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

Asked by Sweden's Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. to endorse a Swedish polio fund drive, philanthropic Soviet Premier Georgy M. Malenkov not only obliged but also kicked in with a contribution of 1 krona (19-c-)

President Eisenhower approved the retirement of two federal judges who had presided over some historic trials. The jurists: Missouri's Albert L. Reeves, 80, an appointee of Warren G. Harding who sat at the trial of Kansas City Politico Tom Pendergast (income tax evasion) and who last November passed death sentences on the Greenlease kidnapers; New York's Vincent L. Leibell, 70, an F.D.R. appointee who last year handed a three-year perjury sentence to William W. Remington, former government economist who had denied Communist ties.

New Jersey's former Republican Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, 58, onetime head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who served a nine-month federal penitentiary stretch in 1949-50 for padding his Congressional payroll and taking kickbacks, was homesick for the Capitol. He said that he is "thinking about the possibility" of running for Congress again. In strongly Republican Bergen County, where many onetime Thomas constituents are still convinced that J. Parnell was framed by vengeful leftists, the possibility did not seem outlandish.

After tallying the votes of some 1,000 fashion experts, the New York Dress Institute gravely announced the names of the world's best-dressed women. No. 1 spot was taken over by Mrs. William S. Paley, wife of Columbia Broadcasting System's board chairman and one of the three glamorous daughters of the late great Surgeon Harvey Gushing. The Duchess of Windsor, who has been at or near the head of every list for the last 15 years, slipped clear down to a tie for tenth place with Musicomedienne Mary Martin. Among the other ten best-dressers: Mme. Henri Bonnet, wife of France's Ambassador to the U.S.; Princess Margaret, Oveta Gulp Hobby.

In Hollywood, where for kicks he is having a one-movie fling as an actor, Author Mickey (Kiss Me, Deadly) Spillane snarled that Hollywood is "too warm in the winter," most of its movies "terrible" and most of its writers "hacks, pure hacks." As for the film version of his own I, the Jury: "I ... walked out after the first 15 minutes. It was putrid."

In Cairo's daily Al Misr, Columnist Mamoud Abdel Moneim deplored the silly way Egyptian women have been acting ever since Cinemactor Robert Taylor hit town. Moaned Mamoud: "They have found excuses to knock at his door . . . reserve restaurant tables next to his . . . They have been observed making provocative gestures with cigarettes drooping from their lips . . . Will [Robert Taylor] think there are only flighty women in Egypt? Are there no men to keep them in check?"

On their way from Seoul to Manila for the inauguration of the Philippines' President-elect Ramon Magsaysay (see FOREIGN NEWS), Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Arthur W. Radford and his wife Marian, along with Assistant Secretary of State (for Far Eastern Affairs) Walter S. Robertson, stopped off for two days in Formosa. There, in the Taipei home of Nationalist China's President Chiang Kaishek, the visitors struck a family-album sort of pose for photographers with the Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang.

The U.S. Air Force's senior officer, four-star General John K. ("Uncle Joe") Cannon,* 61, chief of the Tactical Air Command, will retire in March, the Air Force announced, after 36 years of service, 33 of them as a flyer. As commanding general of U.S. Air Forces in Europe at the close of World War II, General Cannon had already won renown as a peerless air tactician. He devised "Operation Strangle," which paralyzed Nazi rail transport in Italy, sometimes flew a fighter over his own bomber formations. As one of the Air Force's pioneer instructors, Cannon has a roster of former pupils reading like a star chart. Among them: General Nathan F. Twining, Air Force Chief of Staff; General Hoyt Vandenberg, retired Chief of Staff; General Curtis E. LeMay, commanding general of the Strategic Air Command.

In Miami, where both were vacationing, Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had a cordial chat over medium-rare steaks in a local bar, also adjourned to Nixon's private villa for a New Year's toast.

Arriving in Hawaii from Japan with her husband, Trumpeter Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong, former Show Girl Lucille Wilson Armstrong ran into trouble with Honolulu customs men who dug into her overnight bag, found a spectacles case containing crazy cigarettes. Charged with trying to smuggle marijuana, Lucille contended that the whole case was crazy because she doesn't even wear glasses.

*Who, though no kin, got his nickname early in his career from Joseph Gurney ("Uncle Joe") Cannon, strong-willed Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903 to 1911.

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