Life of a diplomat in Red China is a lonely life at best, but worst of all for The Netherlands chargé d’affaires in Peking. One by one, 42 Chinese servants and staffmen began to leave.

In Peking the practice of diplomacy is apt to be anything but diplomatic. In the eagerness of several Western nations to recognize Red China, the men who have had to pay the local price are the diplomats sent to Peking. It is a lonely life at best, but worst of…

The net effect of coalitions is usually to dull debates, to narrow ambitions and to blunt the cutting edge of bold politics. In the Netherlands Drees cabinet fell after extending higher taxes.

In most Western European nations these days, no party commands an absolute majority, and most must rule by coalition. The net effect of coalitions is usually to dull debates, to narrow ambitions and to blunt the cutting edge of bold politics. Rivalries that would otherwise be threshed out in the…

U.S. investors are attracted to The Netherlands and Belgium, since they are politically more stable than France, industrially more productive than Italy, militarily more secure than W. Germany.

In the Gothic cathedral town of Malines, Belgium, Du Pont was preparing last week to build its first plant on the European Continent. Nearby, Procter & Gamble was operating a recently completed $2,000,000 plant. A few miles down the road, Union Carbide was moving into a polyethylene plant, and Ford…

Dutchman Fredericus Witte had to pay less taxes than his own calculations. Sure of his own figures, the tax collector, he fumed, had made a mistake. Wanting to pay more he went to court.

Fredericus U J.H. Witte is a Dutchman bothered by taxes. When he sees a jet fighter plane overhead he thinks to himself: “During my whole lifetime I won’t earn half of what that plane costs.” On the bitter morning in February 1957 when The Netherlands’ bureaucracy finally produced his 1955…

Change of attitude on German tourists happened over the years, they are welcomed now. The Dutch Tourist Bureau was complaining it needed more money to attract more Germans.

The new German invasion of Europe was at flood tide last week. Only this time, instead of carrying guns, the Germans clutched fistfuls of lire, francs, guilders, dinars, schillings. Some 5,000,000 of them are pouring south and west in an eager tourist flight from the greyer skies and industrial soot…

A report of a nine-man Dutch parliamentary commission that visited New Guinea last year concluded that the Dutch administration was ineffective and without success.

As many a World War II G.I. can testify, Western New Guinea is an unappetizing piece of real estate—a land of tropical swamps, unexplored mountains and predominantly Stone Age inhabitants. Yet for more than seven years, possession of this forbidding backwater has been the subject of a bitter quarrel…

The Indonesian Republic “came into being in large part as a result of the interest of the United States that a republic should be founded.” writes TIME, quoting Secretary of State Dulles.

FROM the sandy wastes of North Africa to the lush rain forests of Southeast Asia, the winds of anti-colonialism blow with gale force, and wherever they blow, there is resentment and suspicion of the U.S. “The U.S.,” says an Indonesian, “sides with the Western colonial powers and has not done…

A historic report on Sukarno and Rep. Of Indonesia. In 1949, worn down by Indonesian resistance and world opinion, the Dutch gave up, giving nationalists their independence.

(See Cover)

On the tide of nationalism that swept the world after World War II, no young nation swam more proudly than Indonesia. Its 3,000 islands were rich with oil, bauxite, rubber, tin; its 85,000,000 citizens made it the world’s biggest Moslem nation, sixth in population among all the nations…

A meeting at The Hague last week, Premiers of the three Benelux nations looked back on eleven years’ experience of union, and found it good.

Back in 1946, in a historic meeting at The Hague, the leaders of Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg committed their nations to a far-reaching experiment in cooperation and trust among Europe’s sovereign states—an economic union that obliterated economic borders to let goods, capital and labor flow as freely as…

To know what happened with Anne Frank, author Ernst Schnabel searched the German and Dutch archives and interviewed survivors of the camps who might have known her.

The diary of 15-year-old Anne Frank ended abruptly when the Nazis broke into her family’s hiding place in Amsterdam. What happened next? Of the last days of one of the world’s best-known modern heroines, little was known except that she had died, like millions of other Jews, in a German…

The Queen who has banished healer Greet Hofmans, decided on a new approach. Princess Marijke, who’s eyesight did not improve, was treated as a normal girl.

Two years ago all The Netherlands was thrown into an uproar by the disclosure (TIME, June 25, 1956 et seq.) that Queen Juliana had called upon a lady faith healer to restore the sight of her fourth daughter, Princess Maria Christina (nicknamed Marijke). There was talk of the faith healer’s…

Five year old Joke Haanschoten swallowed a piece of a radioactive needle, that was used to treat her infected adenoids that threatened to block a Eustachian tube.

“Mortal danger: forbidden to set foot here,” read the police signs around the Haanschoten family’s modest little house in the Netherlands town of Putten (pop. 12,000), south of the Zuider Zee. To enforce the order, barbed wire was strung around three sides of the house and its yard, and…

Indonesia’s economic crisis grew daily more acute. Indonesian officials want the Dutch to surrender West Irian (Netherlands New Guinea) or they have their interests in Indonesia liquidated.

Indonesia’s economic crisis grew daily more acute. In Central Java, hungry peasants were reported eating field mice. President Sukarno lingered on, neither ruling nor resting, though the government announced that he was leaving any minute for a vacation tour which would range from Tokyo to Cairo. But government officials were…