Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Russians continued to push through German defenses all along the Eastern Front, capturing Krakow and penetrating East Prussia to a depth of thirty miles. Cossacks and Siberian horsemen led Russian troops into Lodz, Poland's chief industrial center, ten miles west of Warsaw.

In Budapest, the Germans had completely withdrawn across the Danube west from Pest.

A new Russian offensive was begun along a 38-mile front in the Carpathian Mountains, advancing 59 miles, seizing Gozlice, Jaslo, and 400 other towns, forcing the Wisloka and Dunajec Rivers.

Another new offensive in East Prussia, undertaken by the Third White Russian Army, under the command of General Ivan Cherniakhovsky, was initiated along a 36-mile front, advancing 27 miles, crossing the Memel River on the north and capturing Ragniz, five miles southeast of Tilsit.

On the Western Front, German forces broke out of the northern end of the Rhine bridgehead above Strasbourg and linked with other German forces in Northeast Alsace, forming a solid front against the Seventh Army along 40 miles of the Maginot Line, as far west as Bitche, a situation which Supreme Allied Headquarters regarded as increasingly grave. The enemy was crossing the Rhine via pontoon bridges set up between Strasbourg and Karlsruhe. Fighting which had raged for ten days at Hatten on the Maginot suddenly ceased except for artillery fire, and all German efforts were funneled into the Rhine bank corridor.

The Germans were west of the Rhine along 82 of its 114 meandering miles from Switzerland to the Alsatian-German frontier. The Germans had been west of the river along only 55 miles of its course on January 1. The Allies held 24 miles of the west bank, from north of Strasbourg to Gertsheim.

In Luxembourg, the Third Army was advancing again, following the breaking of the German Sure River line.

The British Second Army had advanced two more miles in the Dutch panhandle.

The RAF attacked the previous night despite bad weather, hitting in the areas of Hannover and Brunswick.

The losses thus far in the Battle of the Bulge were provided: German casualties numbered 120,000 from December 12 through January 11; Allied casualties, mostly American, were 55,421, of whom 18,416 had been taken as prisoners, during the same period.

On Luzon in the Philippines, in the first determined effort by the Japanese to stand and fight, the left flank of the Sixth Army, following a 24-hour battle, captured Urdaneta on Highway 3, the crucial road from Baguio to Manila. Urdaneta is 27 miles southeast of Lingayen Gulf, the January 9 landing point for the American forces. Paniqui, 20 miles south of Urdaneta on the highway, was also captured, as forces pressed on toward Tarlac, 70 road miles from Manila. A second force approached Tarlac obliquely from Camiling.

About a hundred Saipan-based B-29's attacked the Kawasaki aircraft factory in Akashi, a few miles from Kobe, on Honshu. It was the first time Akashi had been hit. The attack encountered little opposition despite its being flown at several thousand feet lower altitude than previous missions, and all of the Superfortresses returned safely to base. It was the 41st raid on the home islands by B-29's since the first such raid on June 15, the tenth since the beginning of the year.

In Southern China, Chinese forces had captured several villages in western Yunnan Province and were within a mile and a half of the important Burma Road junction of Wanting.

An attempt to censure the Churchill policy of aggression in liberated countries, especially Greece and Italy, was thoroughly defeated in Commons by a vote of 340 to 7. Laborites who opposed the policy indicated that they would not vote against the bill, an appropriations bill for the war, which had been set as the basis on which the vote of censure would be staked. They might otherwise, they contended, be accused of impeding the war effort generally.

In one of the most torrid attacks ever launched against the Prime Minister, Laborite Aneurin Bevan had assailed Churchill's record as the worst of any statesman in terms of "intervention in other people's affairs", had further accused him of distorting facts, and claimed that secret commitments of the Prime Minister had played a role in the tragedy of Greece.

OPA froze all sales over the weekend of lard, other fats, shortening, and cooking oils, in anticipation of rationing fats and oils on the basis of two red points per pound. Sales were halted to prevent a rush on the stores. It was the first time lard had been rationed since March, 1944.

--Hey, baby, rush out to the A&P and get us some lard to hold us for the winter. They done started that rationin' again. We won't have no fried chicken 'fore the end of the war at this rate.

--No, hunh-unh, they'll have some for you. Just tell 'em that we'll forego our cigarettes for a couple of days to get some lard from under the counter. That'll do it.

John Lardner continues his essays on life in Honolulu, explaining that all was not hardship when compared to the mainland. Butter was plentiful. Cigarettes were easy buys. Before he had realized this latter fact, however, being accustomed to life in the states, he had been seeking his butts in the gutters before others might seize upon them, only to be stared at in ridicule as if an uncouth sort.

The draft in Hawaii was light, he reports, with few men of eligible age and most working in any event for the Government in war-essential capacities.

In Chattanooga, the Society for the Preservation of Southern Accents answered a query through John Temple Graves, editor of the Birmingham Age-Herald, as to whether Southerners knew what in hell they was saying when they said "you all"?

His answer were in the negative. Mr. Graves expressed the idear that when addressing two or more people, "you all" were correct, but when expressing it to merely two, it weren't so. It'd been better not to a-said it at all in that instance. Probably just say, "you uns" when there're two, and be alright.

It sounds kind-a cold, kind-a Yankee even, just to say right out like, "Hey, you two come to dinner, now, y'hear?" "You all" softens it down a mite.

The real issue, of course, was bypassed altogether. That is what the hell does "ya'll" mean and can it be distinguished from "you all" such that it might properly be applied to just two people, or even one.

On the editorial page, "No Shortage Here" bemoans the amount of crime extant in Charlotte, that doors could not be left unlocked. In 1944, there had been 436 aggravated assaults, 54 robberies, 593 burglaries, and eighteen murders. Most of the murders and assaults were not planned, but had resulted from spontaneous acts of anger. But the burglaries, especially proliferating, were obviously preconceived. The statistic suggested that the city had a lot to learn about crime and punishment and how effectively to make one a deterrent to the other. There had been 504 burglaries in 1943.

"A Tax Ceiling?" reports of the North Carolina Legislature petitioning the Federal Government to place a 25% limit on Federal taxes via Constitutional amendment, joining several other state legislatures across the country, following a movement beginning with Wyoming in 1939. The movement had been sponsored by the American Taxpayers' Association and the Committee for Constitutional Government, both insisting that limiting taxes was the only way to limit Federal spending.

"What of This?" remarks on the suggestion of News reporter Tim Pridgen in his series of articles on Charlotte housing, that the City set up a Home Service Department which would educate residents on how to take care of their properties.

The piece does not comment on the earlier investigative work by Cam Shipp in this area in early 1937, a series indited on the slums of Charlotte, that which W. J. Cash had described in The Mind of the South as one of the most "thorough and uncompromising" such reports ever undertaken by a Southern newspaper.

"Greatest Offensive" observes that the Russian winter offensive now underway in Western Poland was the greatest yet of the war, at least based on the descriptions thus far in the scant news advices. Appearances were that the great push had surpassed anything yet accomplished on the Western Front, even that out of the Cotentin Peninsula during the summer, the breakthrough at St. Lo leading on to Paris and beyond, to the eastern borders of France, and into Germany itself.

"The Toll of Death" marks the deaths of the famous in 1944, as noted in The New World Almanac.

From the pages of The News, those on the list included: Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox who had died in April; Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of Major League baseball, who had died in November; General Leslie McNair, who had been hit by friendly fire near St. Lo in France in July; General Orde Wingate, British commander in Burma who had died in a plane crash in March; Republican Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary, who had run for vice-president with Wendell Willkie in 1940, died in February; evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who was found dead with a bottle of sleeping pills beside her bed in Oakland, California, in September; Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the Combined Fleet in the attack on Pearl Harbor and died in July; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had committed suicide in October rather than face court martial with a foregone result, suspected by Hitler as aiding the July 20 plot; Al Smith, Democratic presidential nominee in 1928, in October; Senator Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina, in November; William Allen White, well-known editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, in January; and Wendell Willkie, 1940 Republican presidential nominee, who had died in early October.

And, also included in the list, though not mentioned on the front page of The News during the prior year, was Fats Waller who died at age 39 of pneumonia during a cross-country train trip, actually on December 15, 1943.

Not listed, never mentioned on the front pages as missing, was bandleader Glenn Miller, whose plane to Paris had disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel on December 15, 1944, just as the Ardennes offensive was beginning.

The list also includes bandleader Herbie Kay.

Drew Pearson comments that, only for the second time in the country's history would the President be sworn in at the White House.

Marquis Childs, on the eve of FDR's fourth inaugural, reflects on how the Federal Government had irrevocably changed during the previous twelve years of his tenure in office. Critics of the President saw him as a kind of deus ex machina who forced the changes by preconceived plan. But Mr. Childs sees the results as more reaction to circumstances as they transpired than any grand scheme. The size and operation of the Government was simply an inevitable climax from the forces at work in the 1920's and following the Crash in 1929 with the consequent beginning of the Depression, at its height just as Roosevelt had been elected.

The guide for the brevity of the address, recommends Mr. Childs, should be the second inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson in 1805. In it, the President had rebuked the press for "abuses". Mr. Childs then quotes President Jefferson's concluding remarks.

More fully as to the "abuses" of the press, President Jefferson stated:

During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety. They might, indeed, have been corrected by the wholesome punishments reserved to and provided by the laws of the several States against falsehood and defamation, but public duties more urgent press on the time of public servants, and the offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation.

Nor was it uninteresting to the world that an experiment should be fairly and fully made, whether freedom of discussion, unaided by power, is not sufficient for the propagation and protection of truth—whether a government conducting itself in the true spirit of its constitution, with zeal and purity, and doing no act which it would be unwilling the whole world should witness, can be written down by falsehood and defamation. The experiment has been tried; you have witnessed the scene; our fellow-citizens looked on, cool and collected; they saw the latent source from which these outrages proceeded; they gathered around their public functionaries, and when the Constitution called them to the decision by suffrage, they pronounced their verdict, honorable to those who had served them and consolatory to the friend of man who believes that he may be trusted with the control of his own affairs.

No inference is here intended that the laws provided by the States against false and defamatory publications should not be enforced; he who has time renders a service to public morals and public tranquillity in reforming these abuses by the salutary coercions of the law; but the experiment is noted to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasoning and opinions on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion.

Some of those Fascists today, necessitous of a moral compass, might take a brief leave from their mighty duties of earth-shattering auto-nominated merit, covering police chases of easy-mark, individualist stooges, and the like, to study carefully what President Jefferson meant by his words, and then take a leaf from his manual for the salvation and preservation of our democracy, fit as it is upon the pole star of the First Amendment, one freedom therein united, meant for all to explore liberally, not just the too overpaid tv people, whether royal stars of the media or their subjects.

Samuel Grafton reports of the considerable disappointment being expressed by many in the United States that the country was not waging more of a moral crusade for world freedom on the basis of Atlantic Charter principles. Many of these voices were from former isolationists before the war who had decried the Atlantic Charter at its formation in August, 1941, had, as with Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana, favored staying out of the war even if it meant the loss of both Britain and Russia to Germany, that such conditions would not threaten the security of the United States.

Newly seated Congressman Joe Ervin, brother of Sam J. Ervin, writes a newsletter to constituents which he indicates he intended to do weekly. In it, he tells of Washington life and the need to find housing, scarce in wartime. A cousin of his wife nevertheless had located a comfortable house in Arlington for the two of them. He gives the address and the home phone number, as well as his office address and phone number. The Representative invites response. You may contact him at home.

Hal Boyle, with the First Army in Belgium, tells of the animosity now felt intensely by American soldiers for the Germans, a marked contrast from two years earlier during the North African campaign and the campaigns for Sicily and Southern Italy. Then, there had been a certain respect for the Germans, that they were not barbarians like the Russians. The attitude may have derived from the freshness of American troops to combat and their desire to be sportsmanlike in victory. They had quickly offered their cigarettes and chocolate to captured German troops.