THE "Billion Dollar Club" got a new corporate member last week. Union Carbide and Carbon Corp., whose 1953 gross soared to $1,025,833,041, up 7% over 1952, became the 33rd U.S. corporation to rack up sales of more than $1 billion. One reason for the rise: Union Carbide's rapid expansion in the production of plastics.

NYLON stockings will soon be sheerer. Karl Lieberknecht, Inc. of Reading, Pa., one of the top knitting-machine makers, is producing a new 75-gauge knitter (current highest: 72 gauge) that will turn out the sheerest stockings ever made from 12-denier nylon staple.

A battle for control of the New Haven Railroad at the annual meeting April 14 is shaping up. Seven directors who refused last week to run on the management's, slate for re-election will run on an opposition ticket. (Four had been put on the board last year to avoid a similar wrangle.) Principal contestants: President Frederic C. Dumaine Jr., who favors building up the road by plowing back earnings, and Manhattan Securities Dealer Patrick B. McGinnis, who wants accumulated preferred dividends paid up and common dividends renewed.

GRAIN storage space, short already, is expected to be so scarce when this year's crops are harvested that it may turn into as big a political problem as it was in 1948. Since farmers must store grain in Government-approved places to get crop loans, the Agriculture Department has been lining up unused airplane hangars, Army barracks, even deserted movie houses, to use in a pinch.

PACKARD entered the experimental plastic sports-car parade with the three-passenger "Panther," powered by a 212-h.p. straight-eight engine.

STEAK prices will go higher this year, meatmen predict, because drought and high feed prices caused many ranchers to reduce herds last year. Beef prices should hit a peak about 5% below last year's high by late July or August, remain there through next winter.

JAPAN Air Lines opened a twice-weekly trans-Pacific service, flying DC-6Bs piloted by Americans. The airline hopes to get a fat slice of travel business now split largely between Pan American and Northwest Airlines. By the summer of 1955, J.A.L. hopes to halve San Francisco-Tokyo running time to 15 hours by using Comet II's, plans to start a now Tokyo-to-London jet Service across Asia.

THE Red-bossed Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Union, expelled from the C.I.O. in 1950, is in a losing fight to hang on to its members. Following the lead of Butte miners, 230 members of a predominantly Negro local at Republic Steel's Edwards Mine in Alabama voted to quit the union; they want to join the catch-all District 50 of John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers.

AMERICAN Woolen Co.'s plan to retire its preferred stock (TIME, Feb. 8) and sell eleven Northern mills was voted at a special shareholders' meeting. Nevertheless, dissatisfied stockholders, still trying to block the proposal, got a preliminary injunction against retiring one issue of preferred this week, plan a proxy fight at the annual meeting next month.

SHIPPING Mogul Aristotle S. Onassis TIME, Jan. 19, 1953) and former Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Joseph E. Casey are among nine individuals and six corporations indicted on a charge of conspiracy to defraud the Government in multimillion-dollar deals to buy surplus U.S. ships after the war. The Government charge: the ships were bought for foreign owners through the use of U.S. corporations whose control was misrepresented, in violation of U.S. law forbidding sale of U.S. ships to aliens.

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