IN the prospectus written more than 40 years ago, the founders of TIME promised to deal with "all subjects of importance and general interest." That's quite a charter, and the breadth of its range both challenges and delights the editors who follow it four decades later. In this week's issue, two major stories provide sharp illustration of its all-encompassing nature.

One is the cover story, which probes the savagery of the massacre in the Congo. The story is the work of a group of staffers and stringers spread all the way from Stanleyville to Seattle. Front-line men were our Leopoldville stringer, Oxford Graduate Robin Mannock, and a Kenya Indian freelance photographer named Priya Ramrakha. Moving with Congolese loyalist troops, they reached Stanleyville shortly after the massacre in which Dr.' Paul Carlson was killed. Mannock, who was hit by shell fragments along the way, says after three years in Africa that he stays there because "I am interested in abnormal psychology." Our key reporter in the area, operating from Leopoldville, was West African Bureau Chief Jonathan Randal, who was on an earlier casualty list. He is on crutches as the result of an injury suffered when a piece of a statue of Patrice Lumumba, blown up by loyalist troops, fell on his leg.

As the story spread across and out of Africa, it called for reporting from our correspondents and stringers in Nairobi, Kampala, Dar-es-Salaam, Algiers, Paris, Brussels, Bonn, the United Nations, Washington, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Seattle. As all the pieces of the week's bloody events and their historical perspective were put together in Manhattan by Writer Robert Jones, the story could only be described as one of primitive horror.

AT the other pole of interest is a story that can best be described as velvet and faille seen through the bubbles of good champagne. This is MODERN LIVING'S report on the growing U.S. tendency to dress up for fun, developed by the color projects' staff, with a story by Writer Johanna Davis and twelve pages of color pictures by Ormond Gigli. What Photographer Gigli had to dodge most to get his pictures were frequent dangers of too much hospitality. In most places he and his assistant went, the usual greeting was something like: "I don't know about you fellows, but I'm going to have some champagne. Will you join me?"

Graciousness at one pole of interest and savagery at the other only set the outside points of the range of stories in this week's TIME. With what lies between in all the other sections, the editors are aiming to live up to that charter to cover "all subjects of importance and general interest."

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