To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

You hear so many languages when you walk past the room where our Foreign News researchers work that some people call it our League of Nations.

One or more of these girls speaks Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish--and all but one speak French. They know 33 countries on six continents, and thei. birthplaces girdle the globe: Shanghai, China--Santiago, Chile -- Adelaide, Australia -- Cambridge, Mass. -- Juneau, Alaska --Charlotte, N.C.--Battle Creek, Mich. --Cracow, Poland.

Australia-born Essie Lee went to Melbourne University, lived all over Australia, visited New Zealand, Samoa, the Fijis and many of the other important Pacific islands, moved on to Mexico before she came to TIME.

. . . Alaska-born Anabel Simpson worked four years in the Territory, most recently for the Army engineers who built our air base at Anchorage. . . . Chile-born Paz Davila turned 21 just this week, but she has traveled through Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and every Central American country except Costa Rica, visited Europe and Africa, lived four years in diplomatic Washington, and knows scores of Latin American newsmakers.

Yi Ying Sung, our Chinese researcher, is a Wellesley graduate who spent five years as Professor of Western Literature at the University of Peking. There she worked with China's foremost scholar, slight, charming Dr. Hu Shih. She came to the U.S. in 1940, broadcast one of Mme. Chiang's speeches to the Nazis in German, headed the Chinese desk at the OWI for thirteen months.

Polish-born Zofia Krosnowski is an expert in world trade--knows it both in theory and in hard, realistic practice. She studied in Warsaw, in Geneva, at the ficole des Sciences Politiques in Paris, at the London School of Economics--then followed her husband to the Far East, worked with a Polish export firm in Manila, came on with him to work in New York.

Marjorie Smith specializes in the Middle East--has both her B.A. and her M.A. in modern history -- was working toward her Ph.D. in England when the war broke out. And we have two Foreign News researchers who can tell you firsthand just what the Nazis are like. Louise Bronaugh worked eight years in Europe, was in Paris when the Germans took over. She lived three months under the swistika--finally escaped to Vichy with the help of an old Frenchwoman who led her along 16 miles of backwoods roads at night.

Connie Burwell (who studied at the University of Heidelberg after she finished at Sweet Briar) was inside Germany all during the feverish war preparations of 1937-1938--saw Hitler, Himmler, Goring, Goebbels many times--made notes of everything she saw and heard, tore them into strips, smuggled them out of. Germany in her shoes under the noses of the Gestapo.

I don't suppose there are eight girls working together anywhere who represent such a pool of knowledge of the world's far places and peoples and politics as this group of TIME researchers. That's a terrifying thought--but perhaps their pictures will reassure you.

Cordially,

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