all, July 14, the anniversary of the revolutionary storming of the Bastille, is France’s national day. The revolutionary “Marseillaise” is the national anthem. And France will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the revolution in 1989. Yet, as the celebration nears, it is more and more obvious that a large minority of French has trouble embracing the revolution. Some fret over its bloody excesses and accuse generations of teachers and historians of hiding those stark and frightful realities. Some conservatives accuse leftists of exaggerating the place of the revolution in the mythology of France...

[OPINION] Hugh Capet was crowned king in 987 and the French now look on that date as the birth of France. The country is celebrating the end of its first millennium with religious ceremonies, sound-and-light shows, medieval jousting tournaments, historical symposiums, a bit of monarchist nostalgia and souvenir bric-a-brac decorated with 1,000-year-old designs. There are historical problems; nobody knows much about Hugh Capet. No scholar has ever been able to find a single medieval drawing or written description of him. His kingdom was not much, no more than bits of royal domain around Paris. He was probably more of a kinglet than a king. It is not even clear what he did as monarch aside from persuading a Roman Catholic archbishop to sanctify his son as unchallenged heir to the throne...

But Most Melanesians Boycott S. Pacific Referendum; Paris Hails Outcome. Almost everyone who voted in a special referendum in New Caledonia on Sunday rejected independence from France, but most Melanesians, the largest ethnic group on the South Pacific archipelago, boycotted the polls. Although many analysts had derided the referendum in advance as an exercise that will settle none of the racial and political problems of the territory, the French government hailed the results as a victory for democracy and for France. The results were about the best that the French government of Premier Jacques Chirac could have expected and fell short of the hopes of the main Melanesian independence party, the Socialist Kanak Front for National Liberation. Yet the results did little more than follow the general lines of the ethnic divisions of New Caledonia...

As the old Hapsburg order disintegrated and anti-Semitism grew, Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka gave form to their foreboding...

Most Argentines find it difficult to feel optimistic about their future. This should be a heady, hopeful time. After nearly eight years of military misrule — a contemptible era marked by the military’s murder of thousands of civilians and by its foolish and humiliating adventure in the Falklands — the country is returning to civilian government. Yet, though there were celebrations over the defeat of Peronism and the election of Raul Alfonsin as president, the mood is made sober by the intractability of Argentina’s problems. The feeling of transformation experienced by Spain as it moved step by step from Francoism to democracy does not exist in Argentina. The victory last October of Alfonsin, a fifty-seven-year-old former congressman from the leftist wing of the middle-class Radical Civic Union, marked the first time that the Peronists had lost a presidential election. Many analysts believe that the defeat marks the end of the Peronist movement in Argentine politics. The wonder is not that Peronism may disappear but that it has lingered so long...

Focuses on separatism in Canada. Threat of Quebec separatism; Political strategy of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

For the first time in eleven years, English-speaking Canadians have a prime minister from their own ranks. Hopeful observers feel this will ease the tension between the rest of the country and Quebec; but they may underestimate the strength of the separatist movement. The unity of Canada is threatened as much by indifference as by resentment. On the morning after last May’s elections, when Joe Clark, an unsophisticated and awkward young man from the west, defeated Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the intellectual from Montreal, to become the sixteenth prime minister of Canada, a Toronto taxi driver, overjoyed with the results, boasted, “Trudeau sure got thumped.” Yet Trudeau, I pointed out, had led in the national popular vote. “Oh, yeah,” the taxi driver replied, “but that’s only if you count the French.” Counting the French is not always easy for the people of Toronto and the rest of English-speaking Canada. For many of them, the French-speakers are an annoying and boring segment of national life who, when you bother to think about them, prevent Canada from becoming what everyone knows it ought to be — like Britain or Australia or the United States. In this case, according to the prevailing view, English-speaking Canada, the real Canada, thumped Trudeau, and it was pointless to muddy the issue with French votes. As a result of attitudes like this, which reflect the enormous gulf between the French-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, Canada is more sharply divided along communal lines than it has been in a half-century...

Focuses on general elections scheduled to be held in Canada in May 1979 while discussing chief executive officer of Quebec René Lévesque's promise to his province for a referendum on separation after the elections. Confusion among Canadians regarding Lévesque's promise; Possibility of victory of Lévesque in the elections; Discussion on a sovereignty-association proposed by Lévesque.

Nothing has embarrassed the self-proclaimed Spanish democracy of King Juan Carlos and Premier Adolfo Suarez more than the case of Els Joglars, a Catalan mime troupe convicted of insulting the army. Protests have come from the best-known writers and artists of Europe. Paloma Picasso has warned that the Picasso family will never agree to the transfer of her father’s “Guernica” from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Spain until the four imprisoned actors are released. The case is so ludicrous, anachronistic and unjust that many outsiders are convinced the King will find a way soon to free the actors and end the embarrassment. But whether or not the actors leave their prisons in Barcelona before the end of their two-year sentences, the case has revealed some of the flaws in Spain’s remarkable but fragile attempt at transition from the dictatorship of the late Francisco Franco to a parliamentary government. A latent, unhealthy fear of the army still ties the tongues of critics. And, after almost four decades of Francoism, people here feel that injustice to an individual or defilement of a principle are not worth fretting about so long as the outer forms of democracy are intact...

On June 15, 1977, just a year and a half after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Spaniards elected a new, bicameral Cortes with the authority to write a constitution for Spain. It was the first freely contested parliamentary election in Spain since February 15, 1936, and it produced scenes that Franco would have abhorred: Communists brazenly waving red banners, chanting slogans, and singing the Internationale; the young, dynamic leader of the Socialist Workers Party entering rallies with his left hand in a clenched fist salute, his right signaling V for victoria; politicians exhorting Basques in Euskera, Catalans in Catalan, Galicians in Gallego, all forbidden languages a few years before; and newspapers belittling their government and its leader...

A few months after Francisco Franco died, magazine columnist Antonio Gala used some brutal imagery to insist that it was now time for Spain to rid itself of the old dictator’s institutions. "When a dog dies,” Gala wrote, "the rabies goes with it.” An enraged government confiscated all copies of the magazine left in news kiosks, but the officials were angered more by the metaphor than the meaning. In fact, the post-Franco government of King Juan Carlos is trying to do exactly what Gala suggested: stamp out the rabies and transform Spain from a dictatorship into a democracy. After almost forty years of authoritarianism and repression, Spain probably will have an elected, representative government before summer. The change has been planned by two unlikely reformers — King Juan Carlos, selected and trained by Franco as his successor, and Premier Adolfo Suarez, an exemplary graduate of Franco’s fascist National Movement. Despite their backgrounds, the thirty-nine-year-old king and his forty-four-year-old premier are young enough to understand the inevitability of change, though old enough to understand that change must seem slow for most Spaniards to accept it. Their relative youth also frees them from the memories and bitterness of the Spanish Civil War. Their performance so far has surprised skeptics and united many Spaniards behind them, yet success is not assured. Franco left an enormous legacy to Spain. His decades of dictatorial rule molded an authoritarian bureaucracy and a repressive police force...

On the bridge of a ship moving through the Panama Canal, you can see Gatun Lake high above and then feel the locks by the Atlantic Ocean elevate you up to it and later drop you down from it on the Pacific side. The experience conjures up all the schoolbook stories about the American Army Engineers who succeeded where Ferdinand de Lesseps of the Suez Canal had failed, wiping out the malaria that had slaughtered his men, devising the system of marvelous locks to take the place of his useless ditch. The Canal is the last splinter of Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick. The Canal is an engineering marvel, but it is also a colonial anachronism. To feel that, you must leave the bridge of the ship and sit in magistrate's court in Balboa, capital of the U.S. Canal Zone. I listened one morning to the American judge who, with his white hair and resonant though gentle voice, looked and sounded like Lewis Stone playing the judge in the old Andy Hardy movies. The judge was lecturing a seventeen-year-old Panamanian after convicting him of driving in the Zone without a license...

Americans, when they think of Mexico, see it as a pleasant place for midwinter holidays, a rich source of (perhaps authentic) pre-Columbian treasures, an accommodating provider of divorces, or a more or less permanent refuge from the demands of 20th-century industrial life. However, Mexico presents no problems, and therefore Americans do not think about it very much. But for Mexicans, the United States is the big problem and they think about it all the time. They have been doing so with renewed intensity during the current administration of President Luis Echeverria, a proud, ambitious man in a proud, small country. Mexican relations with the United States have long been founded on humiliation and dependence. Mexicans know that the United States is usually strong enough to work its will - whether conquering all the land from Texas to California or invading in pursuit of bandits or closing the border to punish Mexico for lax drug enforcement. All this is seen by Mexicans as a reflection of their weakness as much as American strength. It is not an easy assessment for them to accept. No matter how urbane he may seem, a Mexican official has trouble keeping resentment out of his feelings when he deals with the United States...

The most desperate people on the Caribbean island of Jamaica grow their hair in fierce, matted locks, smoke marihuana much of the day, and dream of salvation in Africa. They call themselves Rastafarians. Their response to poverty and rejection is a strange one, but it helps the government. For the poor are not clamoring in the streets; they are sedated in the alleyways. This gives Jamaica time. Prime Minister Michael Manley is trying to use that time to turn Jamaica socialist. Manley’s socialism, however, is rather idiosyncratic. A Marxist would barely recognize it. Manley’s government has defined socialism as “the Christian way of life in action.” A popular singer, Max Romeo, has composed a song that amplifies the definition for Jamaicans: "Socialism is love for your brothers. Socialism is linking hearts and hands. Would you believe it? Poverty and hunger is what we’re fighting. Socialism is sharing with your sister. Socialism is pulling people together. Would you believe it? Love and togetherness — that's what it means." Jamaican socialism is obviously mild stuff. Yet Manley is being attacked bitterly for it. Businessmen are in panic. American diplomats and investors are fretting. One rightist group has condemned Manley’s “recent speeches about socialism being Christianity” as “blasphemous and cheap politics.” The great problem for Manley, however, is that his socialism may be too mild in the long run to relieve Jamaica’s desperation...

Reports on Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez's reaction to Spain's Generalisimo Francisco Franco's execution of five revolutionaries in Spain in September 1975. Echeverria's description of the Spanish dictatorship; Call to the United Nations Security Council to expel Spain from the U.N.; Destruction of Echeverria's campaign to succeed Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General in 1976.

As another American and I walked down La Rampa, a street in Havana, three little schoolgirls dressed in blue uniforms called out to us. “Tovarich, ” they said, using the Russian word for “comrade.” I approached one of the Cuban girls, a dark-skinned child of about ten. “Do you think we are Russian?” I asked her in Spanish. She nodded, grinning, her eyes shining in good fun. “But we’re not Russian," I told her. “We’re Americans.” The grin vanished. Her head pulled back. She frowned and tightened her eyes in fright. She was sorry that she had ever called out “tovarich.” It is not a pleasant feeling to frighten a child, but it is a feeling that an American ought to experience, or at least understand, before trying to analyze Cuba and the future of its relations with the United States. Relations will probably get better. Fidel Castro has sent out clear signals that he wants some kind of accommodation. In fact. I was in Cuba only because the Cubans need new channels for those signals...

To understand Mexico, an outsider should put aside his images of cactus and sombreros and even of Oscar Lewis’ Children of Sanchez for a while, and take an evening stroll down Avenida Revolucion or Avenida Insurgentes, or the ancient streets behind the Zocalo, or any of the other frenetic shopping areas of Mexico City. While the snarled and sometimes decrepit cars honk incessantly and puff out black fumes in the streets, the laborers and clerks of the city rush from shop to shop for after-work purchases, perhaps cheap bread, cheap shoes, expensive jeans. Families join for the excursion, mothers carrying blanketed infants, fathers tugging moonfaced children. The crowds are colored gaily by the neon storefronts that occasionally obscure the delightful porfirian or baroque architecture of old buildings. The shoppers wear hip-length sweaters or rebozos or windbreakers. Many wear clothes that are old but rarely tattered, neat and functional but rarely fashionable. By American standards, they are a poor people. Yet it is a poverty with which an American can sympathize, even if he has not experienced it. By all measures, Mexico is a developing country of the Third World, but Mexico City does not have the exotic and incredible, pervasive poverty of Calcutta, with its thousands of human wretches hunting for a piece of sidewalk on which to sleep. Nor does it have the poverty of the African Sahel, with its stick-boned, starving old people and little children. These are miseries so terrible that they blunt the senses and elude the imagination of most Americans. But this is not so in Mexico...

Focuses on relations between the U.S. and Haiti as of October 1974. Reasons for the stoppage of foreign aid to Haiti by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1963; Factors that contributed to industrial establishments by U.S. businessmen in Haiti; State of agricultural production in the country in the 1970s.

The difficult negotiations now in process between the United States and Panama over a new Panama Canal treaty are almost certain to ignore the rights of one people: the descendants of the blacks who dug the canal in the first place. “We are just hoping,” said a black who lives in the U.S. Canal Zone, “that whatever happens between the two countries, our position doesn’t become worse.” It probably will. Although Americans look on the Panama Canal as one of their great engineering achievements, it was dug mainly by foreign workers, mostly blacks from the West Indies. Few of these blacks left when the job was finished in 1914. They stayed on to help run the canal or to work in Panama. Their children did the same. As a result, Panama’s two main ports, Panama City and Colón, have urban ghettos of English-speaking blacks in the slums near the U.S. Canal Zone, and the Canal Zone itself has embarrassing communities of virtually segregated blacks. They are a people without power. Although many are America-oriented, they are not American. Although they are now citizens of Panama, they are a distant cultural minority. Their descendants will probably be assimilated, some day into the racially mixed Panamanian culture, but that does not help the present generations...

The enormity and horror of it all are exposed by what a visitor does not see in Bujumbura. Bujumbura, a languid, colorless, nondescript town on Lake Tanganyika, is the capital of Burundi, a central African nub of a country in which 85 percent of the population is Hutu. Yet a visitor can find few Hutus in Bujumbura. It is a little like entering Warsaw after World War II and looking for Jews. A visitor would not need a tour of Treblinka to know that something terrible had happened. In Burundi, something terrible has happened. A year ago, the government, run by the minority Tutsi tribe, tried to eliminate, in a chilling and systematic way, the entire elite class of the Hutu people -- all those with some education, government jobs, or money. The death toll was perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps as great as two hundred thousand. Since then there has been even more killing, the latest in May and June of this year...

Focuses on Jehovah's Witnesses, a social movement against Nazis, as of July 16, 1973. Number of members of Jehovah's Witnesses in Africa; Founder of Jehovah's Witnesses; Factors that led to the establishment of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Funerals can confuse a visitor to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Is he on the western coast of Africa. or in New Orleans? First, the big brass band marches down Broad Street on a hot Sunday afternoon, playing rollicking hymns, not exactly "Didn't He Ramble?" but something like it. Then comes the second line, the youngsters singing and waving their open palms high in the air, and a soccer team, in uniform, tossing a ball to the rhythms. The casket follows, carried by a jaunty crowd moving to the beat. Schoolchildren in uniform and college graduates in mortarboards step behind. Finally, a long line of mourners, walking two by two, closes the parade. They wear black dresses and suits made of cloth far too thick for the incessant sun. Some men sport Homburgs. It shouldn't be a shock to come across a New Orleans funeral an ocean away in West Africa, but it is. A few moments' reflection, however, produces the obvious logic for it all. Slaves from Africa, with their traditions of joyous mourning, turned the sedate white man's funeral into a black man's jazzy funeral in Louisiana. Freed slaves then carried it back to Africa. But, despite the logic, it is hard for an American visitor to stifle his surprise...

With his brutality, President Idi Amin has obscured the real problems of the Asians of his country. Amin is a poorly educated man oblivious to the complexities of finance and state. He is the disgrace of Black Africa, and it is easy to be repelled by his ravings. But his expulsion of Uganda’s Asians—inspired, he says, by Allah in a dream—is not the chance blow of a maniacal tyrant. As an African Christian wrote in a church newspaper in East Africa recently, "Amin’s dream, even though the press has been laughing at it, is Africa’s genuine dream .” With or without Amin, the plight of the Asians in Uganda, like that of the many more Asians in the rest of East Africa, always has been precarious and even desperate. By ordering the Asians out in ninety days last August, President Amin acted with a haste and callousness that shocked even those other political leaders in East Africa who share his basic views. But he is not really more racist than they are. East Africans feel an intense and terrible hatred of the Asians who live in their countries. They are a despised minority, like the Jews of old Europe...

General Idi Amin of Uganda has laid bare a treacherous weakness of Black Africa that its defenders have either ignored or covered for some time. It is easy to flick aside the fragile political institutions left behind by the colonial powers; the parliaments, the parties, the constitutions, the rules of foreign law have not taken root. The masses are unschooled, timid and ignorant of their rights and potential for power. They are riven by tribal strife. Instead of loyalty to their country, they feel hatred for one another. The quality of statesmanship is low. Leaders are possessed by greed and megalomania. Their promises of the good life have, with few exceptions, collapsed. Most economies are faltering. Life may be getting better for the common man, but not much better. The countries are small; the towns that count are few. A leader only needs a few thousand guns to rule for his lifetime. Thus, the conditions that favor tyranny are many; the checks are few. General Amin’s callous expulsion of the Asians has brought worldwide (though not much African) condemnation upon himself and crippled all those, both black and white, who have spent years trying to focus the attention of outsiders on the injustices of white Southern Africa. But his treatment of the Asians is only the most dramatic of the wrongs inside Uganda...

Ten years ago, I left New York on a dark, snow-lashed night and stepped down the next day into the morning glare of Dakar, in Senegal. It was an exciting, expectant time for the newly independent countries of Africa. Since that moment in Dakar, I have spent most of the last decade in Africa. Those ten years did not transform a gullible fool into a mean and narrow cynic, but I feel more critical, more doubtful, more skeptical, more pessimistic than I did in 1962. I still feel sympathetic and understanding. But I have learned that sympathy and understanding are not enough. Africa needs to be looked at with cold hardness as well. There have been more disappointments than accomplishments in Africa in the ten years. Two events — the Nigerian civil war and the assassination of Tom Mboya — struck like body blows at the sympathies of an outsider. The war was probably the greatest scourge in black Africa since the slave trade, and it was largely self-made. Murder cut down the man who seemed most to represent all that was modern in new Africa, and it was probably done for the glory of tribal chauvinism. On top of this, the decade has produced a host of other unpleasant events...

Several years ago, high in the medieval fortress city of Gondar, once the capital of Ethiopian emperors, I found myself in a poker game with an unusual assortment of Americans — three Peace Corps volunteers and a pair of U.S. Army Green Berets. Somehow, the game, with its clashing Americans, has always symbolized for me the double, contradictory role of American influence and involvement in the Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie. On one hand, the United States supports the traditional, authoritarian regime of the Emperor. American money helps him suppress a regional rebellion in Eritrea without his worrying about the grievances that cause it; and American money allows him to procrastinate as much as he likes in implementing the reforms that might modernize Ethiopia. At the same time, the United States, largely through its influence in education, has catalyzed revolutionary forces that threaten the authoritarianism of the Emperor, and may someday transform Ethiopia. This second role is largely accidental, and many American officials do not recognize it. Ironically, one immediate sign of it is a periodic outpouring of anti-Americanism from young Ethiopians...

The article discusses the genocide in Sudan. For more than a decade, an obscure civil war has ravaged Sudan. Largely ignored by the rest of the world, it is Africa's longest war, paralyzing the Sudan's three southern provinces intermittently from 1955 and continuously from 1963. The war has led to perhaps a half-million deaths and has forced 200,000 southerners to flee for refuge in neighboring countries. All the terror and turmoil have come from cultural hatred. The Sudan is the largest country in Africa, about a third the size of the United States, with a north of scrublands and sandy, arid hills, and a south of forests and grasslands. Swamps separate the two regions.

The Republic of Chad has been independent for more than a decade. But its capital still displays a monument to Commandant Lamy, the French officer slain while conquering Chad at the beginning of the century. “He died,” the monument says, “for France and Civilization.” In many ways, that monument in Fort-Lamy tells an outsider almost all there is to know about the relations of France with most of its fifteen former colonies in black Africa. Though independent, most French-speaking African countries still feel an extraordinary kinship with France. Their leaders would never offend their former masters by tearing down a colonial monument, no matter how offensive it might seem. In fact, they probably agree with the sentiments set forth by this particular monument. French Africans are proud to have been colonized by France. The French conquest gave them civilization. An outsider finds numerous examples of common interest. It is no accident that President Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast is trying to lead black Africa into an accommodation with South Africa at the same time that France is trying to increase its trade with South Africa. Nor was it an accident that the Ivory Coast and Gabon recognized Biafra while Charles de Gaulle shipped arms there during the Nigerian civil war...

There are two ways of looking at the Congo. The first is to compare it with the past, and marvel. Once in turmoil, fractured, tearing apart, projecting images of brutality and savagery, the Congo these days is a reasonably calm, quiet, secure, and united country of 20 million people. A visitor can go almost anywhere without fear. The authority of President Joseph Desire Mobutu reaches almost everywhere. Considering the Congo’s history, these are remarkable achievements. The second way of looking at the Congo is to put aside the past, take the Congo for what it is today, and despair. The Congo is exhibiting some of the worst traits of independent black Africa — corruption, waste, elitism, luxury, grandiosity, and neglect. The government can build what the Congolese call the world’s second largest swimming pool, but it refused, for more than a year, to pay the bills to transport to the Eastern Congo U.S. relief food for children afflicted with kwashiorkor, the disease of advanced malnutrition. The public treasury spends millions of dollars for monuments and parades but no money to build a road from the farms of Kivu Province to their port on the Congo River. At a time when other African leaders, like President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, are trying to infuse their people with self-reliance, austerity, and honesty, Mobutu is rushing the Congo the other way...

Before the murder of Tom Mboya in July 1969, Kenya politicians could mute and obscure their country's tribal tensions. The tensions, of course, were always there, straining the fragile unity of the new country, but they did not pervade every side of political life. Personal rivalry counted; so did ideology. The assassination changed all that. For more than a year, Kenya was torn by a dangerous and blatant tribal conflict that colored all political activity. In a sense, this only followed what had happened elsewhere in Africa, where crisis invariably heightens tribal hatreds and suspicions. The results, as Nigeria showed, can be terrifying. But Kenya is not another Nigeria. In recent months, the fury has diminished, giving Kenya a time of calm to deal with its tribal problem. Its future depends on whether its politicians learn to do so...

Professors in South Africa sometimes like to stand in front of a wall map and show a visitor the “natural” sphere of influence of their white supremacist country. Invariably, their pointers sweep as far as Zambia, locked inland with Rhodesia to its south, Angola to its west, and Mozambique and Malawi to its east. The professors’ casual gesture suggests one of the dramatic conflicts in Africa — the struggle of black Zambia to free itself from the economic web of the white regimes in southern Africa. Since gaining independence from Britain six years ago, Zambia has tried to turn from the South and reach the other black African nations. Psychologically, this has worked. Zambians talk and act as if their lines were all out to the rest of black Africa. Economically, at least so far, it has not worked. Zambia’s four million people are still dependent on the white-ruled economies south of them. But this dependence has dwindled recently. The Zambians are trying to open new channels to black Africa. The most important is the thousand mile railway that the Chinese Communists are building from the Zambian copperbelt to the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The success of Zambia’s drive to the North probably depends on three factors: the strength of President Kenneth Kaunda, the health of the copper industry, and the acquiescence, no matter how reluctant, of white southern Africa...

African governments are so fragile that they sometimes shatter at the first blow. For much of the last half of 1969, Kenya seemed as if it were due to be an other case in the tradition of the Congo and Nigeria. The gunning down of Tom Mboya on a street in Nairobi last July aroused enough tribal hatred to tear the country apart. Yet somehow, Kenya survived the six months of bitterness. At the start of 1970, it had at least as good a chance for stability as any other country in this volatile, impoverished continent. Kenya’s troubles began with the assassination of Mboya. Mboya, who had been Minister of Economic Planning and Development and the General Secretary of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU), was one of the rare African politicians who tried to stand above tribe. He refused to appeal to tribal chauvinism in his election campaigns. Yet, ironically, his murder unleashed Kenya’s greatest surge of tribal hatred since its independence in 1963. The aftermath of Mboya’s death mocked everything he stood for. The members of Mboya’s Luo tribe assumed immediately that the murder was the work of the Kikuyus. The Kikuyus, the tribe of seventy-six-year-old President Jomo Kenyatta, are the dominant and best-educated people of Kenya. Though they number only two million in a population of ten million, the Kikuyus have controlled the major ministries of government and the top civil service positions...

On July 7, 1967, when the Nigerian civil war began, the censors of the federal military government stamped out all use of the phrase “civil war” in news dispatches going overseas. The Nigerians insisted their invasion of Biafra was a “police action.” Major General Yakubu Gowon, the federal military commander, told diplomats the job would be done in six weeks. His army would march into Biafra, string up Colonel C. Odumegwu Ojukwu “and his rebel gang,” and end secession. “Our orders are to get Ojukwu,” a government spokesman said at a news conference the day after the war began. “If we get him today, that’s it.” Now, more than two years later, the Nigerian government has neither captured Ojukwu nor ended secession. More than one million people, mostly Biafrans of the Ibo tribe, have died in the horror. There is no talk of police action now. The Nigerians have dropped pretense. They look on the Ibos of Biafra as a hated enemy people whose secession must be destroyed militarily even if it means destroying them. The specter of millions of starving children fails to dissuade the Nigerians. “All is fair in war,” Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the vice chairman of Nigeria’s federal executive council, told newsmen recently, “and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat, only to fight us harder...”

This article discusses about the Asians settled in Nairobi, Kenya. Most of the shops of downtown Nairobi are in the hands of Indians and Pakistanis. Living in a land run by African blacks, are the most visible evidence of the gravest minority problem in East Africa today. There are 350,000 Asians, as the Indians and Pakistanis are called here, among East Africa's 29 million people. About half of them live in Kenya, a quarter in Tanzania, a quarter in Uganda. They are the shopkeepers, clerks, artisans and foreman of East Africa. The Asians fill just those jobs and places that Africans believe they now have enough experience and training to take. Although they are called Asians, many either were born in East Africa or have spent most of their lives there. They consider East Africa as their home.

The aftermath of the murder of Kenyan political leader Tom Mboya has mocked what he stood for. Mboya, who seemed to represent all that was modern in Africa to the rest of the world, always shunned the appeals to tribal allegiance that have crumbled political stability elsewhere in Africa. His constituents were mainly the urban workers groping for a modern way of life. Yet his assassination on the first Saturday in July, 1969 unleashed intense tribal hatreds. Kenya faces a long and dangerous period of instability unless the government can somehow placate his grieving Luo people.

Images play as important a roIe as guns in the Nigerian civil war. The Biafran secessionists, among Africa’s most sophisticated peoples, have known from the beginning that their chances for success depended as much on evoking world sympathy as on holding back the federal army. Now, after twenty months of war, it is clear that the Biafrans have been far more adept at propaganda than soldiering. If they survive in some sovereign form, they will owe it to their skill with images. Part of the Biafran success in public relations stems from the federal Nigerian Government’s failure at it. At the beginning, the Nigerians made absolutely no intelligent effort to get their point of view across. In fact, the government’s publicists often hurt the Nigerian case as much as they helped it. Many officials of the Ministry of Information were new at their job. Before the troubles, the top information officers had been Ibos, but they fled to their tribal home in eastern Nigeria soon after thousands of Ibos were massacred in northern Nigeria in September, 1966. When the eastern region seceded and called itself Biafra in May, 1967, these civil servants remained there. Besides lacking experience, the new Nigerian information officers also had the disadvantage of working for a military government...

Reviews the book "Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps," by David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett.

The article discusses various aspects of the U.S. foreign policy in Africa. For years, the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) has pursued its own foreign policy in Latin America and now it is turning to Africa. In January 1968 Vice President H. Humphrey visited Kenya with a large party that included executive director Irving Brown. Despite unpopularity Brown's African American Labor Center was set up in 1965 in Kenya. The Center often gives office equipment and cars to African unions or creates vocational training schools. But the Center also tries to fulfill the traditional AFL-CIO role of helping non-Communist unions fight alleged Communist union.

The Portuguese believe they have a special kind of colonialism that makes them different from other imperialists. In the Portuguese view, their kind of inspired colonialism gives them the right to stay in Africa during an era of black independence and the duty to stay in the face of African rebellion. They say their colonialism is special because of its tenure and nonracial quality. They believe that five centuries of rule tie their nation to Africa and that Portuguese colonialism creates societies that are color-blind and color-blended. Both beliefs are delusions. The Portuguese like to show visitors the Isle of Mozambique, a crowded, tiny, historic island off the northern coast of Mozambique in East Africa. Vasco da Gama, the great Portuguese explorer, found the island in 1498 while looking for a sea route to India. The island is engulfed in history, almost five centuries of Portuguese history. It was the capital and chief port of the Portuguese in East Africa until late in the nineteenth century...

The white Afrikaner administrator swept his hand out to show the poverty of the Transkei in South Africa: the round mud houses with their thatched cone roofs, the green hilly land that produced only a pittance of corn during the year, the bony cattle that the Xhosa people refused to sell. “We have to succeed,” the administrator said with a weak, nervous laugh. “Our existence depends on it.” But so far, he and the other white officials of the Transkei are failing. The Transkei is the most advanced of the Bantustans, the word coined by the white supremacist government to describe those areas of South Africa it has set aside for black Africans. Under the theory of apartheid, the Transkei and seven other Bantustans, created out of 13 percent of the land, will some distant day become independent black nations and absorb the great bulk of South Africa’s black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites say, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country — white South Africa. To implement the theory and justify it to the rest of the world, the white South African government is trying, though in a desultory way, to develop the economy of the Bantustans. As the Afrikaner administrator pointed out, the government has no other choice. Without vibrant economies, the Bantustans could not absorb more millions of Africans. The so-called white areas of South Africa would still be left with black majorities, and a powerful and rich minority would still have to hold down the black masses by force. This would expose apartheid as an immoral and impossible solution to the dilemma of South Africa...

Little can be done to save the lives of those bloat-bellied children of Biafra until the civil war in Nigeria is over. That is the heart of the matter; all else is peripheral. The pitiable pictures in the London press, the stricken conscience of the British people, the rush of volunteers to feed and nurse Biafran babies, the American powdered milk piling high on the docks of Lagos, the mad scrambling of relief workers to crack Nigerian inefficiency and push the supplies somewhere, somehow — all mean little as long as the war goes on. Some idealists believe that the world’s indignation, outcry and shamed anger over the thousands dying in Biafra will force the two sides to end their war, in the name of decency and humanity, but that is doubtful. “No group can stop a war because people are dying,” said Alison Ayida, an influential Nigerian civil servant, in a meeting with foreign newsmen in Lagos recently. “It’s never been done in a war before, and it won’t be done in Nigeria — unless you stop the cause of the war. That’s what war is all about.” The federal government feels that it is about to crush the rebellion in Biafra, and it is in no mood to be cheated of this victory by pictures of starving children...

Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...

The white mercenaries of the Congo, now in rebellion, have humiliated black men everywhere in Africa, and by doing so shattered some of the self-confidence that Africans need to run their affairs well. Moreover, some Africans have struck out at whites to assuage this humiliation, and the beatings and killings have torn relations between white men and black men over the continent. These are terrible consequences. Yet it is pointless to condemn these confused, aimless and distorted men. Their role in the Congo was created by others. The rebellion of the mercenaries was the legacy of an attempt by the United States Government to stage-manage the unmanageable Congo. Using them worked for a while; then they flew out of hand. Why blame them?...

Two simple posters explain the civil war in Nigeria. The first, a thin strip, was glued to the walls and windows of most public buildings in Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, a few weeks before the region seceded on May 30 to become the Republic of Biafra. The poster shows four men. Three look alike, obviously Ibos, the dominant tribe of the east. The fourth man is a Hausa from Northern Nigeria. “This Is Your Region,” the poster says, “Report Any Strange Face to the Police.” The second poster, a little larger and more colorful, was slapped all over Lagos, the federal capital of Nigeria, a few weeks before federal troops invaded Biafra on July 6, the beginning of the civil war. This poster shows a monstrous drawing of the severed head of Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the ruler of Biafra, lying under the heavy combat boot of a Nigerian soldier. “Crush Rebellion,” the poster says...

Makes Fools of Federal Military Ruler, Other Opponents in Nigerian Crisis - Lt. Col. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu is a roughly bearded young man with soft eyes and gentle tones and an unconcealed contempt for the men who oppose him in the present Nigerian crisis. There is a feeling in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, that all these Nigerian troubles with the secessionist state of Biafra would go away if only its leader, Ojukwu, would also go away. The feeling Is false. But it is worth recording because it reveals one of the problems In the crisis - the federal rulers know in their bones that Ojukwu has contempt for them...

[OPINION] The angry young men of Nigeria seem tired and subdued these days and not so young anymore. Five years ago, when I visited Lagos, they rushed from nightclub to nightclub, dancing the highlife and drinking and complaining, shouting abuse at politicians, accusing them of corruption, greed, nepotism, ignorance, inefficiency, sloth, lethargy. Their anger had excitement. One young man would pace back and forth and flap his arms in anguish over the sickness in his government. Their frustration was dramatic. "I am an angry young man," one told me, slamming his fist into his palm, "but I do not know what to do." When their frustration mounted, they would grow quiet and bitter, and talk vaguely about plots. Some day, they whispered, the army would put an end to all this...

Stanley Meisler, former Peace Corps deputy director for evaluation and research and Associated Press correspondent in Washington, D.C., Monday, was named chief of the Los Angeles Times news bureau in sub-Sahara Africa, now located in Nairobi, Kenya. Meisler, 33, succeeds Don Shannon, who has been transferred to The Times' Tokyo bureau following two years in Leopoldville, The Congo. The Leopoldville office has been closed. Meisler began his newspaper career with the Middletown (Ohio) Journal in 1953. He moved to the AP bureau in New Orleans a year later and to the Washington bureau in 1958. Meisler covered the House of Representatives prior to his appointment as a Peace Corps official in 1964. Awarded Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1961, Meisler spent a year traveling in Africa, followed by graduate studies in African affairs at UC Berkeley. He has written articles on Africa for Atlantic Monthly, the Reporter, the Nation and other magazines. A native of New York City, Meisler was graduated from City College of New York in 1952.

Reviews the book "Africa from Independence to Tomorrow," by David Hapgood.

In 1963, during a Security Council debate on apartheid, politician Adlai Stevenson announced dramatically that the U.S. had banned all sale of arms to the Republic of South Africa. The step had been taken, he said, to show U.S. government's deep concern that South Africa refused to abandon its racist policies. In March 1963, a reactor went critical at a research center near Pretoria, and South Africa joined the nuclear age. The feat was made possible by the firm that designed and built the equipment: Allis-Chalmers of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Reviews the book "Haile Selassie: The Conquering Lion," by Leonard Mosley.

This article focuses on the Medicare bill that has been proposed in the U.S. Congress. Medicare - as passed by the House - would discourage hospitals from making arrangements that would draw specialists into a comprehensive medical center. Every hospital under Medicare would have to follow the lead of the most progressive hospitals, and appoint a committee to review cases periodically, to see that no doctor was keeping his patient in the hospital too long. Another provision on the bill allows federal pressure on medical practices.

One night in steaming, gamboling Lagos, a young Nigerian poet leaned forward and whispered, "Nigeria is made up of a caste of corruption on the top and a caste of grumblers on the bottom." A friend joined in. "The grumblers are angry." "No," the poet disagreed. "They are not angry yet. They still have too much." These words caught the mood of a generation in Africa...

Old Ben Franklin, ambassador to France during the American revolution, peered out his window early one morning and took in the Paris sun light. "Why are we not taking advantage of all this daylight?" he is supposed to have said. The philosopher and scientist then picked up his quill pen and scratched out a study that showed the immense number of candles that Paris would save if it changed its clocks to gain extra daylight in the summer. With these scratches, Franklin reputedly first outlined the idea that led to the 20th-century daylight saving time system that brings confusion and controversy to America every year. Millions of Americans in 15 states switched from daylight time back to standard Saturday. To some, the time-switching means little, except the twice-annual struggle to remember to juggle their clocks. But others are hotly concerned over the time-switching, and are demanding an end to it. They do battle with the defenders of daylight saving time...

Lie Detectors - The Industry, the Technology and the Victims. The first lie detector, employed centuries ago, was a handful of rice dropped into the mouth of a suspect. If the rice stayed dry while he answered questions, he clearly was a liar — exposed under the questionable theory that a liar's salivary glands would dry up when gripped by fear. The lie detector used most commonly today is far more sophisticated. Developed by the psychologist and criminologist Leonard Keeler almost forty years ago, it comprises a pneumatic tube that fits across a subject's chest to measure breathing, an inflatable rubber cuff that wraps around the arm to measure blood pressure and a pair of electrodes that touch the fingers and, by the flow of current, measure the dampness of the palm. These instruments activate pens that draw wiggles and waves on a rolling sheet of paper — a process that gives the lie detector its modern name, polygraph, Greek for "many writings." In theory, an examiner can look at the chart, note any unusual wiggles and waves, and nab his man. This polygraph, obviously more complicated than a few grains of rice, is also touted as more accurate. In truth, it is not...

This article focuses on the possibility that the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy might harm the U.S. Army's civilian marksmanship program due to public revulsion to the weapon which was used in the murder. The Army oversees civilian marksmanship through its National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which is headed by Colonel John K. Lee. The board sets up instruction programs, organizes the annual National Rifle and Pistol Matches, and markets used guns to the public. It does all this through the National Rifle Association (NRA). The Army sells rifles at cost to civilians only if they are members of the NRA, and it gives instruction to gun clubs only if they are affiliated with the NRA.

A peculiar disease has been isolated by medical scientists in the United States. The disease was first discovered by physician J.V. Brown in the "Western Journal of Surgery." Commerce houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it "the fast draw syndrome"; others, "the Dodge City syndrome." It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holster, quick as lightning and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes they don't shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes though they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot. Brown observed sixteen cases of the syndrome before writing his article "Gunshot Wounds of Lower Extremity: Fast Draw Syndrome." The typical case of the fast draw syndrome according to Browne is a young man in his late teens or early twenties who presents with a small calibre gunshot wound of the lower extremity, accidentally self-inflicted, while practicing a fast 'draw.'

According to the executive council of AFL-CIO, the so-called trade unions of Soviet Union are nothing but agencies of communist dictatorship. This implies that the unions in The U.S. are anything but agencies of government and big business. British Guiana is a good place to begin. The situation in British Guiana is far more complicated than that and its generous aid has involved the AFL-CIO in racial and political strife. In addition, not all the aid given by the AFL-CIO has come from the labor treasury. In British Guiana, as elsewhere in Latin America, the AFL-CIO has operated with money supplied by the United States Government and big business.

The article presents information about U.S. politics. The Republican candidate Barry Goldwater presented his precise views on the problem of civil rights. First, he made it clear that he considered States' rights the cornerstone of the republic. He did not see any conflict between States' rights and civil rights. On any particular issue, either one or the other counted, never both. Voting, for example, was clearly a civil right, and no state had the right to take this away from an individual. Goldwater stayed with these views as late as the University of Mississippi crisis last year.

[The tax bill which has cleared the House and now awaits Senate action involves far more than a cut in tax rates. It is a complicated measure involving many other changes. Here are some questions and answers on how it might affect you.] The tax bill approved yesterday by the House would reduce income taxes by $11,000,000,000 for the nation as a whole. If the Senate passes it in its present form, what will the measure do for you? Here are answers to some of the questions a puzzled taxpayer might be raising: Question - Will this mean more money in my pocket? Answer - The Treasury Department says "virtually every American taxpayer" will pay less taxes if the bill is approved by Congress. Q. - How much more money? A. - That depends on your income. For example, the Treasury figures that average tax reductions for those in the $5,000-$10,000 income range will be about 20 percent. Using percentages, the biggest tax cuts will go to those earning less than $10,000 a year. But, whatever the percentage, those with high salaries will usually get more dollars in their pocket than those with lower salaries...

Harry and Sadie, a mythical American couple have pencils in hand trying to figure out how much they will save if Congress vote for a tax cut. A tax bill comes before the House on Tuesday. If the House passes it and then the Senate passes it and President Kennedy signs it - and no one changes it along the way - this is what a tax cut will mean. Harry, a schoolteacher, earns $6000 a year. Sadie, in her spare moments while taking care of two children, makes and sells dresses to neighbors for a profit of $1500 a year...

No Evidence of Any Effect on Congress - The historic civil rights march on Washington - massive and orderly and moving - has dramatized the wants of Negroes in America, but leaders still faced the task today of trying to turn drama into action. Speaker after speaker told the 200,000 Negro and white sympathizers massed in front of the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday that their demonstration was no more than a beginning. 'Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content,' said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 'will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.' Demonstrators and their leaders made it clear that one sign of progress, in their view, would be congressional approval of President Kennedy's civil rights bill...

The civil rights marchers may not see it all, but this is a city nerved by power, lined with marble, vibrant with areas of beauty and blighted by contrasting areas of squalor. It is a city of great monuments and slums, of complex law and petty crime, of history and lethargy. To the 100,000 or more civil rights marchers expected here Wednesday, Washington will be a symbol of national power, a capital where men and women petition for redress of grievance. They will gather at the base of the soaring Washington Monument, the center of a vast complex of greenery and marble, a monument that looks east to the Capitol, north to the White House, west to the Lincoln Memorial and south to the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin rimmed with cherry trees. Then they will march a few blocks down huge avenues and across parklands to the Lincoln Memorial, a temple in the style of the Parthenon in Greece. These are the symbols of government and beauty and history that draw almost 5 million tourists to Washington each year. But Washington has other faces, too...

Is President Kennedy’s legislative program stuck in the bogs of Congress? Some critics say so. The White House and Democratic leaders say it isn’t. Congress has passed July 31 - the suggested legal date for adjournment - with only a few bills of substance to show for it. This session will go on at least to Thanksgiving and perhaps to Christmas, the longest spell since the Congress of 1950. “It seems to me that on the basis of the record to date” said Sen. Jacob K Javits, R-N.Y., in a recent Senate speech “we are assigning ourselves a unique niche in history as the biggest and longest running, slow-motion show to hit Washington in years. And I believe we are in grave danger of seeing ourselves dubbed the 'standstill' Congress, or worse. ” Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts disagrees...

This article reports the National Draft Goldwater Independence Day Rally, staged by the National Draft Goldwater Committee, held on July 4, 1963, in Washington, D.C. This Republican national convention was held for convincing every participants, specially politicians and reporters, to nominate Republican Barry Goldwater. The arranging Committee was headed by Texas Republican Chairman Peter O'Donnell, Jr. The main focus during the convention was on youths. The young people much preferred to think of their so-called hero, Goldwater. The rally was much dominated by youth and Dixie.

For the first time, the United States is at the door of the International Monetary Fund as a borrower. Few people prophesied this when the Fund was founded at the United Nations Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But obviously times have changed. The United States which had huge supplies of gold in the early postwar period, has found its supplies dwindling. That is why President Kennedy told Congress Thursday that the United States has been authorized to draw up to $500 million worth of currencies from the Fund this year. This transaction is a classic example of how a nation uses the Fund when it has a balance of payments problem. That's what the Fund is for, and other countries have been using it for years. The United States has a balance of payments problem because it sends more dollars overseas than it takes in...

Investigators of the Securities and Exchange Commission criticized the mechanics and policing of America's stock exchanges Wednesday and recommended dozens of sweeping changes. The scope of the criticism and the proposals was unexpected. The recommendations would do away with personal floor trading, put more restrictions on stock specialists and odd-lot traders, and give the SEC more supervision over the vast over-the-counter market in the United States. William L. Cary, chairman of the SEC, sent the five-volume, 14-pound, 2100-page report to Congress. "We expect to send a letter within the next few clays detailing our views on the specific recommendations," he told Congress. But Cary did say: "This report should not impair public confidence in the securities markets, but should strengthen it as suggestions for raising standards are put into practice." Prices on the New York Stock Exchange slumped badly as soon as the news from the capital reached New York. Some traders on Wall Street said they were shocked at the proposals...

A month ago, three college educated Negroes received promotions in the Dallas, (Tex.), Post Office. What pushed them ahead — ability or the color of their skins? The promotion of the three set off a tempest in Dallas and in Washington. Some critics cried discrimination against whites. This Dallas controversy may be a harbinger of things to come, for tempests like it may brew again and again in the Negro struggle for better jobs and better conditions. Representative Alger, Republican of Texas, who represents Dallas, says the promotions there show that, “in a direct appeal to racial prejudice and in an effort to submit to threats of violence, the administration has ordered that Civil Service procedures be ignored and promotions made strictly on the basis of race." Clarence Mitchell, Washington representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, dismisses this argument. “The Dallas promotions.” he says, “were just one of those things where the Government is trying to correct an inequity.”

Negroes have less chance than whites to get a high-paying job in the North, but most employers and unions deny this stems from racial discrimination. Negro leaders generally contend it does. In Chicago, for example, they say that hardly anyone downtown hires Negroes as office workers, store clerks, or skilled craftsmen. "The Loop of Chicago looks like a snowstorm at 5 o'clock," says Hamp McKinney of the Urban League of Chicago, "with only here and there a little brown speck in it." But employers and unions say that situations like this are not caused by racial discrimination. They say there are not enough qualified Negroes to fill the jobs available. Negro charges of job discrimination have flamed into one of the most searing problems in the North, where almost half of America's 19 million Negroes live...

President Kennedy asked members of Congress on Wednesday to look into their hearts and help end "rancor, violence, disunity and national shame" by passing the most sweeping civil rights bill since Reconstruction days. And he told them to stay in session this year until they do so. His proposals drew a favorable reaction in Congress. But Southerners served notice of a filibuster and threatened to tie up his entire legislative program. Liberal forces in both parties praised the proposals. But key Republicans who may hold the balance of power took a cautious approach. The President's plea came in a special message that accompanied a bill brimming with weapons against racial discrimination in stores, hotels and other public places, in schools, in jobs, in polling booths. He asked for a law banning discrimination by any privately owned enterprise that serves the public. He asked power for the Attorney General to start school desegregation court suits on his own. He asked for a massive program to train unskilled Negroes and others for higher paying jobs. He asked for the right to withhold Federal aid from a project when local officials discriminate against Negroes. He asked for much other legislation. And, in a real sense, he may have asked for one of the great legislative battles in American history...

More than 2000 Negro and white demonstrators marched through Washington on Friday in a civil rights protest that had the air of a happy summer outing until they met Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The confrontation with Kennedy seemed to dispel the pleasant, friendly, almost festive atmosphere that had prevailed during the hot afternoon. The demonstrators grew angry because Kennedy kept them waiting in the hot sun for about a quarter of an hour and, when he arrived, Kennedy grew annoyed as he spied some home made signs charging racial discrimination in the Justice Department. Kennedy, standing on a rostrum at the door of the Justice Building, denied this. "Any individual can come here and get a job if he is qualified," he said. At the end of his speech, there were more cheers than boos. Despite this mutual irritation, the demonstration contrasted sharply with other racial protests that have erupted through out the Nation. There was no violence...

President Kennedy outlined a broad legislative program on civil rights Tuesday night and asked the American people for help in ending racial discrimination and in stemming “the rising tide of discontent that perils the public safety". The President spoke to the nation after Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama had bowed to federal pressure and stepped aside so two Negro students could register at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his radio-television talk, the President cited the Alabama crisis in making his appeal and outlining his legislative program. He said he will ask Congress next week for legislation that would: 1. Prohibit stores, hotels restaurants and theaters from discriminating against Negroes 2. Allow the federal government to take a more active part to court suits aimed at desegregating public schools 3. Allow Negroes to take advantage of their right to vote. But the President said that legislation alone would not do the job of insuring that the U.S. Constitution is color-blind...

William C. Foster, United States disarmament director, predicts a safe passage in the Senate for any nuclear test ban treaty signed by Russia and the West. He does not agree with those who predict that a treaty would provoke the most bruising battle in the Senate since the proposal to join the League of Nations after World War I. Nor does he believe it would suffer the same dismal fate. “It would be tough,” the 66-year-old Mr. Foster said in an interview, “but we could get a treaty through the Senate." Mr. Foster, director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, will not take part in the United States-British-Russian nuclear test-ban treaty negotiations in Moscow next month. But, from his office here, he will back up the efforts of the American negotiators. The chief negotiator for the United States at the Moscow talks, scheduled for next month, will be Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman...

President Kennedy outlined a broad legislative program on civil rights tonight and asked the American people for help in ending racial discrimination and in stemming "the rising tide of discontent that perils the public safety." The President spoke to the nation after Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama bowed to federal pressure and stepped aside so two Negro students could register at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his radio-television talk, the President cited the Alabama crisis in making his appeal and outlining his legislative program...

President Kennedy announced Monday that the United States, Russia and Britain have agreed to send high-level negotiators to Moscow next month in a fresh start at hammering out a nuclear test-ban treaty. He said the agreement to start the high-level talks had been reached by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and himself. In the meantime, the President announced, the United States will not conduct any nuclear tests in the atmosphere - so long as the Soviet Union and other nations hold back on their tests, too. Mr. Kennedy spoke of the talks as a badly needed first start on negotiations "where the end is in sight." But he cautioned that his announcements were "no substitute for a formal binding treaty - but I hope it will help us achieve it." British officials seemed more optimistic...

Sometimes a Congressman casts a vote that eventually puts money in his own purse. If he found someone else in government making a self-serving decision like that, the congressman would arch his brow, pound his fist and bellow. The cry of "conflict of interest" would resound against the walls. But no one, or at least hardly any one, arches, pounds, or bellows when the congressman casts his vote. There are 535 members of Congress. Of these, 315 are lawyers, some still allied with active, lucrative law firms representing a host of different clients. Thirty-three congressmen have some form of interest in banks, trust companies, or savings & loan associations. Twenty-three congressmen or their families have some sort of interest in radio or television stations. A handful of members are farmers, voting on farm legislation. Far more than a handful own stocks, sometimes in heavy amounts, in interests ranging from oil to soda water...

[Chief Justice Earl Warren has called for a great national debate on three proposed constitutional amendments. In this last of three articles, Stanley Meisler discusses the two amendments aimed at the Supreme Court.] Chief Justice Warren has chided lawyers for their silence about three constitutional amendments. Warren's irritation is not surprising. Two of the amendments are aimed right at his court. "For the bar of America to be as inactive as it has been in this situation," he said recently, "is almost an abdication of its responsibility to the public." As head of the Supreme Court, Warren did not take a position on the amendments, but he clearly was concerned that, with little or no debate, sixteen state legislatures had approved at least one of three amendments. If any amendment wins support from 34 states, Congress must call a national convention to accept or reject it...

[Chief Justice Earl Warren has called for a great national debate on three proposed constitutional amendments that have quietly slipped through sixteen state legislatures. One of these amendments would change the way of amending the Constitution. In this second of three articles, Stanley Meisler analyzes this amendment.] States righters quietly trying to push three new amendments into the United States Constitution have a long, rocky, weaving road ahead. Without fanfare, the legislatures of sixteen states have approved resolutions asking congress to call a national convention to consider these amendments aimed at curtailing the powers of the Federal Government. But the states vary in their likes and dislikes, and not all sixteen have voted for the same amendments. Only one amendment so far has attracted as many as twelve states. The states righters need at least 34 states to take a long first step on the rough constitutional road...

[Chief Justice Earl Warren has taken America's lawyers to task for remaining silent while sixteen states approved at least one of three proposed states rights amendments to the United Slates Constitution. In this first of three articles, Stanley Meisler describes the strange, silent drive behind these amendments aimed at curtailing Federal Government powers.] Without trumpeting or the beating of drums, sixteen states have slipped into a strange, silent parade to amend the United States Constitution and curtail the power of the Federal Government. These states have approved at least one of three proposed constitutional amendments designed by men piqued at the United States Supreme Court and alarmed at the ballooning power of Washington. "If proposals of this magnitude had been made in the early days of the Republic," Chief Justice Earl Warren said recently, ''the voices of the lawyers of that time would have been heard from one end of our land to the other." Warren has called for a great national debate, and, of late, a chorus of opposition has started to sound...