RANDALL Commission's long-awaited report on foreign trade, due to come out this week, won't tear down tariff barriers right and left. Some recommendations: 1) extension of the Reciprocal Trade Act for three years; 2) permission for the President to cut tariffs by a maximum 5% a year during the period; 3) liberalized tax treatment to encourage overseas investment by U.S. firms.

CIGARETTE sales have been hit harder than tobaccomen like to admit. In 1953 consumption dropped 2%, the first dip in 21 years.

AMERICAN Airlines, the biggest domestic air carrier, has hung up a new target for the industry to shoot at: a record 3,289,972,000 passenger miles flown in 1953, a 13.2% increase over 1952, and the first time an airline has flown more than 3 billion passenger miles in a year.

FREIGHT rates will be cut again this year by railroads to fight heavier truck competition and to attempt to stop a steady decline in car loadings. Starting in March, Eastern roads will put through an 18% to 20% reduction on all shipments of iron and steel within the area, will probably extend the cuts to other major products before the year is out.

THE NAVY has finally decided to get out of the railroad business after twelve years, will shut down its freight line (four locomotives, 48 miles of track) from Brandywine, Md. to the Patuxent Naval Air Training Center. Reason: the dilapidated road would cost $1,000,000 to repair, another $100,000 a year to run "safely and efficiently."

CONVERTIPLANE, a cross between a helicopter and a fixed-wing plane, is taking shape at Bell Aircraft's Fort Worth plant under a joint Army-Air Force contract. The new aircraft will have propellers that tilt horizontally to lift it straight up like a helicopter, then tilt forward to pull the plane ahead at 150 m.p.h.

Possible commercial use: as a medium range (500 miles) transport between big airliners and short-haul helicopters.

JAPANESE planemakers will soon get additional experience with jet aircraft. The Far East Air Force awarded a one-year, $1,000,000-plus repair-and-overhaul contract for jet fighters (including the famed F-86 Sabre) and trainers to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Kawasaki Aircraft Engineering Co., makers of Zeros and light bombers in World War II.

HOUSE prices will drop sharply in the next four years, predicted St. Louis' Roy Wenzlick, one of the real-estate industry's top economists.

They will drop slightly this year, then dive some 30% by 1957. Area of heaviest depreciation: the hastily built, boxlike postwar houses.

MERGER may be in the offing between the $350 million Frisco System and the $103 million Central of Georgia. The two railroads would connect at Birmingham, and complement each other's business; the Middlewestern Frisco would send its trains east to the Atlantic and the Georgia operate 1,000 miles westward. Talk is at the stage where Frisco President Clark Hungerford is looking over the Georgia line.

SUPREME Court has decided to review its ruling that the Federal Power Commission has the power to fix prices on interstate sales of natural gas (TIME, Dec. 14). The court had originally refused to review the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals, but was asked to reconsider by the Phillips Petroleum Co. and the states of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

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