Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

World-circling Vice President Richard Nixon roared into Hong Kong with an escort of twelve Royal Air Force Vampire jets. Hong Kong roared back with a 19-gun salute. Later, in a police outpost only 200 yards from the Hong Kong-Red China border, the Vice President spotted a Communist flag flapping above the village of Sha Tau Kok. Nixon wanted to cross over to the village for a quick look-see, but his guides discouraged him.

Autographing copies of his latest work, The Future of Architecture, in a Chicago bookstore, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, 84, cast a cranky eye on his literary surroundings and snorted: "Books, books, books! Well. I suppose they're all right for people who have nothing to do."

After their official Navy sedan conked out, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert B. Carney and the Pacific Fleet's commanding Admiral Felix B. Stump, on their way to a reception for Carney at Pearl Harbor, proceeded in a style to which they are unaccustomed. Hitchhiker Carney arrived in a small British sports car, Stump in a half-ton pickup truck.

With a neat sense of poetic justice, the Berlin senate court confiscated $1,480.95 from the estate of the top Nazi Jewbaiter, Alfred Rosenberg, put the money into a fund for the restitution of surviving Nazi victims. -

At his home in Uvalde, Texas, former Vice President John Nance ("Cactus Jack") Garner, 84, who was once denounced by Labor Boss John L. Lewis as "a whisky-drinking, poker-playing, evil old man," had his picture taken as he played a wicked game of solitaire without a poker chip or drop of bourbon-and-branch water in sight.

At a performance of Samson and Delilah in Miami, Soprano Risë Stevens' breathtaking Delilah prompted enthusiastic operagoers to rush to the lobby during intermission and rack up a new house record for the sale of binoculars.

Peeking over the wall of a villa near Cannes, the curious saw a squat, slow-footed man trying to absorb the Riviera sunshine through a heavy, fur-collared coat and baggy cap. The man, who proclaimed himself an architect from Paris, wallowed in luxury amidst the pines. He had five cars and a swimming pool at his disposal, was guarded night & day by a patrol of gun-toting guards and police dogs. The architect: Maurice Thorez, ailing boss of France's Communist Party.

Dropping in for a half-hour's talk with President Eisenhower at the White House, ebullient Evangelist Billy Graham told Ike that people look upon the President "as a great spiritual leader more than a political leader." Thus, added Billy, "the nation is enjoying the greatest religious renaissance in history."

In Los Angeles, durable (49) Crooner-Actor Bing (Little Boy Lost) Crosby was moaning low over a $1,051,400 damage suit filed against him by three people who were injured last month in a dawn collision with Bing's $12,250 Mercedes-Benz. Scoffing at a claim that he was drunk, Bing ticked off his liquor intake at a party he attended before the smashup: "Two Scotch and water drinks before dinner, champagne during dinner, two Scotches and water after dinner."