MEAT PRICES WILL DROP this winter. Record slaughters and recent drops in wholesale hog prices have cut the retail price of pork chops by 6%, loin roast by 10%, bacon 2%, ham 5%, with more reductions in prospect straight through until next March. Beef prices, which have been rising, will follow the trend, are expected to start dropping next month.

URANIUM HUNT will be started by Texas Co., 14th biggest U.S. industrial company. The oil company will form a new $6,000,000 firm with two other smaller companies (New Jersey Zinc Co., Shattuck Denn Mining Corp.) to lease several hundred square miles of potential uranium lands in Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah.

CIGARETTE SMOKING will jump 4% in 1955, reversing a two-year dip, and keep climbing in 1956, predicts the U.S. Agriculture Department. The forecast: 383 billion smokes in 1955, some 15 billion more than last year and only 11 billion short of the alltime peak in 1952.

VIDEO BOOM has put TV sets into two out of every three U.S. households in the last five years, reports the Census Bureau. With 33 million sets currently in use, 46% of all rural homes have TV, while in metropolitan areas TV is nearing the saturation point, with almost 80% of all families owning sets.

MEXICAN NATURAL GAS will soon be supplied to U.S. markets in quantity for the first time. Pemex (Mexico's national oil and gas company) has signed a deal with Texas Eastern Transmission Corp. to export between 100 million and 200 million cu. ft. of methane gas daily from Reynosa, Mexico through pipelines to Eastern U.S. consumers.

LIGHTWEIGHT TRAIN is picking up speed on U.S. railroads. New England's Boston & Maine Railroad has ordered a Talgo train similar to the ones being built for the New Haven and the Rock Island. American Car & Foundry will build the long, low streamliner, have it ready for delivery by 1956.

U.S. TOURISTS abroad have been spending more than ever before, says the Commerce Department. The 1955 forecast: $1.5 billion, nearly $200 million more than the previous peak set last year.

KRUPP, Germany's famed wartime munitions-maker, is going back into armaments, this time to make aircraft. Krupp's partner: Designer Heinrich Focke of the wartime team of Focke-Wulf, which turned out the famed Fw-190 Nazi fighter.

PATENT PIRACY by a Japanese drug firm has been stopped, at least for the time being. In Japan's most important patent decision since World War II, a Tokyo court ordered the powerful Meiji Seika company to stop manufacturing aureomycin without permission from American Cyanamid. The court rejected the local firm's contention that it had discovered a new type of aureomycin in mud and that it should be allowed to continue production for "special reasons," i.e., nationalism.

GUIDED MISSILE PROGRESS is so fast that Douglas Aircraft Co. will set up an independent missile engineering department separate from the company's aircraft work. Located at Santa Monica, Calif., new missiles department will have its own buildings and labs, a special corps of engineers to work fulltime on eight projects for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

VENEZUELAN STEEL will be competing with the U.S. product for South American markets within the next few years. Venezuela has signed a $128 million contract with Italy's Fiat Motor Car Co. to build the country's first big steel plant on the Orinoco River near the big Cerro Bolivar iron ore deposits. To be completed in late 1957, new plant will have an eventual capacity of 421,000 tons of steel annually.

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