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

In a grubby street in Lodz, Poland, Lord Beaverbrook's stunt-loving London Daily Express tracked down a grey-bearded rabbi, proved that the rabbi was brother to Russia's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Maximovitch Litvinoff. For 100 zlotys ($1,900) Rabbi Yankel Vallach talked. His brother, said he, was born Meyer Moses Vallach, was a pious Jew until Tsarist police clapped him into jail. There he met Bolsheviks Kamenev and Zinoviev, turned Communist, atheist. Released, he was made the fat-salaried manager of a sugar factory. He almost forgot his Communism but police jailed him again for helping his old friends. After that he met Lenin and Trotsky, directed Russian terrorists from England until the Revolution.

Last time Rabbi Vallach saw his brother was when Maxim-Moses' train passed through Bialystok, their birthplace, once part of Russia, now in Poland. Related the rabbi: "I shouted 'Meyer, Meyer.' He looked out of his carriage. At first he did not know me. . . . Then he stepped on the platform and we walked up and down. . . . We talked of our other brothers. He gave me a cigar. And all the time his guards were following. . . ." Last year Rabbi Vallach; ill, wrote to Maxim-Moses for money. Back came a reply from Litvinoffs secretary: "According to ... the Soviet Constitution money may not be sent outside Russia, and Comrade Minister Litvinoff will not break the law."

The London Daily Express, enterprising stunter (see above), invited its readers to state what people they liked to read about most (and least). Public Bore No. 1 was George Bernard Shaw. After him in order of boredom:

Amy Johnson Mollison

Sir Oswald Mosley James Ramsay MacDonald

Greta Garbo

Adolf Hitler

Leslie Hore-Belisha

Lady Astor

Douglas Fairbanks

Max Baer

The Mdivanis

No. 1 Public Favorite was David Lloyd George; No. 2, Winston Churchill; No. 3, William Maxwell Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook, tireless, hard-driving master of the Express.

Twice in seven months the Duke of Manchester's erratic second son has set out to join the French Foreign Legion. The first time, last summer, he got as far as the Dunkirk recruiting office before changing his mind, decided to open a hot-dog stand at Maidenhead. "I am Lord Edward Montagu. I want to enlist," he announced again last week to a Paris recruiting officer. The officer took his application, which asked assignment to the aviation service, gave him a 5-franc piece. Lest Lord Edward turn back, his sister, Lady Louise, put him on a train with soap and toothbrush. In barracks at Toul, between a pair of Saar refugees he fell downstairs, dislocated a rib.

To Pittsburgh one morning went eagle-nosed Major-General Smedley Darlington ("Old Gimlet Eye") Butler, to speak at a banquet.* That same day Jimmy ("Schnozzle") Durante was appearing at a Pittsburgh theatre. Stepping off his train, General Butler thrust his head forward in characteristic pose, stomped down the platform. Loiterers, mistaking him for the well-publicized Durante, began to cheer. That evening nosey Comedian Durante turned up at the banquet where nosey General Butler was speaking. A cameraman snapped them nose to nose.

Recommended for a valor medal in Michigan was Corporal Norman Selby ("Kid McCoy"),* tricky oldtime middle-weight prizefighter and barroom brawler. Two years ago fisticuffer McCoy finished a nine-year term in San Quentin Prison for drunkenly killing a sweetheart. Last August, when a boat capsized in a lake near Ann Arbor, he raced to the rescue in a motorboat. Grey, paunchy and 61, Kid McCoy fished five children from the water, dived deep for their parents until his nose spurted blood from the pressure.

In a lodge on his father's farm at Berwyn Heights, Md., Douglas Schall, son of Minnesota's blind Senator Thomas David Schall, was poring late over his Georgetown University law books. Sniffing smoke, he looked out the window of his second-story room, saw flames licking up from a garage on the ground floor. Douglas pulled on a bathrobe, yelled "Fire" at his sleeping younger brother Richard, stumbled downstairs with Richard after him. While Douglas & Richard drove out two of the seven cars in the garage, a Negro servant crawled through a window to rescue a Scotch terrier they had left upstairs. In the house nearby Senator Schall, with wife and daughter, awoke, sat tight. The lodge burned almost flat. Aboard the cruiser Australia, twice called off her course by the distressed Schooner Seth Parker (TIME, Feb. 18), the Duke of Gloucester, third son of George V, steamed toward Jamaica (via Panama) a week behind his itinerary. Promptly on schedule, his younger brother and new sister-in-law, the Duke & Duchess of Kent, flew into Jamaica from Haiti, settled down to wait for tardy Gloucester.

An innkeeper at Kitzbuhel in the Tyrol charged the vacationing Prince of Wales $13.10 for a bottle of whiskey and the Austrian Government, taken aback, formed a commission to control all future liquor prices.

Six hundred and fifty-eight dollars was all that the French Government realized from an auction of the personal belongings of the late Great Swindler Alexandre Serge Stavisky, against whose estate lie claims of $16,500,000.

Last week Vivian LaMarre, Frances "Queen of Diamonds," upon whom Swindler Stavisky reputedly spent $6,000 a month was ordered to pay her rent or quit her apartment. Mile LaMarre drew her revolver, shot & killed herself.*

A Paris court found Charles A. L. Audry, nephew of France's onetime Premier Gaston Doumergue, guilty of swindling, gave him a suspended sentence of 26 months in jail. For the same deal onetime Minister of Commerce Louis Serre paid a fine of $250 and two accomplices were jailed. Swindlers Audry, Serre & friends sold $1,980,000 worth of stock which had been entrusted to them, fooled the owners by paying false dividends.

Fresh from a visit to his pretty, Italian first wife Tosca, Enzo Fiermonte. occasional prizefighter, taxied up to a Naples Hotel, hastened in to calm his tearful wife, Mrs. Madeleine Force Astor Dick Fiermonte, widow of John Jacob Astor II, mother of John Jacob Astor III. Hotel-men, eavesdropping, heard sounds of a quarrel. After an hour, handsome, husky Fisticuffer Fiermonte, whose passport had been taken by the police, left to spend the night with his first wife's brother. Next morning he was off to Rome on the third lap of a wife-to-wife shuttling trip which began three weeks ago when he left the U. S. for a visit with Tosca, only to find that Mrs. Madeleine Fiermonte had tagged along. In Rome he visited Tosca. played with their young son. Meanwhile, police investigated Enzo's Reno divorce, illegal in Italy. At Naples Mrs. Madeleine Fiermonte had a cold, could see no one except a lawyer who advised her to quit Italy before she was arrested for bigamy. Said Enzo's aged mother: "My son really loves the American lady a great deal." Last week newshawks rumored that Enzo might be conscripted to fight Abyssinia. Said one official: "He is not considered desirable to represent Italy abroad."

* The Denver Zoo received from Major-General Butler last week a request for a young bald eagle which he could train to appear on lecture platforms with him. Zoo Director Clyde Hill, perplexed, inspected his eagles, replied that a bald eagle is virtually indistinguishable until, at the age of about two years, its head feathers turn white.

Also last week the House Committee on Un-American Activities purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.

* According to Columnist 0. 0. Mclntyre, a drunk once refused to believe that the person with whom he was scuffling was Fisticuffer McCoy. Knocked to the floor, he looked up, said, "It's the real McCoy." Hence, the phrase.

* Alarmed by the number of women who had fitted their vanity cases with revolvers, the French Government last fortnight prohibited the sale of firearms to private individuals.

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