NEITHER tumult in the U.N. nor crises in Aqaba deterred or even interested the participants in one annual spring rite--the pilgrimage to the boulevards of Paris to examine the treasure-trove -of Paris' haute couture. For hundreds of years moralists have thundered and savants deplored the "private luxury" of fashion, but its tides have inexorably rolled on, exposing then obscuring bosoms, enhancing then suppressing derrieeres. This week the iron curtain of secrecy lifts, and U.S. women will see for the first time Fashion Dictator Christian Dior's newest enticements to planned obsolescence. See FOREIGN NEWS, Dictator by Demand.

MODERN Republicanism," business leaders and Congressmen have suddenly discovered to their horror, is more than just a progressive political movement. It is also a record peacetime budget. The House Appropriation Committee's Veteran Chairman Clarence Cannon says that he cannot recall anything like the current public outcry against the budget, and dozens of Senators and Congressmen are purposefully sharpening their paring knives. For how much they hope to cut, and where, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Cut That Budget!

IF the creed of Negro nonviolence was the hallmark of Montgomery's Reverend Martin Luther King (TIME, Feb. 18), another brand of nonviolence marks the year-old administration of a remarkable Deep South governor, Mississippi's James Plemon Coleman. Coleman wants time to show what Mississippi can do on its own--and he probably wants to run for the Senate in 1960 against Race Baiter James Easttend. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Six-Foot Wedge.

A BIG CLOUD of dust is rising up above the cathode horizon, and soon the biggest passel of straight-shooting, clean-living Westerners ever to jingle on screen will ride into TV. In its insatiable search for material, television is transforming the traditional horse opera into the "adult western." The results, which pushed one western last week to No. 3 in the Trendex popularity poll, have encouraged the networks into preparing a whole herd of new westerns for next fall in the biggest visible trend for the coming TV season. See TV-RADIO, High in the Saddle.

THE near monopoly that the slash and drip school of painters has clamped on the Manhattan art world for the past decade is beginning to crack up. The first signs of change came with the shift to a gentler, moody type of semi-landscape-painting which critics are calling abstract impressionism (TIME, Feb. 20, 1956). Last week one of the leading pioneers of abstract painting stunned his comrades with an about-face show that pointed to a new and radically different solution. See ART, The Bottle & I.

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