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

Metropolitan Opera Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas (TIME, Oct. 29), fresh from a three-week U.S. publicity triumph, rushed to New York's International Airport, Paris-bound with her toy poodle, a black mite aptly named Toy, sharing a first-class booking with Maria. Her retinue also included her husband, Millionaire Italian Industrialist Giovanni Meneghini, ticketed modestly as a tourist-class passenger, but described in a lawsuit earlier in the week by Maria as the man "who owns me as a husband." At the airport, Diva Callas bumped into another tourist-class passenger, none other than fur-collared Baritone Enzo Sordello, fired from the Met fortnight ago because, claimed Sordello, he had outsung Maria in an unaffectionate duet of Lucia di Lammermoor. In jolly holiday spirits, Sordello proffered a bygones-be-bygones handshake. Maria spurned his mitt and stalked off. Warbled she to newsmen a bit later: "I said, 'Merry Christmas.' He said, 'I want to shake hands.' I asked him to apologize for what he had said. He said in good Italian, 'No. I can't do that.' I said I was sorry and withdrew my hand." Before winging off into the misty twilight, stormy-eyed Maria Callas amplified her outrage: "I am a woman who has been terribly hurt ... I don't like this man taking advantage of my publicity!"

In 48 state capitals, 531 Constitution-ordained members of the Electoral College gathered to perform a patently superfluous rite, their sworn duty to re-elect (457-74) Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon to the nation's highest offices. In Alabama, however, one elector chose to ignore the vote that sent him to college, wrote in for President, instead of Adlai Stevenson, the name of Alabama's states-rightist Judge Walter B. Jones. Thus history books will forever record the 1956 election results as: Eisenhower, 457; Stevenson, 73; Jones, 1.

After a quiet six-week respite in a cozy Sun Valley chalet (owner: New York's Democratic Governor Averell Harriman), pretty Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, 33. second wife of Millionaire Horseman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 44, won a divorce on the technical ground of "extreme mental cruelty." During the last fortnight of her legalistic Idaho residency, Jeanne and the children of her eleven-year marriage, Heidi, 8, and Alfred Jr., 6, had taken some "out-of-season" skiing lessons and more than one pratfall. Snapped by a Chicago lensman as she headed back to her "home" in New York. Jeanne looked glum, kept mum. A little less reticent was one of her most dashing recent escorts, handsome Investment Scion Anthony Nutting, 36, separated from his wife (last June) and from his No. 2 spot in Britain's Foreign Office (last month) in protest against Anthony Eden's ill-starred Suez adventure. About to leave London at week's end for the U.S., where he will author six articles on the world scene for the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, Tony Nutting was asked if he plans to drop in on the ex-Mrs. Vanderbilt. Replied he: "Well, I said I should be going to see my friends."

The chairmen of both major national party committees, Republican Leonard Hall and Democrat Paul M. Butler, found themselves in a state of rare agreement. Butler told a special House committee studying lobbying and campaign activities that televiewers were bored sick by the torrent of campaign oratory that flooded their TV screens this year. Appearing before the same sitting solons two days later, Chairman Hall allowed: "You can saturate television with too much politics." Hall cited his proof--a welcome harbinger of less saturation in campaigns to come: political broadcasts win "very very low" audience ratings unless the speakers are candidates for the White House or Vice-Presidency.

The 77th birthday (Dec. 21) of the onetime "supreme genius of all mankind," unmourned Joseph Stalin, went unobserved in the U.S.S.R. Not a single official speech, parade or party.

T he American Academy of Arts and Letters, whose hallowed niches are normally restricted to a full complement of 50 members, took in two more of the elite, to raise its roster to 49: Harvard-educated, Pulitzer Prizewinning Poet Conrad (A Letter from Li Po) Aiken, 67, and Russian-born Composer Igor (The Firebird) Stravinsky, a U.S. citizen since 1946.

High-flying Broadway Producer Roger Stevens, whose off-Broadway enterprises include an interest in Manhattan's 102-story Empire State Building, announced plans to stage a play about the blotted career of convicted Perjurer Alger Hiss.

Guest writing in place of off-duty United Presshen Aline Mosby, full-bodied Cineminx Jayne Mansfield got confidential about her limelight techniques: "My press clippings, bound, weigh 95 lbs. . . . They've meant everything to my career thus far ... If you tell [newsfolk] the truth they try very hard not to hurt you with it ... When my daughter, Jayne Marie, now six, comes to an age when she will have problems, I'll hand her my scrapbook and say, 'This was your mother.' "

Christmas-paroled (last on a list of 66 prisoners) in Indiana: onetime Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, D. C. Stephenson, 63, who had served 30-odd years for second-degree murder, been sprung in 1950 but was clapped back into prison for jumping his parole.

At a Hungarian relief concert in London, hot-lipped Trumpeter Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong and five local cats out-blasted the whole blasted Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which sought to play under the hesitant, finally motionless, baton of Conductor Norman Del Mar. After running wild until shortly before midnight, Satchmo, on hand as a guest artist to fill out, not ruin, the Philharmonic, loped off stage while a flustered impresario temporarily confiscated his trumpet to prevent an all-night encore. But the hep types filling Royal Festival Hall screamed and stomped for more. (One of the most insistent: the rock-'n'-rolling Duke of Kent.) Unable to calm the wild beasts in order to start the finale, Maestro Del Mar and his boys straggled into the wings. To the more mystified than miffed conductor, Satchmo joyously growled: "Your cats are sharp as needles!" Muttered Del Mar with a shudder: "A shambles."

Accountants summed up the estate of Sportsman William Woodward Jr., accidentally shot to death 14 months ago by his wife Ann in her belief that he was a prowler (TIME, Nov. 7, 1955 et seq.). Inheritance taxes will gobble more than $6,000,000 of his net estate of $10,186,299. Ann was left the life income from a $1,300,000 trust; upon her death, their two sons are to get her trust principal.

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