THREE weeks ago TIME'S editors began planning coverage of one of the year's biggest news stories: the opening of schools in the South. Alerts were sent to a score of bureau and stringer correspondents (local newsmen who report for TIME) ; preliminary reports streamed back to New York, and red circles appeared on the maps.

North Carolina, representing a significant integration breakthrough in the Solid South, was obviously a key state. While stringers covered Charlotte and Greensboro, Atlanta Bureau Chief Harry Johnston flew to Winston-Salem with responsibility for reporting statewide developments.

Tennessee also demanded coverage. While TIME stringers kept a close eye on Clinton, last year's trouble spot, Chicago Bureau Correspondent Burt Meyers landed in Nashville, began preparing for the opening of Nashville schools this week.

In Kentucky, state militiamen were called out last year to keep the peace in coal-mining Sturgis. What would happen in Sturgis this year? Chicago Bureau Correspondent Harrison Lilly was there to report.

Arkansas was a question mark. There seemed little reason to expect trouble. But TIME'S Washington bureau reported disquieting rumors about the plans of Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus. To Little Rock went Chicago Bureau Correspondent Jack Olsen, an old Arkansas hand (he reported the story of Arkansas' industrial development, TIME, March 11, and the cover story of Senator John McClellan, TIME, May 27). In a pet cliche of Governor Faubus, a stitch in time saved nine. Olsen was one of the first out-of-state newsmen to arrive in Little Rock, the only one present when the militia clanked into the city.

For the dramatic, wide-ranging results of TIME'S bureau and stringer reporting, see the first five pages of NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

NIKITA Khrushchev's latest sidekick and fixer is an enigmatic Armenian who is Soviet Communism's big-time businessman. To find out all it could about Trader Mikoyan, TIME tracked down men who had bargained with him from Hong Kong to Marseille, ranging from U.S. ambassadors to Germans who dealt with him during the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact. One of the directors of Rome's Armenian Pontifical College insists that Armenians everywhere, Communist or antiCommunist, generally admire him as a "man with a head on his shoulders." Diplomats, defectors, Russian specialists in ten capitals from Bonn to Beirut, and Chicago businessmen who met Mikoyan on his 1936 U.S. trip--all were interviewed for the cover story; see FOREIGN NEWS, The Survivor.

BY conservative estimate, one in every 100 people in the world is schizophrenic. But the psychiatric profession is itself schizophrenic in its approach to treatment--divided between-schools that seek the cause and cure of the disease either in the emotions or in physical-chemical conditions. When 2,000 of the world's leading psychiatrists assembled in Zurich last week for the Second International Congress for Psychiatry, TIME'S Medicine Editor Gilbert Cant was there, to listen to their latest findings on the urgent problem of mental illness. For his report, see MEDICINE, Meeting on the Mind, The Big Sleep and Schizophrenics International.

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