To TIME, the news is not just what happened yesterday or today. It is the whole stream of events, which can be seen in their full dimension only by assessing the past, examining the present, following the course of trends and looking toward the future. Four facets of the news in this week's TIME especially illustrate this scope:

LOOKING back upon a moment of history, NATIONAL AFFAIRS recalls the Battle for Leyte Gulf, which flamed into the headlines 15 years ago this week. It was the Japanese Empire's last stand. Never had a sea battle's stakes been so high, never so many warships involved, never such fierce fighting over such a vast expanse of trackless ocean. It was in fact four great battles, waged with every known naval weapon, majestic in its sweep, but complex and even controversial in its detail. Both the sense of sweep and the drama of detail are to be found in color maps with accompanying text.

EXAMINING the status of television in the troubled first weeks of another season, SHOW BUSINESS turns at cover length to the Private Eyes. Two seasons back, the giveaways dominated the air, and last year the major switch was out of the claustrophobic isolation booth into the West's wide-open spaces. This year, while the Westerns still lead the race for ratings and no week passes without at least a couple of "specials," the Private Eye is muscling in as the top gun. As for the cover painting, Artist Boris Chaliapin says the five big Eyes ran gun-first into a crime on their way to a meeting of the union. The girl, he said, is not really dead. She may be laughing. Who can tell?

FOLLOWING the course of European economic recovery, FOREIGN NEWS found that Europe is amassing gold and dollars at such a clip that the U.S., to protect its own economic strength, must press other nations to shoulder an increasing share of the burden of aid to underdeveloped countries. Around this basic point developed a definitive story of a momentous shift in the balance between the Old World and the New.

LOOKING toward the day a year from now when the U.S. will elect a President, NATIONAL AFFAIRS deployed political reporters in force to catch the significant straws. From Albany to Atlanta to Dallas to Sacramento, from Rockefeller to Kennedy to Johnson to Brown, they produced a whole series of beneath-the-surface stories as the presidential season opened in earnest.

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