Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an RAF raid of the previous night, consisting of more than 1,000 planes, hitting Nurenberg, had suffered a loss of 96 planes, the largest single loss in a raid during the war thus far, eclipsing the record set previously by the RAF of 73 losses.

American planes struck again at Truk, destroying 49 enemy planes, losing only one bomber in the raid. Another raid hit a Japanese airdrome on Woleai Island, 460 miles west of Truk. Yet another raid struck a Japanese airdrome at Hollandia on the northern coast of New Guinea, destroying 108 planes.

Further to the west of Truk, 1,175 miles away and 600 miles below the Philippines, a large Navy carrier task force under Admiral Nimitz struck Palau Island on Thursday morning with hundreds of planes.

From Burma, it was announced that Tiddim, in the Chin Hills a hundred miles below Imphal, had been surrendered by the British. Meanwhile, Japanese forces were penetrating deeper into the Manipur state of India on the approach to Imphal.

The First Ukrainian Army was moving across the Carpathian Mountains, through Delatyn, toward the borders with Hungary and post-1940 Rumania.

Two thousands Nazis were killed in the forests near Mynkovtsky, 28 miles northeast of Kamenets Podolsk. The Russian capture of Kataigorod nearly closed off the only remaining avenue of escape from the Proskurov sector.

The Third Ukrainian Army moved to within 40 miles of Odessa on the Black Sea by capturing Ochakov, an important German stronghold on the Bug-Dneiper estuary.

In Italy, the Germans reoccupied Hills 202 and 146 on the slopes of Monte Cassino, areas recently abandoned by the Indian Gurkha and New Zealand troops. Fighting continued for the German position at the Continental Hotel in Cassino.

A German air raid hit an Allied field hospital on the Anzio beachhead, resulting in 65 casualties.

Richard Massock, in the "Reporter's Notebook" column, quotes extensively from Stars and Stripes on the grueling, bloody fight for Cassino.

The Soviets insisted on compliance by the Japanese with terms of an agreement signed in April, 1941 under which concessions for oil and coal leases, originally provided Japan on northern Sakhalin Island in 1925, set to expire in 1970, had been shortened in their duration to five years after the war. Thus far, Japan had not complied with the provision which was part of the Russo-Japanese neutrality agreement of April, 1941.

President Roosevelt determined to allow the Federal soldier ballot bill, which provided that the states would decide the methods and qualifications by which soldiers could exercise their franchise, to become law without his signature, though he deemed it inadequate for the protection of the soldiers' voting rights. He urged Congress to amend the law by allowing for a Federal ballot to be provided directly to the soldiers whose home states did not act by a certain date to provide them the means to vote.

The jury received its instructions on the law from the judge in the case of Wayne Lonergan in New York City, on trial for the strangulation murder of his estranged wife in late October. The judge instructed that the jury could consider Mr. Lonergan's confession only if it concluded that it was made voluntarily.

That the jury heard the confession, however, regardless of their conclusion, was a bell which could not be unrung. Typically, therefore, the judge determines by way of pre-trial motions whether a confession is or is not voluntary such that the jury may hear the evidence. Whether that had already occurred and the motion was denied or whether New York procedure at the time, in the days twenty-two years prior to constitutionally mandated Miranda warnings and advisement of basic constitutional rights upon arrest or suspect-focused interrogation, simply did not allow for a judicial determination in advance of trial of the voluntariness of a confession but left it up to the trier of fact to determine, is not clear from the reports.

On the editorial page, "Disclaimers" comments on the Izvestia report that Russia did not mean, by limited exchange of envoys, to recognize the legitimacy of the Badoglio Government to the extent of its undemocratic ways.

To add to this confusing statement of policy from Russia was the advice from the White House that the report that President Roosevelt had considered asking Badoglio to step aside was untrue.

The piece wonders, with Allied policy toward Italy thus tangled, what the Italian patriot favoring reform must have thought of the situation and how much longer qualified support should be given to such an unpopular provisional leader as Pietro Badoglio.

"No Peace" reports that Bertrand Russell had predicted that America would emerge from the war as the great world power but that true extended peace was yet being frustrated by insistence by Russia on post-war spheres of national influence and intense nationalism. No world peace could be had for long until such nationalistic tendencies were proved futile by successive wars.

The editorial quite agrees with his analysis.

He was, while obviously not able to predict the impact of nuclear bombs and long-range rocketry on the world, basically correct in his assertions regarding nationalism and its adverse impact on peace. There is no worse patriot in the United States than one who waves the flag in your face while suggesting that the country should abandon the United Nations and let the rest of the world go hang. Such is a person unstudied of history and too limited even to understand that they are unstudied.

We might remark and suggest to militant Muslims abroad that the appropriate response to a silly preacher in Florida burning a copy of the Quran is not to murder innocent people, thereby providing to such a silly preacher confirmation of what he is trying to promote, the seeds of religious bigotry. He exercised his right of freedom of speech under our Constitution, did so peacefully. That is his right in America. And we support it, even if his message is despicable.

The proper way to respond to that message is to gather a pile of Bibles and burn them publicly, without endangering anyone's life or livelihood. Then you make your statement, using the same tool, freedom of expression, that this fool used in Florida. You will be just as foolish, but far less so than killing people and severing heads in the process, a damn fool thing to do for sure and hardly having anything to do with any religion on earth. It is egoism taken to the level of mass psychopathology.

We do not credit you as being Muslim. You are just a bunch of damned fools and murderers, bestial in your bloodthirsty intent, seeking as the cowards you are to hide behind a religious veil. You are simply psychopaths who have earned the right to be treated as such. You no longer shock us after September 11, 2001. What the hell are you thinking?

That of course does not make the preacher any the less a damn fool for what he did.

Burn those Bibles, baby, and get him back that way. Torch those suckers. Get to it.

"Farm Aid" is not about the 1985 concert and subsequent reprises of that worthy cause. It rather regards the abolition of the 16-unit production requirement on farms to enable deferment of farm workers from the draft. The continuation of the policy was estimated likely to have cut production by 60 percent. Yet, the piece warns, as the need for increased manpower in the armed services continued with the invasion of Europe and the stepped up offensive in the Pacific, there might still come a need to take farm workers in the draft.

"War at Home" comments on the vast military construction and manufacturing program undertaken in North Carolina since June, 1940. A billion dollars had been spent and 25 Army, Navy, and Marine Corps bases had been built. Seven war manufacturing facilities had been constructed along with four power dams and twelve housing projects directly attributable to the war effort.

Samuel Grafton remarks on the form of internationalism being advocated by Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey. Mr. Willkie, for instance, wanted a true international determination of the Polish-Russian border question. Governor Dewey favored an international conclave to determine all issues of the war and post-war, contended that the Tehran and Cairo accords were insufficient as only being signed by the Big Four nations, the U.S., Britain, Russia, and China.

Such forms of internationalism, defying the consequences of potential alienation of the British and Russians who might not want such a form of open agreement, were, by design or otherwise, inevitably going to undermine internationalism while appearing to favor broader, if unrealistic, internationalism than the principal Allies at present were willing to endorse.

Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones writes a letter in which he labels false the statements of Drew Pearson re the controversy over the Secretary's supposedly providing to Alcoa a sweetheart deal in Canada, whereby, claimed Mr. Pearson, the Government loaned interest free some 60 million dollars, resulting in a glut of aluminum, threatening to shut down American producers having to compete with a lower overhead manufacturer in Canada supported by the U.S. Government and for whom the Government built its plant.

Secretary Jones rejoindered that interest had been charged on the loan and that the proceeds did not go to build the plant. The loans were made, he contended, at the request of the War Production Board and the Office of Production Management.

Marquis Childs writes of Mayor Edward Kelly, longtime political boss of Chicago, gearing up to muster strong support in Chicago for FDR to offset an expected strong Republican showing down state. It was hoped that 75% of Chicagoans would vote Democratic in November. Signs of polarization, however, had developed among blacks as well among Poles, the latter upset with the noncommittal policy of the U.S. toward the Russo-Polish border question.

Regardless of the fact that Boss Kelly's administration was shot through with graft and corruption, the opposition was, in taking an isolationist line at the beck of Chicago Tribune publisher Bertie McCormick, shooting itself so badly in the foot with voters that they would likely be inclined to suit up with the devil they knew than with the one they didn't.

Drew Pearson reports of the uneasiness of Secretary of State Hull regarding the expanded agenda of Undersecretary Edward Stettinius on his mission to London. In addition to some discussion of economic issues, was added consideration of Near East oil and how to deal with it effectively after the war without cutthroat competition ensuing between Britain and the United States, recently complicated by the announcement of the U.S. of its agreement with Saudi Arabia to build a 1,200-mile pipeline to the Eastern Mediterranean. The Undersecretary's agenda also included consideration of post-war German border issues.

Mr. Pearson next turns to the resignation recently of Randolph Paul as adviser to the Treasury Department on tax issues, having strongly favored a pay-as-you-go plan for the war, thus heavily contesting the recent tax bill passed by the Congress which reduced the Administration's requested additional revenue from 12.5 billion to 2.3 billion.

Mr. Paul, informs Mr. Pearson, had given up a lucrative position paying $200,000 per year as a tax consultant for the automobile and large oil companies to take a government job paying $8,000 per annum. Not appreciated, he would return to the private sector, though Mr. Pearson hints he might receive an appointment to a Federal judgeship.

Finally, Mr. Pearson examines the concerted efforts of Republicans in Florida to defeat Claude Pepper for the Senate. The insurance companies were especially angry at him for having refused to vote to exempt them from anti-trust laws. Senator Pepper would, nevertheless, go on to serve one further term in the Senate before being defeated in 1950. He then ran successfully for the House in 1962, where he served for the ensuing 26 years to his death in 1989.

Incidentally, if you wish to argue error in our theory on the identity behind the celebrated "W. H." on the basis that the letters are preceded by "Mr.", you must explain why only initials, which were not obvious in providing identity, were employed in the first instance if not intended to be cryptic. If intended to be a cipher, there is obviously no obstruction in logic to consistent application of our theory by the mere presence of "Mr."

Upon further consideration, we have to wonder whether "W. H." refers to William Harrison, whose election as President in 1840, because of his leading role in the Battle of Tippecanoe, November 7, 1811, began the supposed curse placed on the nation by Tecumseh in 1811, remembering that the Sonnets to whom W. H. was (or were) the dedicatee(s) were first published in 1609, 200 years before the birth of Abraham Lincoln.

On the other hand, of course, curses are nonsense and only reside so long as people wish to bring about the acts which fall in line with the supposed curse so as to corroborate its presumed insuperable, supernatural forces, but in the end possessing no more force than that silliness brought about by man's acts so to validate the supposition as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If all of the Presidents who were elected in the zero year since 1840 had died at the hand of nature while in office, as did President Harrison, President Harding, and President Roosevelt, even if there is some speculation regarding the death of President Harding, then that would be more suggestive of a curse. But when you add in four assassinations and one assassination attempt against Presidents elected in zero years, you wind up not with any curse but simply a bunch of idiots committing or attempting to commit murder.

We could suggest that the supposed curse is gone from the nation by the fact that the President elected in 2000 survived his term of office, even if a footnote has to define in this instance the term "elected". But, then the curse of Tecumseh was not specific as to its terms. Its assumed terms derived from the death of President Harrison and then the death of President Lincoln, even if interspersed by the natural death of President Zachary Taylor, elected in 1848--though in 1991, his exhumation had to occur before the historical rumor could be put to rest that he was poisoned because of his opposition to the part of the Compromise of 1850 which allowed the territories of the Southwest acquired from Mexico in the Mexican-American War to determine by popular will whether slavery would be permitted there.

Was the curse in the most recent instance of its expected gratification fulfilled by the problems surrounding the election itself? By the events of September 11, 2001? But then, what about the election of 1980? Did the curse become tired of killing off presidents, thus, in some respects, gratifying the opposing party, not intended to be part of Tecumseh's curse, and so, by a hair, this time, chose only to wound its target?

We do not, by the way, idly state the many coincidences and patterns of symbols present at the scene of the Kennedy assassination. They are, we believe, quite indicative of a conspiracy, quite manmade and earthly. Some may have been deliberate, as directions to one another, to avoid leaving behind a paper trail among the perpetrators, or to accomplish proper timing along sight lines pre-determined; others may have been incidental, others accidental, fingerprints of the unconscious mind which inevitably are left on any crime scene involving murder or attempted murder if investigators will only have the good sense to look for them. There is something about the human constitution which does not allow humanity to get around the complex of conscience, thus leaving its signature behind at a murder scene whether the conscious mind wants it so or not. The more persons who are involved in a conspiracy, the more those signatures will be left.

To understand the Kennedy assassination, as we have before suggested, one must step outside the normal perception of things and understand that it is entirely probable that through some of those lenses which captured footage of the event--after all, photographed in motion picture footage in complete continuity along Houston and Elm as if planned in advance to accomplish that continuity, to show what the cameras wanted us to see and to hide the rest--you are viewing through the sights which controlled the weapons used to commit the crime. That is primarily what we mean when we suggest that the operative methodology was for the conspirators to be hidden in plain view. What better way to have hidden themselves than behind camera lenses? That does not mean that the guns fired from the point of the cameras, only that lenses controlled the weapon as the sight, divorcing human fallibility, though not culpability, from the weapon.

And, still, 47 years later, no one has ever explained the purpose of the red O's positioned in the windows beneath three of the arches on the Depository, such that when a photograph of the building at the time is turned to the left, it forms "Coo Co Coo".

And it was George Cukor who directed Miss Marilyn Monroe in her last role in the never completed film, "Something's Got to Give", a film from which she was fired by 20th Century Fox two months before her fatal overdose of barbiturates in August, 1962, all of which was quite public at the time and which appeared at the time to resonate among the Kuku's for their various fixations with gyneolatry.

One of her last scenes committed to film, shot during May, 1962, obviously not available to the public at the time, was that involving a blonde cocker spaniel, a scene in which she was directed to begin with both of her hands held, palms down and folded one on the other, against the base of her throat, presumably as a cue to the trained dog to react, its Pavlovian role being to greet its mistress, home from a long time gone. She wore a print dress with a red rose emblazoned on the bodice, visible just below where her hands rested against her throat, the ghost risible in the garter's shadows by the basin's statuary tossed green goddess.

That script, incidentally, after the first failed attempt at its filming had been shelved, was remade as "Move Over, Darling", with Doris Day playing the role originally occupied by Ms. Monroe. "Move Over, Darling" was released by 20th Century Fox on Christmas Day, 1963, despite its rather completely poor taste in choice of new title.

We saw it at the theater in early 1964, thought it a rather forgettable piece of fluff, which it is. But we did not realize until last night the history of that project.