In the U.S., popular and congressional support for Richard Nixon's presidency continued to crumble, keeping TIME'S Nation section busy with a fistful of cover stories. But it was also an exceptionally heavy week for our World section. From Canberra to Jerusalem, a shock wave of seemingly global proportions has been rattling the foundations of governments, toppling or threatening world leaders with astonishing regularity. The resignation of West Germany's Willy Brandt and the downfall of Canada's Trudeau government signaled a new high mark on the political Richter scale. This has been a remarkable period for World Senior Editor John T. Elson, whose job offers a rare overview of the international scene. Presiding over a staff of 14 writers and reporter-researchers, Elson is also in daily contact with TIME'S 21 bureaus outside the U.S. He requests and monitors dispatches from abroad, determines each week's assignments and edits the section's wide range of material. When the news about Brandt reached Elson, he had just returned from a two-week swing through five Western European countries. As the World editor does periodically, he visited TIME correspondents and met with leaders of European politics, business, the church and the press. He talked with, among many others, Italy's Prince Nicolo Pignatelli, the oilman who is president of Gulf Italiana; Spain's Vincente Cardinal Enrique y Tarancon; France's Jean-Franc,ois Revel, author and columnist for the weekly L'Express; and Britain's Roy Hattersley, Minister for European Affairs. "The changes in leadership all over the Continent have implications that go beyond the confines of the countries themselves," says Elson. "I got the sense that this is a bad time for the 'idea of Europe'; there seems to be a resurgence of nationalistic concerns."

Elson, a sometime dance critic and longtime oenophile, began at TIME as a summer-vacation copy boy while an undergraduate at Notre Dame. He went on to get an M.A. in English from Columbia, and after a stint in Japan with the Air Force joined our Detroit bureau in 1957. He later transferred to New York, where he wrote and edited Religion as well as other sections, and he moved to World three years ago. "What's going on now is as challenging and complex a variety of situations as I've had to deal with in a long time," he says. "We don't expect more than two crises a week, but now we have five or six of major political interest."

This week, along with a summary-analysis of the leadership crisis that has engulfed so many countries, the World section describes events in Germany and Canada. We discuss the forthcoming elections for new heads of state in France and Australia, and examine the first weeks of Portugal's new regime. In addition, TIME this week publishes an interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and in seven pages of text and color pictures provides a view of Sadat's "new Egypt."

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