Quadrupled oil prices may be transforming the world. Nowhere is the pace of change faster than in Iran, the ancient empire ruled by this week's TIME cover subject, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, "King of Kings, Light of the Aryans." This is his third appearance on TIME'S cover since he came to the Peacock Throne in 1941. Using his overflowing oil revenues, the Shah now hopes to make Iran "the Japan of the Middle East" and a force in world politics. Filing the main reports for this week's cover story were Beirut Bureau Chief Karsten Prager and Correspondent William Stewart assisted by TIME'S Tehran Stringer Parviz Raein. Prager's rounds included interviews with the Shah and Empress Farah in their Saadabad Palace on the outskirts of Tehran. Stewart mean while spent several days at industrial and agricultural projects and interviewing members of Iran's ruling elite. The story was written by Associate Editor Spencer Davidson. "The Shah's power is exploding," Davidson says, "and Americans would be wise to pay attention to his dreams."

In four years with TIME'S Medicine section, Associate Editor Peter Stoler has written dozens of stories on cancer. This week, in a four-page special report, he surveys the tragically topical subject of breast cancer, a disease that until recently many people were almost afraid to mention. "Our purpose," Stoler explains, "is to try to dispel some of the fears and myths by answering the questions that women have about breast cancer." While much of the article comes from cold, dispassionate research data, Stoler's analysis of the emotional effects of mastectomy is based on intimate, some times agonizing conversations between TIME correspondents and women who have undergone the operation. Among those contributing were Bonnie Angelo of TIME'S Washington bureau, who talked to Betty Ford at the White House; Mary Cronin of the New York Bureau, who interviewed recent mastectomy patients at Memorial Hospital in Manhattan, where Happy Rockefeller was operated on; and Madeleine Nash in Chicago and Elizabeth Frappollo in New England, both of whom spoke with doctors, psychologists and their breast-cancer patients. "Women correspondents' files were essential," Stoler says. "This is the type of story that the best and most sensitive male journalists are handicapped in reporting."

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