Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Chinese High Command had announced the recapture of Liuchow, site of the former U. S. airbase, the previous night. Another former base, Kweilin, more than a hundred miles to the northeast of Liuchow, was directly threatened by other forces. The Kweichow-Kwangsi railroad became the first rail line in China to be recaptured by the Chinese partially or entirely.

A gap of 225 miles now existed in the Japanese lines from Liuchow to Pingsiang, Japanese-controlled town eleven miles from the frontier of Indo-China.

Some 50 B-29's struck an oil refinery at Kudumatsu on the Inland Sea of southwest Honshu. All planes returned safely from the raid.

An Allied fleet of 50 ships hit Balikpapan on Borneo the previous day, apparently, according to Tokyo radio's speculation, in preparation for a landing of troops. Fully 2,500 tons of bombs had been dropped during the previous two weeks.

Tass reported from Belgrade of widespread terrorism taking place in northern Greece in the area of Macedonia, from which a thousand refugees had fled into Bitolj in Yugoslavia. British troops were reported to be within Macedonia. The Greek Minister of the Interior, however, described such reports of Tass as "fantastic".

Readjustment of the four occupation zones in Germany was announced, such that British and American troops were withdrawing from certain areas to be occupied by Russian troops.

Governor Frank Lausche of Ohio directed the State Selective Service to begin drafting striking workers at the Akron Goodyear plant. The strike was proceeding in the face of Government orders to return to work.

Senate hearings on the United Nations Charter were slated to begin in the Senate caucus room July 9, with the probable first witness to be Edward Stettinius, outgoing Secretary of State and soon to become the U.S. representative to the U.N.

Senator Walter George of Georgia expressed concern regarding a proposal to define the powers of the U.S. representative within the ratification resolution. He asserted that such a move would effectively amend the Charter and lead other signatory nations to do likewise in their ratification process.

The House approved the one-year extension to the Office of Price Administration, set to expire at the end of the fiscal year, this day at midnight. President Truman was ready to sign the bill in Kansas City before midnight, as the final bill would be specially flown to him for the purpose.

The four newest appointees to the Cabinet took their offices, Clinton Anderson as Secretary of Agriculture, Lewis Schwellenbach as Secretary of Labor, Robert Hannegan as Postmaster General, and Tom Clark as Attorney General.

Pete McKnight, now News Editor of The News, examines in some depth the Mecklenburg Superior Court and the habits of Solicitor John Carpenter, the prosecutor for both Gaston and Mecklenburg Counties. The piece explains that Mr. Carpenter had the responsibility of prosecuting all of the criminal cases for the two populous counties and in that system lay the problem: too much work for one man paid $5,000 annually.

The way in which Mr. Carpenter dealt with case overloads was simply to dismiss by way of nolle prosequi the stale cases which had come up on the calendar too many times without answer from the defendant. The fact that a bench warrant or capias was issued by the judge to have the non-appearing defendant arrested and hauled into court had no great impact on the appearance rate, as the orders usually went unheeded without action by either the Sheriff or bondsman, the latter of whom was often also summoned to court by way of a nisi scire-facias, (which is pretty scire), but likewise without the slightest budging toward compulsion to appear.

Thus, the ghostly defendants were simply swept clean from the record every so often in June by Mr. Carpenter. And the process started over.

Mr. McKnight suggests that a higher salary ought be allotted for the solicitor and for Superior Court judges, who only received $3,000 annually. Furthermore, he suggests that judges ought be limited in their travels to within the judicial district, rather than riding circuit throughout the state, which was then the practice. But, he cautions, there was the disadvantage in the latter system in that the judge familiar with the district might tend to demonstrate lenience to certain defendants.

But, for the present, the problem was in the failure of Solicitor Carpenter to prosecute cases diligently and with celerity.

As we have pointed out before, Pete McKnight was a friend to W. J. Cash and lived for a time nearby him in the Frederick Apartments in downtown Charlotte. When Mr. McKnight, on occasion on weekends, would hear Cash's Victrola tone-arm clicking back and forth within the inner groove of Beethoven, Mozart, or Sibelius records in Cash's collection of 78's, he knew it was his cue to enter Cash's apartment and turn off the record player, as Cash had lapsed into a deep sleep.

Probably the result of too much inner thought regarding the mixed-up cases of Solicitor Carpenter and the crazy court system for which he worked, among a few other things, such as Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, the Ku Klux Klan, and finishing his book.

The seismographs at Fordham University and at Weston College recorded fairly sharp earthquake activity epicentered some 700 miles west of Mexico. Tremors were recorded for three hours.

The London Evening Standard, owned by Lord Beaverbrook, predicted a comfortable victory for Prime Minister Churchill on election day, July 5. The report was based on the newspaper's election experts stationed throughout the United Kingdom.

President Truman visited his old haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, in Kansas City, to buy some shirts, found that Mr. Jacobson had none in stock in the President's size. But when word went forth of the problem, three dozen shirts were sent to Mr. Truman by various store owners and individuals in the area.

On the editorial page, "No Hurry" looks back into the newspaper's files maintained on the Police Department, reminding of a story when Chief Joyner had been the head of the Department in 1941, in which a police officer scheduled to testify in a case could not be found for a whole day and a judge demanded that the City Manager and the City Council's Police Committee appear and explain what was going on.

It did not even bring up the 1937 episode with Officer Bowlin, who had shot and killed a fleeing accused misdemeanant, claiming that he had aimed for the man's legs but inadvertently stepped in a ditch while shooting and struck the man instead in the head.

"Hot, Ain't It?" tells of the pristine reputation of Charlotte's meteorologist, J. M. Howe, suggesting thunder showers day after day when no showers peeked out from the sunshine.

So, it wanted an investigation, in the end, of Mr. Howe's wherefores and bona fides.

"Out of Turn" reports that Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana—the Republican who would be beaten by Birch Bayh in the election of 1962, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, regarding which Mr. Capehart had, along with Clare Boothe Luce, garnered somehow more information in early October anent the presence of missiles in Cuba than had the President of the United States—and who was the Simplex-Wurlitzer King, had proposed peace with Japan, provided the Japanese would surrender all territory they had conquered, including Manchuria.

Most Americans, it offers, would reject out of hand any such compromise with the country which had attacked Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, the East Indies and Malaya.

Senator Capehart's state of mind, it cautions, was dangerous in neglecting to realize that Japan had to be stripped of all political and military power which had served to wage war, before war in the future could be averted.

"Down to Business" finds it satisfying that the American occupation force had begun executing German civilians for atrocities. Two soldiers were appointed the task as hangmen, going from town to town meting justice as prescribed by military tribunals. In the instant case, just reported, three civilians were hanged for having killed brutally an American airman who had parachuted from his burning bomber the previous August.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi commenting on wartime regulations by OPA, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and other matters. He complained that OPA was telling him who businessmen could hire and at what pay, as well as to whom they could sell and at what prices. The businessman no longer had much to do other than to prepare a payroll.

Drew Pearson tells of the final secret session of delegates in San Francisco in room 233 of the Veterans Building, in which the Steering Committee met. The Cuban Ambassador, Guillermo Ramirez, and the Peruvian Foreign Minister, Manuel Gallagher, proposed a vote of thanks for Edward Stettinius and his efforts at adopting the Charter. Everyone then followed suit, even if some of the small nations did so reluctantly.

Marquis Childs reports of a million tons of food being shipped from the United States, Canada, and Britain to feed Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, and, to a lesser degree, other countries of Europe. The food was being distributed by the Army.

Samuel Grafton reports that the British and Americans in Germany were demobilizing the German soldiers at the rate of many thousands per day, disarming them and placing them back in civilian dress. The Americans and British remained in uniform. Some of them, since they had to remain on duty while the Germans went back to civilian life, found the whole matter confusing, wondering who had won the war.

A piece by Russell Whelan, reprinted from The American Mercury, tells of the National Legion of Decency of the Roman Catholic Church acting as censor for American movies, a role of which the American public was largely unaware. The Legion screened all movies and then categorized them either as suitable for general viewing, only adult viewing, partially objectionable, or condemned.

Similarly, "The Ox-Bow Incident" in 1943 had been separately classified because of depiction of a character receiving Sacramental confession from a layman, not a priest, being therefore Greek to the Legion.

"Mission to Moscow", the Walter Huston film about Joseph Davies and his role as U. S. Ambassador to Russia, was classified as being unobjectionable for adults, not suitable, however, for minors, because it sympathetically portrayed the Stalin Government and because it contained the personal views of former Ambassador Davies.

"To the People of the United States", a film about venereal disease, was condemned for its subject matter being unfit for motion pictures and because it omitted moral considerations in setting forth the problems of venereal disease.

The piece rhetorically questions whether the Legion had any real impact on morals in the country, but it plainly did have impact on what movies the country could view. Moreover, it chilled the movie industry from presenting any fare to which the Legion would not lend its imprimatur.

Clearly, with two world wars having been fought during the previous 31 years, with the Great Depression and Prohibition, with all of its seamy consequences, having beset the country during the 20 years following World War I, the nation and its people were in a much better state when there were clean and wholesome and approved movies in the movie houses, those wholly approved by the Church.

Boy, those were the good old days, weren't they? Shoot, it's all out there, now. And look at the result. A good world war would cure some of that right quick. Rocket bombs.

Sacramentum domini regis fregisse.