Capsules

P: U.S. flour millers are feeling the pinch as more and more overweight citizens cut down on calories and take in their belts. In 50 years, U.S. per capita consumption of flour products has shrunk from 225 lbs. a year to 130, is still going down.

P: Henry Austin, 58, had just been operated on for lung cancer in Birmingham, England when he rolled off the table, crashed to the floor, died. Explained Surgeon Satyen Basuroy: he and the nurse "must have turned away simultaneously." Ruled the coroner: accidental death.

P: After a few Montana mineowners hit pay dirt by charging the crippled and credulous for sitting in a worked-out uranium mine and absorbing the "radiation" (TIME, July 7, 1952), some Nevada casino operators figured they were missing a bet. Now they are doing a gold-rush business at Mesa, Ariz., charging visitors $3.50 for half an hour in an air-cooled mine shack. Geiger counters show that the radiation is no stronger than that from an old radium-dial watch. Says the A.M.A.: "An unfortunate hoax."

P: As Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden prepared to go home, feeling much better after his bile-duct operation at Boston's

Lahey Clinic, another international patient flew in for similar surgery at the skilled hands of Dr. Richard Cattell. This one, who had also failed to get relief from operations in his homeland, was Mohammed Kuttob, a lowly private in the army of Jordan.

P: Medical officials of John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers of America, miffed because they had got nowhere with their complaints of poor administration, poor care and overcharging at the 600-bed Jefferson-Hillman Hospital in Birmingham, Ala., ordered 300 doctors to send no more U.M.W. patients there. Those now in (about 75) are to be sent home as soon as possible; urgent cases must go to smaller hospitals, where the union's welfare fund will pay their bills.

P: Canadian Psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, first "doctor to the human race," ended a five-year term as director general of the U.N.'s World Health Organization. Into his place stepped Brazil's Dr. Marcolino Gomes Candau, 42, trained in public-health work at Johns Hopkins and lately deputy director of WHO's Pan American Sanitary Bureau.

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