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New York's Supreme Court moved to straighten out the troubled lives of the two sons of executed Atom Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The boys, Michael, 11, and Robert. 6. were given by the Rosenberg's defense attorney, the late Emanuel Bloch. to a Manhattan couple, Songwriter Abel (Strange Fruit) Meeropol and his wife. The Society for the Prevention of-Cruelty to Children charged that, in the hands of the Meeropols, the two orphans were ruthlessly exploited by Communist groups as fund-raising tools and propaganda sob stories. This week State Supreme Court Justice James B. M. McNally asked the children's grandmother, Mrs. Sophie Rosenberg, if she wanted the boys. In tears, she said: "That's my children. I want to take them, please." Then the judge asked her (for the record) whether she would "teach these children to hate this country." Her reply: "No, no, no!" Judge McNally awarded her temporary (presumably until her death) custody of Michael and Robert. Piped Michael: "God bless you, judge."
Peru's multi-octaved Yma Sumac, whose extraordinary voice ranges easily from a mockingbird soprano to a deep, womanly baritone, gave a concert in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, so impressed the Herald Tribune's Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson that he wrote: "She belongs in the great houses of opera." Said Yma, who claims to be 24: "It's too late for me to do it . . . [Besides,] I make very much more money than if I sang in two cr three operas a year for the Metropolitan."
Egypt's government, busily auctioning off the confiscated assortment of treasures and junk which formerly titillated banished King Faroulc (TIME, Feb. 22), set an admission fee of $14.000 minimum for a mere look at Farouk's collection of pornography, which is not going on the block.
First to get a peek at the gallery were an American and a Briton, each of whom had bought more than $14,000 worth of Farouk's stamp collection. The American marveled: "Boy, this is certainly some collection of dirt!" Mused the Englishman: "I cannot understand why the monarch, who was surrounded by so much that was desirable, found pleasure in such obscenity." Meanwhile, four city fathers of Venice demanded that Farouk be kicked out of his Italian exile because he offends "national dignity and morality."
Cinemactor Marlon Brando, who took off from a Hollywood movie set last fortnight and landed on the couch of his Manhattan psychiatrist, was sued for $2,000,000 by 20th Century-Fox, which called him irreplaceable in his role in The Egyptian, but said that his couch time was costing the studio $10,000 a day.