Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the number of the nation's idle workers had risen to two million, the latest strike involving 62,000 textile workers at 284 print and dye plants in nine Eastern states, including 6,000 in Paterson, N.J. where the strike began. The national union had, however, issued a back-to-work directive to the print and dye workers. The strike stretched from plants in South Carolina all the way up the Eastern seaboard. It could impact a half million workers in the textile industry were it to continue.

The actual number of workers on strike in the country now stood at half a million, with another 1.5 million impacted by the elevator strike in New York. In the Empire State Building, only about a 1,000 of the usual 15,000 daily workers were at their jobs, most below the 10th floor. In the lobby, refuse had accumulated ankle deep as the strike also involved building service personnel, including cleaning and maintenance crews.

In Japan, General MacArthur ordered the Eighth Army to arrest 34 Japanese officers and others suspected of participation in the massacre of a hundred Allied prisoners, many American, on Palawan in the Philippines on December 11, 1944. The prisoners had been herded into an air raid shelter and buckets of gasoline and lighted torches tossed in on them. Those few escaping were shot down by machinegun fire or killed by hand grenades or bayonets.

General MacArthur also issued permission for Japan to produce certain goods in limited quantities, including trucks but not cars, textiles, provided there was no silk utilized. He denied permission to reopen the stock exchange.

Leaders of labor met in Japan to re-form unions in the midst of a socialistic labor movement in the country. None of the labor groups favored capitalistic democracy.

Transportation was thought to be available for 1.49 million men from the Pacific to return home to the United States during the ensuing seven months.

In Brussels, the bodies of 240 Belgian underground members, victims of Nazi atrocities, were exhumed and all but nineteen identified.

Rita Zucca, known during the war as "Axis Sally", a Tokyo Rose type broadcaster to Allied troops in Italy, was slated to go on trial in Rome beginning the following day for trading intelligence with the enemy. Ms. Zucca was a native of New York but had obtained Italian citizenship.

President Truman issued an executive order proclaiming United States jurisdiction over offshore oil resources within the territorial limits of the country. The states had previously been asserting jurisdiction over these oil reserves and issuing leases to oil companies, especially off the coast of California.

The President appointed J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island as the new Solicitor-General to succeed Charles Fahy. Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall had been offered the position, as reported by Drew Pearson, but had turned it down.

The Administration warned the Argentine Government that its detention of newspaper editors and censorship of radio and the press would have a profound adverse impact on public opinion in the United States.

General A.A. Vandergrift, Commandant of the Marine Corps, told the House Naval Committee that he recommended a 60,000-man Marine minute-man type force to be deployed anywhere in the world to quell disturbances and re-establish the peace when necessary. It would represent about three-fifths of the recommended total complement of post-war Marines, 100,000 enlisted men and 9,200 officers.

Two airline carriers, Commonwealth and Pennsylvania Central, had been awarded east-west routes into Charlotte by the Civil Aeronautics Board, though still subject to further hearings.

Former war products manufacturers had turned to production of gadgetry as a stopgap measure until full production of regular goods could continue apace. Non-slip shoelaces, potato peelers, musical alarm clocks, and special holders for the ears of dogs or dog ears, it being unclear the nature of that one, were all now being manufactured in limited quantities.

Charlotte stores would begin on Monday opening at 9:00 a.m. and closing at 5:30 instead of opening at 9:30 and closing at 6:00 as during the war when War Time, the equivalent of Daylight Savings Time, was in effect nationwide.

Get your Christmas shopping done before 5:30.

For it will be, pert near, another 14 year, before the Charlottetown Mall will open—across the street from which, in 1963, one day, during a picnic up in the mountains with our ma and her cousin, Belle, we saw a mad, mad, mad, mad world unfold before our eyes, a few months after, at the same locale, we had said bye-bye to the birdies.

In Easton, Pa., a young woman, age 20, rushed into her home, shouting: "He chased me. A huge man—with a cap on, with whiskers and a long black coat."

Well, we know what happened to Goldilocks...

On the editorial page, "Parting Seams" comments on the difficulty with which the United Nations were getting along now that the war was won. While still united on basic principles, the devil was proving to be in the details, as demonstrated at the Foreign Ministers Conference in London where there was failure to reach any accord on the peace in Europe. The Balkans was a source of stalemate, as was the fate of Trieste and the colonies in Africa.

Yet, matters could have been worse. The war might have dragged on and depleted the resources of the United States by its end. But attempts at reconstruction might prove in vain, as the making of the peace would be a crazy quilt of compromise and expediency.

"Now or Never" comments on the series of articles the previous week by Pete McKnight regarding the future of Charlotte aviation and its importance to the growth of a modern community. The new age of aviation would see pronounced population shifts in its wake. So, if Winston-Salem and Greensboro obtained routes to the West which Charlotte did not get, then Charlotte might come a cropper in the new age. At present, there were no east-west routes from Charlotte, and travelers going west had first to fly to Atlanta.

"Fight for All" advocates establishment of a center where muscular dystrophy cases could be treated and investigated. Though the incidence of the disease was rare, with only one known case at the time in Charlotte, it was such a crippling disease as to warrant the attention of the nation to try to be rid of it.

"An Encore" suggests that the state of siege in Argentina was little different from the state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy a decade or so earlier. Yet, the country paid little attention to this potential hotbed of violence and corruption of the democratic processes.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut commenting on the atomic bomb and what she considers uninformed discussion of it by a Minnesota Representative the previous week. The unnamed Congressman had stated that, with the lack of expertise on the bomb evident in Congress, members should refrain from discussing it.

Drew Pearson comments on Congressman Andrew May of Kentucky and other Congressmen following the routine of sending G.I. mail to a War Department staff of 400 WAC's who then answered each piece with form letters, all in aid of the election campaigns of the Congressmen. The War Department liked the policy because it enabled them to make friends with Congress and, at the same time, see who the troublemakers were among the members. The WAC's were less than fond of it because it did not fall within their expected duties and often forced them to write letters for members whom they did not like or support. And, meanwhile, civilians were being laid off by the War Department.

Marquis Childs, still writing from Louisville, finds the Kentucky State Constitution so antiquated that it required every officeholder to swear an oath that he had not participated in a duel or acted as a second. Another provision limited salaries to $5,000 per annum. The citizens sought to be rid of these anachronistic conventions but were finding the going difficult against a tide of preservationist sentiment.

Samuel Grafton comments on the back-to-normalcy policy being followed with alacrity by the country, as fuel oil and substantial parts of food rationing had ended right after V-J Day. It was done despite the fact that the country had never gone hungry or cold during the war.

A letter writer suggests, among other things, that, to avoid inflation in clothing prices, men be allowed to wear only their underwear to work, beneath a long coat and a muffler wrapped around their neck.