"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

Hugh Simons Gibson, Ambassador to Belgium, overworked by disarmament negotiations for his good friend, the President of the U. S., quit his post, went to Biarritz for a month's rest.

Alfred Emanuel Smith was asked when he would move from the Hotel Biltmore into his new Manhattan home (No. 51 Fifth Ave.). Said he, paying the ultimate tribute to Catherine Dunn ("Katie") Smith, "I will move when the last rug is laid, the last picture is on the wall and dinner is on the table."

Last August Vincent Bendix, industrialist son of a Methodist minister, who starts and stops most of the world's automobiles (Bendix Drive, Mechanical Four-Wheel Brakes), gave to Swedish Explorer Sven Anders Hedin $135,000 with which to proceed to China, draw plans of two ancient Lama temples and buy their trappings. Last week Mr. Bendix was thanked by King Gustaf of Sweden for one of these temples which he had given to Stockholm. It will cost some $65,000, will be erected by Explorer Hedin, who will assemble the other one, also at Bendix expense, in Chicago. Purpose: ornamental, not religious.

Hon. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, described by the New York Telegram as "catsup-faced, white-haired," arrived last week in Manhattan for a U. S. lecture tour.* His points:

1) "The churches are more powerful in America than anywhere in the world except in the wilds of Tibet, and such power obstructs intellectual progress."

2) "The American educational system is not designed to make people know the truth. It is tainted with propaganda and with the money of Big Business. . . . The obvious purpose . . . is to turn out job lots of men and women with brains as standardized as so many gum vending machines."

3) "The Catholic church will increase in power in America. . . . It keeps a stronger hold on its children. They breed faster."

4) "I dislike the prudery of the Boy Scout."

Professor Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, famed Russian physiologist, author of Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, refused an official celebration of his 80th birthday at Leningrad. Reason: Physiologist Pavlov is no friend of Communism. Said he, "I deplore the destruction of cultural values by illiterate Communists." Mindful that upon his research rests the behavioristic "Science of Marxism" and Marxian doctrine, the Soviet tolerates his slaps gently and without reproach, babies him. Birthday gifts from the Soviet to him include $50,000 endowment of his laboratory and an assurance that traffic would be diverted from the street near it so as not to disturb the conditioned reflexes of some six score dogs, kept there for experimental purposes.

Fritz von Opel, youthful and imaginative automobile maker of Frankfort, Germany, after two unsuccessful attempts rose 250 feet in the air, flew six miles to an airplane given momentum not by a motor but by rockets. It was the first rocket-plane flight. Just before he started he had explained: "Before one attempts to fly to the moon, he must jump over the first milestone."*

In Berlin, Michael Bohnen, most currently famed Wagnerian basso, announced that he was "sick and tired" of opera, said the public is tired of it too. He, who has rarely sung twice with the same makeup, is tired of the beards of Hans Sachs, Wotan, Hagen, King Mark. He has signed a contract to make sound-cinemas, believes that "everyone will soon be running to the cinema to take their music in this new form." In Chicago Louis Eckstein wrote a check for $103,458.50, half the deficit of the Ravinia Opera so that an ardently enthusiastic Chicago public might continue to have summer opera. Said he: "Art pays dividends in beauty. It cannot be expected to pay in material things."

Monte Blue, cinemactor, "on location" at Laguna Beach, Calif., toppled off a raft broke three ribs.

*Called Honorable because he was the second son of Viscount Amberly, Philosopher Russell is famed as mathematician, radical, pacifist. One of "twelve men" who understood Einstein's Relativity Theory, he wrote The A B C of Relativity (1925). Last week he said he did not understand the "last five pages" of the Einstein "Coherent Field Theory," latest Einstein hypothesis, printed on six pages (TIME, Fed. 18).

*In Hudson, Ohio, one Jim Sorgi was last week working on a 90-foot, home-made rocket in which he expects to fly to the moon.