At Bath, England, ex-Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia watched his 15-year-old son, Prince Makonnen, act the part of King of Ethiopia in a Nativity play.

Few days before retiring as U. S. Attorney General, 68-year-old Homer Stille Cummings, class poet at Yale in 1891, confessed that he had written two volumes of poetry during his six years in office. Said he: "I doubt seriously that they will ever see the light of day."

In Geneva the wife of Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, Wartime German Ambassador to the U. S., revealed that he was so broken up by the death last march of Colonel E. M. House, one-time confidential adviser to Woodrow Wilson, that he has been ill ever since.

Comparing a Jew-baiting article written last month by Father Charles Edward Coughlin for his weekly Social Justice, with a Jew-baiting address given in 1935 by German Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels (see p. 20), the New York Post discovered that parts of them were almost word for word the same.

British Publisher Allen Lane, whose sixpenny paperbound Penguin and Pelican have flooded British newsstands and brought him a fortune, left London for India, Burma and Siam. Purpose: to investigate the possibilities of publishing paper-covered books in Basic English (850 words which "do all the work of 20,000") for use East of Suez.

In Washington. Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClair Ickes ordered underlings to do something about roadside signs which read, "Slow Men Working."

Famed California Convict Thomas Joseph Mooney, anticipating a full pardon by Governor Culbert Olson (due about January 15), made plans for the future after almost 22 years in prison: "My long-range work after I get out of prison will be to seek unity for the labor movement--a progressive unity that looks to the future instead of the past. ... I am sure that by living cautiously I can live another quarter century. I have no doubts about my ability to withstand the mental strain of release. My heart and mind have never been confined to prison walls."

At a teachers' meeting in Cleveland, Professor Max D. Steer of Purdue University produced graphs of Adolf Hitler's clod-compelling voice. The wave frequency of the Fuehrer's frenetic shouts in a typical sentence: 228 vibrations a second--eight more, according to one authority, than the average person's in anger. Said Professor Steer: "It is this high pitch and its accompanying emotion that puts the German people in a passive state."

Informed of the death on Christmas Day of 48-year-old CzechoSlovakian Dramatist Karel Capek (TIME, Jan. 2), 82-year-old Dramatist George Bernard Shaw exclaimed: "Why did he die? Why not me? ... It seems almost absurd that an old man like me should continue living while youngsters like Karel have to pass on."

Arriving in the Independency of San Bias,-the 200th country he has visited in the past 20 years, buck-toothed Robert LeRoy Ripley announced another believe-it-or-not: he himself is now "more widely traveled than Marco Polo, Magellan, and any other human being that ever lived." In an article for the London News-Chronicle, "1939--What Does It Hold," H. G. Wells suggested a possible solution of the world's present ills: ". . . The immediate fate of hundreds of millions of people hangs upon the unchecked impulses of a mere handful of men. You could pack the whole lot of them into an ordinary aeroplane. It would be a tumultuous load, but if you could contrive a crash for it the alleviation of human trouble would be disproportionately vast."

Appointed Honorary President of Butlers' Club, Inc. (an organization of butlers and maids employed by U. S. socialites) was famed Film Butler Arthur Treacher (The Case Against Mrs. Ames, Thank You Jeeves, Heidi).

Year ago Iran's touchy Riza Shah Palevi, King of Kings, broke off (for a month) Iran's diplomatic relations with France, because a French humorous weekly had punned "chat" (cat) with Shah. Last week, Paris papers reviewing the annual cat show did it again. So did the Shah.

* A tribe of still uncivilized Indians who live on the north coast of Panama, consider themselves an independent nation.

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