WHEN crises come in clusters, is it all coincidence? Suez and Hungary occurred in the same week, and last week was another time of reverberating violence -in Algiers, Paris, Caracas, Beirut. Mobs stoned the Vice President of the U.S. on one continent, burned U.S. Information Agency libraries on two others. Some of the events were clearly foreseeable; others could be seized upon. Some could be planned: a new Sputnik went up in Russia in time to impress a visiting Nasser. In Algiers ambitious men leaped to a balcony to power events, and in France General Charles de Gaulle, who last controlled events to restore the French Republic after World War II, dramatically announced that he was ready to return to save it from civil war.

De Gaulle first appeared on TIME'S cover in 1941, when he alone spoke for a defeated but unyielding France. He appeared on two more TIME covers before retiring to private life. "Without one being able to say what factor or what event will provoke the necessary change in the regime," he said in 1955, "one can only say that it will come." As the Fourth Republic flounders from crisis to crisis, the De Gaulle alternative is more and more discovered in France. A haughty, stubborn man, sensitive to history, conscious of legality, he was against the domination of a weak Parliament, but he probably did not want to be a dictator. He actually favors a stronger executive somewhat like the U.S. For his present prospects, see FOREIGN NEWS, "I Am Ready."

Farther east on the Mediterranean, the bloody rioting in Lebanon was also not quite what it seemed in the first bulletins -a deliberate attempt of those linked with Cairo or Moscow to take over the prosperous and divided little republic. For a study in how occasions are seized, see FOREIGN NEWS, Bloodletting.

PERHAPS on some desk in the Kremlin a date on a calendar was marked with a note, "Nixon in Peru," and a few days later another: "Nixon in Venezuela." But the explosive receptions that greeted Dick Nixon in those countries on those dates only moved the U.S. to a search for answers. "I was an American," wrote a TIME correspondent in Caracas, "and here before my eyes the Vice President of the U.S. was on the verge of very possibly being beaten to death. How in God's name could something like this be happening?" For some answers, see THE HEMISPHERE, Why It Happened.

THE week's upheavals abroad jarred Lieut. Colonel David Simons of the U.S. Air Force off this week's TIME cover but produced not a ripple in the intensive, long-range campaign he serves: to solve the problems of man's survival in outer space. Six months ago, TIME tackled the job of picturing the efforts of U.S. space medics in color, found that there was more to picture than had been imagined. Medicine Editor Gilbert Cant went on a flying tour of U.S. Air Force space medicine centers, and for his preview of what man faces when he reaches for the stars, see MEDICINE, Outward Bound.

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