Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Of all the Western scientists who have rustled into the folds of the Iron Curtain, few vanished more completely than Italian-born Nuclear Physicist Bruno Pontecorvo. In late 1950 Pontecorvo, his head and perhaps his luggage crammed with hydrogen-bomb secrets gleaned from his U.S., Canadian and British research, landed in Helsinki without a Finnish visa. He cheerfully surrendered his passport, was not impolitely detained. Within an hour, Pontecorvo, his Swedish-born wife and their three children dropped out of sight. But passengers on the airline bus which had hauled the Pontecorvo family into the Finnish capital recalled that, as the bus entered the city, one of the scientist's little sons had ingenuously piped: "Are we now in Russia?" Last week, after more than four years of rambling speculation about his whereabouts, Bruno Pontecorvo, 41, could at last publicly answer the youngster's query, "Yes"--with a vengeance. In a bristling letter to Pravda, Pontecorvo wrote that he had left England because of "the sugar-coated blackmail of the police," found asylum in the U.S.S.R., where his brain had dwelt on "atomic energy for peaceful aims." He also sprang a surprise: he had won a secretly awarded Stalin Prize last year. Later, Pontecorvo, proud occupant of a Moscow flat and a country villa, waved a Soviet passport before newsmen and cried: "I am a Soviet citizen!"

At a fancy chuck wagon parked near Palm Springs, Calif., rugged Cinemactor Clark (Mogambo) Gable and his old-time playmate, sometime Actress Kay Williams Spreckels, fifth ex-wife of Sugar (Honey Dew) Daddy Adolph Spreckels II, lined up for morning chow. With other early risers of the Desert Riders, oldest galloping group in those parts, they had just taken a constitutional in the saddle as dawn peeped over the oasis.

In 1950, wanderlusty Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, world tramper and traveloguer (Of Men and Mountains, Strange Lands and Friendly People), spent a long summer vacation clambering about on the peaks of northern Iran. Suspecting that Douglas, from his lofty perches, had stolen a peek or two northward, the Russians promptly and peevishly accused him of spying on them. Now, however, unpredictable Moscow is willing to let him look around some more. This summer, accompanied by Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, counsel to the Senate's Government Operations Committee, Douglas will enter Russia from Iran, reconnoiter by car through six Soviet republics in central Asia.

In Manhattan, over a Scotch-and-milk, tousled Author James T. (Studs Lonigan) Farrell confessed that religion scares him mostly because he cannot visualize any hereafter to his liking. "If I were to go to Heaven," he explained wryly, "I would find my sainted mother nagging my father, and my grandmother bawling out my grandfather. And both ladies would be telling the Lord how to run things. On the other hand, if I go where I should go, I would find my aunt chasing the Devil as always. That wouldn't be any change for me, either."

At New York's International Airport, old (87) Maestro Arturo Toscanini arrived after a flight from Milan, was welcomed by his daughter Wanda, wife of Pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and son Walter, who explained that the spry conductor had returned to the U.S. to polish up some recordings already made or in the works. The rumor that he is hankering to marry grey-haired Anita Colombo, his secretary and plane companion? Widower (since 1951) Toscanini passed a fatherly glance at Anita, snorted: "Ridiculous!"

From the Kremlin came the official word that Nebraska-born Author Anna Louise Strong, 69, whose unwavering loyalty to the U.S.S.R. was ungratefully rewarded in 1949 when she was kicked out of Russia as a spy, is a nice lady after all. Guiltless Anna, according to the Moscow announcement, had been framed by the late Soviet Interior Minister Lavrenty Beria and the late State Security Boss Viktor Abakumov. At her home in Los Angeles, veteran Party-Liner Strong broke her martyred silence. "I'm very much pleased to have all this mess cleared up," beamed she. "The accusations were a terrific shock and smashed my career."

From Kansas City, Harry Truman sent regrets to the citizens of Key West, Fla., Truman's favorite watering place during his presidency, explained that he will have to pass up a vacation he planned there soon. Reason: he is taking longer than he anticipated in putting his memoirs in shape for publication (by LIFE this fall).

Ever since France's No. 1 Red, Maurice Thorez, plunked down $90,000 for a Riviera villa (TIME, Feb. 14) and moved in, many of France's Communists, less prosperously ensconced in the garrets of Paris and Marseilles, have wondered aloud whether Comrade Thorez is as comradely as of yore. They also found it painful to picture a horny-handed hero of the working class hemmed in by such blue-blooded neighbors as the Ago Khan, Belgium's ex-King Leopold, Britain's playgirl Marchioness of Milford-Haven. To quiet the mutterings from the underlings, the party secretariat in Paris last week oozed some analgesic balm, proving that Thorez is but a compliant redbird in a gilded cage: "If some of its members are lodged in villas or pavilions bought by the party, that does not involve personal privileges, but collective decisions for the investment of working-class funds ... It was thus, in obedience to a party decision, that Comrade Thorez agreed to live in a southern villa bought on the advice of the Central Committee."

Until recently one of the world's most harried men, France's carefree ex-Premier Pierre Mendes-France, proving that leisure cometh after a fall (TIME, Feb. 14), was all smiles behind his colored-glasses when he ventured out in ski togs at the French Alpine resort of Megeve.

Modern poets are the favorite whipping boys of Ireland's Eireascible poet-dramatist, Lord (The Man Who Ate the Phoenix) Dunsany, 76, propounder of the notion that much modern verse is based on a belief that "nonsense is truth, truth nonsense." In Washington, D.C. last week, he flailed mightily at the obscure rhymes that plague him, dented works such as T. S. Eliot's Choruses from "The Rock." A line singled out by Dunsany as gibberish: "A moment in time but time was made through that moment : for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning." Later, he turned gloomily from poetry's plight to civilization's: "We're like a party of people in an automobile being driven downhill at midnight by a child of the age of four. I can't see any possibility of our avoiding a crash."

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