Wim Bartels, which helped organize an antimissile demonstration of 350,000 persons, promised to pursue his campaign for the elimination of both the Soviet and American missiles.

Schmidt fails to convince Brezhnev that the U.S. wants serious arms talks

The conversation in the grand, neoclassic Beethoven dining room of Bonn’s 18th century Redoute palace hushed as the ailing, 74-year-old guest rose ponderously from his chair. While his host, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, unceremoniously popped a stick…

Opposition to the new U.S. missiles in the Netherlands, where deployment is planned, is 68% and favor unilateral disarmament.

Nuclear foes would change the course of Europe

It began quietly in 1979, almost as an echo from a bygone generation. Pastors delivered sermons on the virtues of peace. Antiwar groups, some with their roots in the ’50s, passed out petitions and organized small demonstrations. Communist parties drummed up predictable…

Time correspondent Rademaekers saw young Dutchmen protesting against the deployment of new U.S. missiles on European soil, and saw the antinuclear movement take root and grow.

When TIME Senior Correspondent William Rademaekers returned to Europe last spring after a four-year absence, he was struck by the profound changes in European attitudes toward the Atlantic Alliance and the U.S. Growing numbers of people, mostly young, were protesting the deployment of new U.S. missiles on European soil and…

Project Pearl, that smuggled 232-ton cargo of bibles into China, was engineered by Open Doors with Brother Andrew International, an evangelical missionary organization based in Ermelo.

Bold expedition smuggles 1 million Bibles into mainland China

The beach near the mainland Chinese village of Gezhou, code named “Mike,” looked deserted in the moonlight. Just offshore, in a glassy South China sea, a crew member on the seagoing tugboat Michael signaled inland with three sharp flashes of a…

U.S. cities look to Europe for livable streets. To achieve peaceful coexistence between cars and people, the Dutch are rearranging conventional streets into sidewalkless Woonerven.

U.S. cities look to Europe for livable streets

Boston can be a nightmare for motorists: a spaghetti tangle of twisting alleys, tree-sentineled boulevards and cramped, one-way lanes. But it can be equally harrowing for the poor pedestrian. Consider Appleton Street in the South End. Some years ago drivers discovered they…

Czech-born director Kylian has made the Netherlands Dance Theater one of the most inventive and physically exciting companies around, but The Netherlands itself has no stars.

In this troupe, the choreographer is the star

Soldiers dropping one by one to the ground, doubled over in the agony of death. Men lifting a feather-light ballerina and unexpectedly groaning under the strain. A trio dancing to a mournful Sardinian folk song in the eerie darkness of an eclipsed…

Frans Swarttouw announced that Fokker and McDonnell Douglas Corp. of St. Louis were preparing to link up and build a Fokker-designed 150-seat, medium-range passenger jet.

Fokker’s challenge to Boeing

When it comes to flying high, few businessmen can measure up to Frans Swarttouw, 49, of The Netherlands. Having built Rotterdam’s containership terminal into a key operation of the world’s biggest and busiest deepwater port, Swarttouw took command three years ago of Holland’s weak and floundering…

The conservative Dutch have the lowest abortion rate of any West Eur. Nation. In the NL., 75% of the legally restricted but officially tolerated procedures are performed on foreigners.

In the Soviet Union, where contraceptives are both unpopular and hard to obtain, the average woman has six abortions in her lifetime. In Kenya, where a man’s wealth is often measured by the number of his children, the average woman bears eight children. In Mexico City, where herbal abortifacients are…

The Vatican has quietly decided to take no action against Schillebeeckx, at least for now, thus signaling that there is still some lee way for liberal thinking in the era of Pope John Paul II.

Rome drops a tricky case

In two pre-Christmas shots heard round the theological world, the Vatican in 1979 summoned Father Edward Schillebeeckx from The Netherlands for questioning as a possible heretic and then declared that West Germany’s Father Hans Küng had no license to practice as a “Catholic” theologian. Since…

In the NL., committed to the welfare idea, 1.4 million beneficiaries of state aid, a potent political force, have so far managed to blunt major attempts at social services reform in parliament.

A humanitarian dream becomes an economic nightmare

They are called welfare states, after the sense of collective compassion that inspired them in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. Like Gothic cathedrals, they rose gradually across Western Europe, in dedication to a lofty goal: to create more…