In Montevideo, Uruguay, dictatorial Maestro Arturo Toscanini, nearing the end of a triumphal tour of South America, called his orchestra for a morning rehearsal on July 4. In the empty theatre he led his surprised men through The Star-Spangled Banner, waved a cheery greeting, dismissed them.

In Paris, Serge Lifar, director of the Paris Opera Ballet, whose "music-less" ballet Icarus created a teaspoon stir in the art world five years ago, revealed that Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goring had invited him to stage a production in Berlin.

Announcing that the national defense tax, which has added one or two cents to the purchase price of some 40-odd items (notably cigarets, gasoline, liquor, cosmetics) since it became effective July 1, has drained all the pennies from the U. S. Mint, Superintendent Edwin H. Dressel explained: "We've shipped out millions of 'em, and if the demand keeps up, we'll have to throw all our resources on pennies, 24 hours a day."

Sighted in mid-Pacific by a ship of the American President Lines, President Pierce, was a waterlogged, barnacle-covered piece of driftwood resembling the rudder of the Chinese junk in which globe-trotting Author Richard Halliburton was lost with all hands last year.

As a gift from "the Belgian people" to the Herbert Hoover Library at Stanford University went the $100,000, 35-bell, 6,916-lb. carillon of the Belgian Pavilion at the New York World's Fair.

Spanish Prince Ludovico Pignatelli filed an application in Manhattan Supreme Court asking that Italian Prince Guido Pignatelli and his precariously married* wife, Henrietta Hartford, $200,000,000 A. & P. store heiress, be ordered to drop the titles from their names. Complained Ludovico: "Guido has assumed the designation [Prince Pignatelli] so he might pirate the reputation and prominence of the petitioner. ... By reason thereof he . . . found the doors of New York's best society, which ordinarily would have been barred to him, suddenly open."

From the big Labor Building near the League of Nations Palace in Geneva, Switzerland, onetime Governor of New Hampshire John Gilbert Winant, director of the International Labor Office, followed the exodus of League officials, journeyed through France and Spain to Lisbon.

For displaying "great dash and gallantry" and bagging eight enemy planes, R. A. F. Squadron Leader the Hon. Maxwell ("Max") Aitken, 30, son & heir of Napoleonic little British Publisher Lord Beaverbrook, now Minister for Aircraft Production, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Still plugging for an international federation of democratic countries, sparse-haired Clarence Streit, author of Union Now, drafted a "declaration of independence" designed to unite the seven English-speaking States (the U. S., Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Union of South Africa, Ireland) under an "intercontinental congress" which, sitting in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, would be empowered to command their military forces, declare war & peace.

Terming military conscription a "desperate remedy--a last resort," Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, advocated enrolling CCC boys and WPAsters in the Regular Army and the National Guard. Said he: "We have plenty of men for our mobile army if we stop supporting them in idleness."

Watching hard-hitting, ex-Army Mule Shoer Lew Jenkins, world's lightweight boxing champion, hammer sparring partners around the ring, No. 1 Professional Tennist J. Donald Budge, noted for his own smashing attack, commented: "That's a snappy forehand drive Jenkins has."

Goaded into action last week by World War II was a motley assortment of U. S. citizens: Tall, well-dressed Governor William H. Vanderbilt of Rhode Island, 38, one of the youngest men to enlist in the Navy during World War I, reported in Washington for a two-week tour of duty with the Naval Reserve.

Aviator Clyde Edward Pangborn, who flew around the world with Hugh Herndon Jr. in 1931, offered his services to the Canadian Government in Ottawa. In Sofia, where his father, George H. Earle, onetime Pennsylvania Governor, is Minister to Bulgaria, Son George H. IV, 23, decided to return to the U. S. to join the air force. "To awaken America to her own desperate situation before it's too late," mustachioed Sculptor Stuart Benson, 63, onetime ambulance driver with the American Field Service in France, planned to tour the U. S., show films of the war zones. In Hollywood, Ecdysiast Faith Bacon announced plans to go to England as a nurse or ambulance driver. Disguised in cheap clothes and using an assumed name, black-eyed Cinemactress Luise Rainer was discovered working at a child refugee headquarters in Manhattan. Said she: "With world affairs inside out and outside in, this is no time for sitting on the lawn."

Over a fort in Italian Libya a British plane circled, dropped, not a bomb, but a note to the commanding officer, from Sir Arthur Longmore, Commander of the R. A. F. in the Middle East. The note expressed regret at the death of his onetime friend, Air Marshal Italo Balbo (TIME, July 8).

*The Los Angeles marriage, held the day the Prince's Reno divorce from Constance Grenelle Wilcox became effective, is technically invalid in New York, valid in California.

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