A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

In reporting the news, TIME sometimes also helps to make news, moving readers to act on information they first discovered in TIME. Some examples:

> Awaiting trial in federal district court in New York, former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans read an article in TIME'S Law section about the innovative techniques developed by Psychologist Richard Christie and Sociologist Jay Schulman for selecting un prejudiced juries. Although their major successes involved cases brought by the Nixon Administration against such radicals as the Gainesville Eight and the Harrisburg Seven, Stans instructed his lawyers to get in touch with Christie, who expressed interest. However, his promise to pick a fair but not necessarily winning jury failed to impress Stans' codefendant, former Attorney General John Mitchell, and the deal was called off.

> Southern Vermont, reported a story in our Environment section, was being subdivided by developers into an ugly mosaic of plots for leisure homes; laws to halt the despoliation were nonexistent. Once the story appeared, Vermont Governor Deane C. Davis felt that national exposure of the problem gave him the political strength he needed to sponsor the kind of progressive program vital to protect the remaining undeveloped land. The required legislation, first of its kind in the nation, was passed by the lawmakers and, in addition to becoming a model for other states, has since caused one of the biggest developers to go out of business.

> In Bombay, India, Doctoral Student Raja Dhale was distressed by the continued oppression of the harijan, or untouchable caste, to which he belonged. After reading about the Black Panthers in TIME, he founded the Dalit (Oppressed) Panthers, a group composed almost entirely of members of the untouchable caste who have since attracted considerable attention by protesting the iniquities of Indian society in polemics and poetry that have come to be known as "Dalit literature."

> Occasionally the news gathered by TIME correspondents is deemed so vital that a reader cannot wait for it to see print. This seems to have been the case with Watergate Conspirator E. Howard Hunt. In 1971 he somehow acquired a cable sent by our Bangkok bureau chief reporting details of North Vietnamese military preparations in the South. The cable was found with other documents when Watergate investigators opened Hunt's White House safe and searched his files after the break-in of the Democratic headquarters.

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