Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that G.M. withdrew, as anticipated, from the Government fact-finding board hearings regarding the fact that the board intended to consider evidence of G.M.'s ability to pay the demanded wage increase in issuing its findings. The hearings would go on regardless of G.M.'s absence.

It was announced that, as a result of the concluded eleven-day foreign ministers conference in Moscow, Russia had joined the Anglo-American proposals to present to the U.N., presumably only to the Security Council, the issue of how to use atomic energy. It was also confirmed that doing so had caused the other Allies to vote for Russia being included in the four-power council to govern Japan. The joint communique stated a goal of unification of China, establishment of a provisional government in Korea by the Russians in the North and the United States in the South, with independence to be granted by 1950, and broadening of the governments of Rumania and Bulgaria, with plans for peace treaties with both countries plus Finland, Hungary, and Italy.

Unwittingly, of course, the result in Korea would form the foundations for the Korean War.

The conference, however, did not resolve the questions regarding Azerbaijan Province in Iran, although all British and Russian troops would be withdrawn from Iran by March 2 per the previously established schedule, and U.S. troops by January 1. Also left dangling was the issue regarding Russian access to the Dardanelles, the determination of Germany's western border, and a common Big Three policy on the Franco Government in Spain.

In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the British imposed a curfew following a bombing and gunfire which killed at least nine people, seven of whom were police officers in Jerusalem, and injured eleven others. The curfew kept thousands of people in municipal and Jewish residential areas in their homes in Jerusalem and applied to the whole of Tel Aviv. The bombing in Jerusalem had targeted and destroyed the criminal investigation headquarters, was said by eyewitnesses to have been the result of six young men shooting their way into the building and then planting the explosives. In Tel Aviv, where two were killed, an attack was launched against police headquarters and the Royal Engineers arms store located north of the city.

In Prague, Karl Hermann Frank, the so-called "Butcher of Lidice", the village wiped out in June, 1942 in the wake of the killing of Reinhard Heydrich by two assailants in Prague, stated that the program of the Sudeten German Party, attempting to re-Germanize Bohemia, had been treason to Czechoslovakia. Herr Frank, who was the Nazi chieftain in Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, stated that he believed Nazism was dead forever. He did not wish to discuss Lidice, occurring in his district, but finally admitted that it would not have been right if the situation were reversed and Czechs had destroyed a German village, even with grievances against the villagers. He also stated that the Nazis had failed because of their exaggerated belief in their own power.

In Yokohama, the war crimes trial of Lt. Chotaro Furushima, commander during the war of Fukuoka Camp, revealed testimony of systematic torture and starvation of prisoners. Similar testimony, including reports of the fatal bayoneting of two prisoners, was being provided at the trial of Lt. Yel Yuri, commander of the Omuta Camp, a trial taking place in an adjoining courtroom.

A Liberty ship, the Henry D. Thoreau, out of Naples, radioed Cape May, N.J., that it had hit high seas 420 miles southwest of the Azores and its cargo of 5,000 tons of bombs was breaking loose.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, 573 Navy veterans en route home disembarked a Pennsylvania railroad train and refused to re-board until conditions were improved. There was no water for 24 hours or lights in three coaches. Some of the windows were broken. The train had also moved at a rate of 40 miles per hour from Chicago and it had taken fourteen hours to get to Fort Wayne. Eventually, repairs were made and the troop train continued on its journey toward New York.

Different signs on one coach read: "This train brought my grandpappy back from the Civil War"; "It brought my dad back from World War I"; "I'm going to get out and walk". At a stop in Pittsburgh, additional chalk inscriptions were observed: "For pigs and sailors only. Refrigerator cars"; "Nothing is too good for the returning veterans."

The sailors also complained about the food being bad and high-priced. At least, the forks apparently were clean.

An eight-year old Italian boy was to undergo a delicate operation at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to restore his sight, lost when he was kicked by a horse in Italy. Pope Pius XII, with whom the boy had already had two audiences, would bestow his blessings upon him during the operation.

In Baltimore, an open safety pin was removed from the throat of a three-year old girl after she had managed to swallow it. She was doing well.

The Secret Service, in driving President Truman's limousine from the airport following his departure from Kansas City back to Washington, hit an icy spot in the road on the way back to Independence and struck a truck. No one was injured and the damage was slight to the limousine, originally built for FDR.

Clearly an attempted assassination gone awry, probably by slick Russian agents or angry O.S.S., or the President's mother, angry that the President did not visit with her longer at Christmas, saying probably, "Fiddlesticks," a code word for "Get Harry for Mom."

And a picture of Dickie from Chicago appears on the page, with his cat, now apparently named Hookie, rather than Cookie as previously.

To us, Dickie looks a mite young for fourteen, and so perhaps we misjudged the situation. We shall let Dickie off this time with a stern warning, that he should definitely stay away from trains, not to mention Loop hotels. Despite the apparent innocence, we still would like to know how he spent that $500. Nice hotel rooms in 1945 could be had for under $10 per night. And the ballet and the movies... Well, perhaps he provided a diamond necklace or two for his mother and a gold watch for his grandfather as presents, and so we provide the benefit of the doubt.

We still think that there may be something to the notion that a third was present as he played Hookie with Cookie.

There is always more to the picture than meets the eye, especially with clever photographers.

On the editorial page, "Why Not a Primary?" comments on the somewhat confused situation at the sudden vacancy in the Tenth District of North Carolina following the Christmas Day suicide of Representative Joe Ervin in Washington. It was clear that the Governor could not appoint an interim Representative, that he could only call an election to fill the seat, but it remained unclear as to the machanics of how that election would work, whether there would be the necessity first of a primary or whether the Democrats could simply select a nominee through its six-man committee and have the nominee stand for an election which, in the one-party state, meant, effectively, that the candidate would win, even though, of course, the election was open to all other parties and independents. The Constitution was silent on the mechanics of the election.

"One More Grand Tour" comments on the latest Congressional junket among many since the end of the war in Europe, this one involving Senators Tunnell, Mitchell, and Knowland from the Defense Investigating Committee, looking into Army waste based on reports of deliberate destruction of Army surplus property.

"Of Peace and Quiet" comments on the strident note occasioned by a letter from a reader recently assailing the Government for not doing more to provide a place to live for returning veterans. But the editorial quickly adds: "Peace and quiet, in this rather violent democracy of ours, are the real danger signals, for our progress is measured by disorder and our energy is derived from the clash of conflicting views."

A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Give 'Em Enough Rope", takes off in rhyme, in a meter reminiscent of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas", from the news item that a bus had struck an ambulance when the driver failed to see it out of his right side because of passengers congregating around the door.

Drew Pearson remarks that since the death of FDR, former Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones of Texas had been on good terms with President Truman, at least until recently. During a dinner given by Surplus Property administrator and future Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri and his wife, at which the President was a guest of honor, following toasts by Mr. and Mrs. Symington, Mr. Jones tapped his glass with his fork and rose to provide his own toast. He toasted to "Mrs. Fiddlesticks, the mother of Mrs. Truman". The silence afterward was deafening and Mr. Jones quietly sat down, his joke, based on the President's mother having responded to press requests for photographs by saying, "Fiddlesticks," having fallen on deaf ears. He had also confused the President's mother with the mother of Bess Truman.

One question: What are fiddlesticks? Bows? We don't know.

Mr. Pearson next reports that during Senator Claude Pepper's trip to Moscow, Stalin had remarked to him, "Seek and ye shall find," in reference to the distrust among some elements of the press and public in America for Russia. Mr. Pearson thought it a strange remark from a leader supposed to be "ungodly".

He next relates of the fact that all governments were changing their codes since learning in September of the letter from General Marshall to Governor Thomas Dewey sent during the 1944 campaign asking him not to reveal information which would compromise the fact that the U.S. had cracked the Japanese code.

Finally, he comments on the stir recently caused on the floor of the House by Indiana Representative Charles LaFollette when he asserted that there was no such thing as states' rights, only individual rights. When challenged by Representative Jensen of Massachusetts, that states existed before the Federal Government, Mr. LaFollette countered that individuals existed before the states. Significantly, none of the Southern Democrats on the other side of the aisle protested.

While we agree in spirit with Mr. LaFollette, strictly speaking, the Tenth Amendment states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The "police powers" to regulate health, morals, safety and welfare, have been interpreted to be those powers reserved to the states, and all remaining power to the people, inclusive, under the Ninth Amendment, not only of the enumerated rights in the Constitution, but also other non-enumerated rights not reserved to the Federal Government or the states. This precept, often misunderstood, is key to understanding the relationship of the people to the government, both Federal and state.

The Federal Government, acting within its enumerated powers and not in derogation of the rights of the people, enumerated or unenumerated, has trumping power over action by the states pursuant to the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, clause 2, which reads: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Integrate those basic fundamental principles and you have an understanding of how our government is supposed to work. Anything short of it is unconstitutional and thus tending toward despotism.

And, of course, the people always have the right to initiate the process of amending the Constitution, though, by its very nature, promising a tedious and hard battle to accomplish, one which ought be aimed at establishing rights of the people, not prohibiting rights to them previously granted by the Constitution or court interpretation of it. Only once has the latter been attempted, with Prohibition in 1919, a miserable failure, repealed therefore in 1933.

That said, the "right to bear arms", in the Twenty-first century, when arms are not needed for self-defense against savages and errant knights and cowboys of the prairie or for hunting wild game for sustenance, is not, on balance, as interpreted in the courts, an affirmative right of liberty but rather an assertion, ultimately, of a "right" to deprive, limit, or chill others of the rights not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, pursuant to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. If a person kills someone either deliberately or by negligence or recklessness, besides the obvious violations of state homicide laws, that person also violates the person's Constitutional rights under the due process clauses.

Marquis Childs comments on the civilian travel rush at Christmas having left thousands of home-bound veterans stranded on the West Coast. But also to blame was simply the absence of transportation facilities with a million men a month being transported home, as the speed of Army demobilization had been increased pursuant to civilian and Congressional pressure.

Samuel Grafton discusses "l'Uome Qualunque", "The Common Man", the new Italian political movement with control of about 1.5 million votes. The movement was particularly corrosive as it had as its guiding principle a cynical rejection of politics and professional politicians, desiring in their stead an "administrative" state operated by persons with no previous contact with politics—akin to today's Tea Party in America. It claimed not to care whether Italy had a monarch or a republican form of government but stressed purity, honor, and truth.

A letter writer calls upon Governor Cherry and University president Frank Porter Graham to intervene in the dispute at N.C. State in which the chancellor, J. N. Harrelson, had warned a biology professor to refrain from speaking on controversial subjects, in the instant case, counseling a better organization in the State Wildlife Department. The author favors academic freedom and informs, as had an editorial on the subject earlier in the week, that the professor had been given leave specifically to form new clubs for the Wildlife Federation in the state.

Dorothy Thompson comments on the first information out of the Moscow foreign ministers conference suggesting the usual pattern of such conferences, a fait accompli announced by the Soviets, in this case that the Big Three would recognize the government of Yugoslavia at the behest of the Russians. At the end of October, the Big Three had called to the attention of Tito the Yalta agreement which provided for free elections in Yugoslavia on November 11, advising that he postpone them until conforming conditions could be established. Tito held the elections anyway, a totalitarian plebiscite with a foregone conclusion, disenfranchising all opposition, including in the vote all who had fought in the resistance, among them young people 12 to 17. Thousands stayed away from the polls, inviting visits from the political police.

Such were the questions posed by the news, this Fourth Day of Christmas, 1945.