When TIME's International and Foreign News editor, Max Ways, returned to his post recently after a month's inspection of Europe (the Nuernberg Trials, Paris Peace Conference, Saxony elections, Berlin's Russian zone, etc.), he made his usual mental note to stay home for awhile. His log showed that in the last five years he had covered some 200,000 miles, mostly overseas, by air alone.

The last time Ways saw Europe he was busy inspecting U.S. economic intelligence outposts from Naples to Chungking. That was in 1944, when Ways was chief of the U.S. Foreign Economics Administration's Enemy Branch, which tried to keep track of German and Japanese war production for the U.S. chiefs of staff and the Army Air Forces.

When his war job was finished, Max Ways became a writer for TIME's new International section. This return to his trade was probably as inevitable as his original decision to become a journalist. His father, Max Ways Sr., city editor of the Baltimore Herald (he gave H. L. Mencken his first reporting job), had advised against it. Said he, with a newsman's directness: "I don't want to influence your decision, but if you ever grow up to be a newspaperman I'll strangle you with my bare hands."

Ways Sr. was not around in 1926 when Ways Jr., turned 21, fled from his philosophy major at Loyola College and his night law course at University of Maryland to the sanctuary of his father's old rival, the Baltimore Sun. By that process of osmosis known to newsmen as "learning the business," he had progressed, by the advent of World War II, from police & sundries reporter to editorial writer of foreign news and national affairs for the Philadelphia Record. In the process he had made himself a qualified political economist--a rarity among U.S. journalists.

As editor of TIME's International and Foreign News sections, Ways, who is a tall, tousled, eccentrically uneccentric individual with a propensity for thinking on his feet and working late, has a full measure of responsibility for TIME's presentation of the news in these highly controversial fields. Fortunately, in this postwar world, he does not have to make an argument that foreign and international news is important to U.S. readers. He does, however, have some other problems, such as:

1) Seeing that complex subjects like the Balkan peace treaties are told clearly, so that readers who are not experts in foreign affairs will understand them.

2) Selecting and developing those stories which add up to a balanced perspective of international and foreign news.

The latter involves reaching behind today's headlines for the stories that will make tomorrow's headline news (e.g., unrest among Africa's Negroes--TIME, Nov. 4).

There are other problems, of course, and one of them is viewpoint. Says Ways: "The two most important stories in the world right now are probably U.S.-Russian relations and the atomic bomb. The first is one of those highly controversial subjects on which everybody has strong opinions. TIME editors are not exceptions. We think that the Russians will go as far as the U.S. will let them. We do not think that war with Russia is inevitable, and we think that the best way to avoid war is by patient and firm resistance to Russian expansion--plus a positive, constructive U.S. world leadership. TIME reports and interprets the news of U.S.-Russian relations in the light of these convictions."

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