Assassinations, even unsuccessful attempts on the lives of American leaders, strike so swiftly and frighteningly that TIME correspondents, like other journalists, need no marching orders from the home office before starting work. On the almost fatal scene with the President Friday morning was TIME'S veteran Sacramento stringer Tom Arden. As soon as Lynette Fromme's gun was wrested away, Arden began gathering eyewitness accounts of the attempt. San Francisco Bureau Chief Joseph Boyce took off for Sacramento and covered Fromme's midafternoon arraignment. Correspondent John Austin remained in San Francisco gathering background material. The Los Angeles bureau managed to obtain some unpublished memoirs that Fromme had written about her life with Manson. Picture departments in both bureaus sought out exclusive photographs. In Washington, a team of correspondents gathered White House and Secret Service reaction.

In New York, James Atwater, Frank Merrick, Ivan Webster and Gerald Clarke pieced together the cables that flowed in all through the weekend and wrote the cover story and accompanying boxes. The package was researched by Edward Tivnan, Marta Dorion and Allan Hill and edited by Marshall Loeb. "An assassination attempt is more than just bad news or the act of a lunatic," says Loeb. "It raises the problem of how to campaign in our free, open society. And it reins in the ability of our President or presidential candidates to move among their followers and get a 'feel' for the mood of the people."

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The slide of Britain, once the world's leading industrial power, into apparently chronic economic sickness is a development alarming to all the West. Rather than recite only the surface facts and statistics of crippling inflation, union demands and slumping productivity, TIME editors felt that a real understanding of the situation required telling the human side of the story. Therefore, the special report that appears in the Economy & Business section focuses on workers and bosses at one of Britain's major firms. Like the Bellamys and their servants in the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs, they cannot live apart, though their relationships are plagued by mistrust and class antagonisms. The factory chosen for the story belongs to Rubery Owen Holdings Ltd., Britain's largest privately owned manufacturing firm. For two weeks, Correspondent William McWhirter followed Managing Director John Owen and Doug Peach, the firm's senior union spokesman, around the company's main plant in Darlaston, and interviewed workers, foremen, efficiency experts and company directors. "I left Darlaston feeling that neither side was to blame," says McWhirter. "It was just, as they would say, 'the situation.' "

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