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

The hair was skimpier, the waist thicker, but Comic Bob Hope, onstage at the St. Louis Municipal Opera in the Broadway role he created 25 years ago, seemed the same slat-nosed, perpetual lad with the innocent leer. Playing Huckleberry Haines, the matchmaking student bandleader of Alpha Beta Pi, in the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach musical Roberta, Gagman Hope (aided by his writers) stuck to the creaky plot, but inserted his old vaudeville number Invitation to the Dance, convulsed the audience with typical, topical Hopela: "The President is getting off better drives --he has Sherman Adams' picture on the ball." For its 40th season, the famed old Muny, heavily challenged by TV, had turned to the star system--and with hopeful results: more than 12,000 showed up at the opera's best opening night ever.

Still stern to the memory of his onetime commander, General Charles de Gaulle refused a request from the widow of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, wavering head of the fascist puppet Vichy government during World War II, asking that her husband's remains, now on the lonely Ile d'Yeu, be transferred to a graveyard at Verdun, site of his great 1916 defensive victory over the Germans.

Chin up but mouse-quiet, Elizabeth Taylor Todd made her first public appearance since the death of her rambunctious Mike (TIME, March 31) at a Hollywood press conference called to announce her next screen role: a budding beauty queen in the comedy Busman's Holiday. The producers: plucky Liz and her stepson, Mike Todd Jr., 28, who nervously flaunted some of the old man's damn-the-torpedoes financial bazaz: "Cost? We'll spend as much as it takes."

When Columbia University honored eleven wartime military leaders with honorary doctorates at a special convocation on Feb. 21, 1947,* one of the best known of the names was overseas as military panjandrum of occupied Japan. Setting the books in order, stately General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, whose son Arthur is a sophomore at Columbia College, dropped in on University President

Grayson Kirk, at long last received his scroll and the purple-trimmed hood of a doctor of laws.

In the midst of a top-hole week--in which a family history, The Churchills, by Historian A. L. Rowse (TIME. May 12), drew critical tribute from British reviewers, and France offered him a high decoration (see FOREIGN NEWS)--Elder (83) Statesman Sir Winston Churchill, with cigar, cane and topper, plunked down in the middle of the Ascot paddock to keep an eye on his Tudor Monarch in the $30,660 Gold Cup. Souring the big day, horse failed man as Tudor Monarch finished fourth behind the American-owned, Irish-trained mare Gladness.

In for the full hero's welcome, West Germany's President Theodor Heuss earnestly trundled about the country to New York (where he received an honorary L.H.D. from the New School's President Dr. Hans Simons, who attended Berlin's Hochschule fuer Politik with him some 40 years ago) from the Grand Canyon (which, in good statesmanlike fashion, he painted). Sampling the lighter side of U.S. life, Dr. Heuss bounced two miles in an old-fashioned buggy to a rodeo in Prescott, Ariz. (His comment: "I looked to see if they dressed the way cowboys do in the movies, but they dress better"), and in Williamsburg, Va.. true to the colonial spirit, he draped himself in a yard-square bib for a roaring good feast at the King's Arms Tavern.

In a rare gesture of across-the-Curtain appreciation, the top-drawer Soviet Union Academy of Sciences awarded membership to 30 non-Russian scientists and scholars, including two Americans: Nobel prizewinning Caltech Chemist Linus Pauling, 57, vociferous foe of nuclear testing, and Biophysicist Detlev W. Bronk, three-term president of the National Academy of Sciences, former president of Johns Hopkins University. Named a corresponding member: brilliant, furtive Nuclear Physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, 44, who fled to the U.S.S.R. from Great Britain in 1950 with a vast knowledge of A-bomb research.

Making sure that U.S. newspapers noticed their annual convention in Portland next month, veterans of the island-hopping 41st Infantry Division issued a loud invitation to an old Pacific pal: Mrs. Iva Toguri D' Aquino, better known as the languid-toned Axis platter-puss, Tokyo Rose. Unperturbed by the fact that she would have to pay her own way from Chicago, Ex-Disk Jockey Rose said she would be interested-- if some pesky federal deportation proceedings against her did not get in the way.

*Among those present: General Dwight Eisenhower, later (1948-52) president of Columbia.

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