THE man on this week's cover is an outlaw, condemned to death in absentia by France. It is no light matter for TIME to give General Salan's face such prominence.

In recent weeks, CBS has got into difficulties with French authorities for showing a TV interview with Salan in his Algerian hideout, and an NBC reporter has not been allowed back into France because of a talk on France he gave while home in the States.

A country or a regime that feels itself in extreme danger may not be much moved by the argument that we often put on TIME'S cover people whose policies or actions we have no sympathy with, as when we show China's Mao or East Germany's Ulbricht. Notoriety and evil, or even misguided passion, shape events and make news, just as achievement does. And it is our business to report the news, sometimes at the moment most inconvenient to the participants. Misunderstandings, resentments and injured feelings over what we publish arise constantly, usually in nations with less of a tradition of liberty than France.

TIME of course is not on the newsstands in Communist countries, though a number of copies go to top officials, curious, we suppose, about what's going on in the world, or at least what a Western journal says is going on in the world. Though there is no official ban on us in Cuba, distributors are afraid to handle TIME there for fear of trouble. In the past year, nine issues of TIME have been confiscated in the Dominican Republic (about as many under Ramfis Trujillo as under his assassinated father). We are currently banned in Spain and Portugal and their colonies, and in Indonesia too. We have run into trouble in the past year in Laos, Iran, and Jordan for stories that displeased the censors. In Ghana, a local distributor, on his own initiative, prudently burned all copies of one issue that reprinted a cartoon from the Manchester Guardi an showing Nkrumah gagging the press. In Arab countries, censors sometimes wield their scissors as if they were scimitars. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Libya have confiscated or cut pages out of issues in recent months, and in Iraq the censor has objected to stories about Middle Eastern politics, to cartoons, to a classically painted nude, and to stories, and even an ad, about Israel.

We think this is an instructive list. During this same period we have on occasion said things as harsh or harsher about political figures or government policies in Britain, France, West Germany, Italy. Canada, Brazil, Japan, Belgium, Australia, Mexico (among many others) without being censored. And there are those who might argue that political figures in the U.S. are often the most unhappy of all about what we say about them. In the end we (and other journalists) count on the reliability of our reporting and the responsibility of our writing to make our case as best we can.

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