News Note: New York Times Executive Editor...

News Note: New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel complained after his newspaper ranked last in a survey of how many women are quoted on newspaper front pages. Frankel called the survey, released Tuesday at an editors convention in Washington, D.C., “bizarre and unworthy. . . . As soon as Mr. Gorbachev lets Mrs. Gorbachev do his deciding or even speaking, we will be quoting or photographing more women on Page One,” Frankel said.

Toon Town: Syndicated political cartoonist Pat Oliphant’s acerbic drawings must have made Ronald Reagan wince more than once. Now, the Kiplinger Foundation in Washington has bought nearly 70 of those works and donated them to the unbuilt Reagan presidential library. Why did the foundation do it? Spokesman Austin Kiplinger said Reagan “is so fond of political cartoons.”

Special Delivery: The postal service has been misdirecting other people’s mail to Ralph Nader’s post office box in Washington, D.C., so he presented about 100 such letters recently to Postmaster General Anthony Frank. The last straw was one Nader received addressed to George Bush, properly addressed to the White House. Nader told Frank he doubted “the Postal Service’s ability to distinguish the most famous address in the United States from a random misdelivery.”

Spaceship Earth: Former astronaut Scott Carpenter says the United States needs to embark on a new mission--to planet Earth. The forests, air, streams and oceans must be preserved, he said in a talk in Hastings, Neb., Monday. Carpenter said that from space in 1962 he saw the “excruciating beauty but extreme fragility” of the planet.