WHEN TIME'S Correspondent John Mecklin asked a Baghdad bookseller why he had no books about Iraqi Premier Nuri asSaid, he was told: "If somebody said he was good, nobody would buy the book. If a book said he was bad, the police would ban it. So nobody tries it." Later, over a card-table dinner of "roofed fish" (a Baghdad speciality) in Nuri's home, the old strongman told more about himself than the West has ever heard before. For the Arabian Nights' story of the Iraqi strongman, Nuri asSaid, a blue-eyed Arab, see FOREIGN NEWS, The Pasha.

THE beginning of justice," U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren once wrote, "is the capacity to generalize and make objective one's private sense of wrong." Last week Chief Justice Warren's court generalized its way into two specific surprises that rocked the FBI and its chief, J. Edgar Hoover, raised legal brows and shook corporate board rooms across the U.S. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Direction Disputed, The Jencks Case, The Du Pont Case and BUSINESS, The $2.7 Billion Question.

THE uproar over the case of Army Specialist Third Class William S. Girard, and whether or not he should be tried by a Japanese court for the accidental shooting of a Japanese woman boils down to a heated argument over the much misunderstood status-of-forces agreements between the U.S. and 49 friendly countries. Just what do the agreements mean, and how well have they worked in the past? See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Girard Case and G.I.s in Foreign Courts.

COMMENCEMENTS were busting out all over last week, and many a famous man and woman donned cap and gown for the annual distribution of honorary degrees. Whether actress or general, scholar or former infielder, each heard his praises sung in the rolling rhetoric of the citations accompanying their degrees. For a sampling of this year's academic honors list, see EDUCATION, Kudos.

CHICAGO baseball fans, who have hoped in vain for an American League pennant since the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, have learned to endure an annual disappointment: watching the White Sox get off to a fast start, then fall in a "June Swoon." This year the Sox raced into June as if they really mean to run all the way. One big difference is a scrappy, tobacco-chewing little second baseman named Jacob Nelson Fox. See SPORT, Nellie's Needle.

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