HOUSEWIVES can expect more beef at retail counters in the next few weeks as the summer's grass-fed steers start to market. Farm experts expect U.S. beef supplies this year to hit 73.5 Ibs. per capita, the highest in 44 years. But beef prices have about hit bottom. Farm Economist L. H. Simerl of the University of Illinois thinks they will hold steady for the next twelve months.

TWO big hotel chains have drawn up ambitious building plans. Statler, which has started work on a 450-room, $7,000,000 hotel in Hartford, Conn., will soon begin a $15 million, 1,000-room hotel in Dallas. Sheraton, in addition to its new $14 million Philadelphia hotel (TIME, July 6), will add 200 rooms each to its hotels in Baltimore and Rochester, 600 rooms to the Chicago Sheraton.

DETROIT'S automakers, now readying their 1954 models, are counting on bigger horsepower to give them a fast getaway in sales next year. Ford is stepping up the rating of its higher-priced models from 110 to 125 h.p., Mercury from 125 to 145 h.p. Hoping to grab the lead in the industry's horsepower race: Chrysler, whose new V-8 models may have 220-235 h.p. under the hood v. 180 last year.

PASSENGER helicopter service is in for big expansion. T.W.A. estimates that by 1965 helicopters will be shuttling 1,500,000 passengers a year in & out of Washington, D.C. alone.

REPUBLICAN Trustbuster Stanley Barnes is expected to handle antitrust cases by consent decrees where he can rather than by punitive court action. Where original cause of prosecution has been removed, as in the cement basing-point case, Barnes is considering dropping prosecution.

WEST Germany had new evidence of economic recovery (see FOREIGN NEWS). Friedrich Krupp & Co., and Demag, a big machinery maker, got the order to build a $150 million steel mill in India that will produce one-fourth of India's total steel output. The North German Lloyd line late this year will launch the first of six 10,000-ton passenger and cargo ships to go into service between Germany and the Far East, and Germany's C. C. Deilmann has won the exclusive rights to explore and drill for oil in Yemen.

A FIGHT is developing over the U.S. stockpile of strategic materials. While Defense Mobilizer Arthur S. Flemming is fighting to build up the stockpile, Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks has been getting some scarce materials released to industry. One result: aluminum stocks, dipped into several times to make up for production shortages, have dropped alarmingly low.

DESPITE talk of free convertibility of sterling, there is little immediate hope of it. Ex-Ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas has advised President Eisenhower that before convertibility can work, both U.S. imports of British goods and U.S. investments in Britain will have to rise considerably, and dollar guarantees will have to be made on sterling loans by British banks within the Commonwealth.

NOW that Malenkov himself has criticized the shoddiness of Soviet consumer goods, Pravda is washing some of the tattered laundry out in public, complains that Soviet rayon underwear does not survive a single laundering, that men's shirts fall apart in the tub.

FALLING natural rubber prices are putting the squeeze on synthetic rubber. Production, which has dropped from 60,000 to 50,000 tons a month, is in for more reductions. Next month the Government's biggest copolymer plant, at Institute, W.Va., will close down, thus reducing output by another 7,500 tons a month. Tiremakers expect still further cuts, perhaps as much as 20% in the final quarter.

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