Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that while the Government conciliator in the coal strike had stated to reporters that he made a proposal to resolve the impasse, both operators and John L. Lewis stated that no such proposal had been offered, Mr. Lewis calling it "a joke". The conciliator stood by his statement but declined to provide the terms of the proposal.

The Solid Fuels Administration barred deliveries of soft coal to domestic consumers until such point as the customer had less than a five-day supply.

Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia were in brownouts from the coal strike, and Detroit was expected to follow, along with 45 other cities and towns of Michigan. Cincinnati was expected to join the list as well by the end of May. Virginia Electric & Power Co. and the Braddock Light & Power Co. also ordered rationing of electricity. The strike had precipitated as well layoffs of railroad and steel workers.

The head of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen stated that Government seizure of the railroads appeared the only option to avert the May 18 deadline for strike of the rail workers.

A threatened strike of a thousand TWA pilots, to have begun this date, appeared to have been averted by appointment by the President of an emergency fact-finding committee to study the wage dispute. In addition to TWA, pilots of American Airlines, American Overseas Airlines, Braniff Airways, Delta, Chicago and Southern, Eastern, National, Northeast, Northwest, Pennsylvania Central, United, and Western Airlines, were involved.

In Cairo, Britain proposed to withdraw all armed forces from Egyptian territory and leave control of it to the armies of King Farouk. Mutual assistance in time of war would be provided Egypt under a revision of the 1936 treaty. The agreement, approved by the Egyptian Premier, would remove all British troops from the area of the Suez Canal.

In Parliament, Winston Churchill angrily denounced the decision of Prime Minister Attlee to remove the troops after 60 years of "diplomacy and administration" in Egypt.

Speaking at a ceremony at the site of the first meeting of the U.N. Security Council the previous January, Church House in London, Mr. Churchill, being provided the freedom of the city of Westminster, stated that the U.N. afforded the only road through which an understanding with Russia could be reached. He asked the world to ponder what the consequences would be of a schism among nations, calling on "the English-speaking world and the western democracies of Europe to move together in creating a true fellowship with Russia." He hoped for a strong France and a revived Italy.

He suggested that some actions of the Russians had boomeranged to cement Anglo-American relations while actions of the French Communists had impelled likewise Generalissimo Franco in Spain.

The four-power foreign ministers conference in Paris agreed to restore to Rumania Transylvania, most of which had been ceded to Hungary by a 1940 pact between Hitler and Mussolini, and to discuss the remaining territorial cessions occurring to the country since 1938, involving Dobrudja, ceded to Bulgaria in 1940, and Bessarabia, occupied by Russia in 1940 and annexed in 1944.

Britain and America had insisted on freedom of navigation on the Danube and freedom of trade for all nations in Rumania. Russia, however, did not wish to discuss the matters, with Foreign Commissar V.M. Molotov saying it was strictly a Central European matter which should be discussed in diplomatic channels.

The ministers were also set to begin discussions of the treaty with Bulgaria, which had requested cession of western Thrace from Greece and access to the Aegean Sea.

In Singapore, a Korean guard and Japanese lieutenant were sentenced to death for war crimes against Allied prisoners, forced to build a military railway across Siam during Japanese occupation.

Primary races in Ohio, Alabama, Indiana, and Florida were taking place this date, with attention being paid especially to the Senate race in Alabama and the 5th District House race in Ohio, both of which had seen heavy activity by the CIO PAC. These races were therefore predictive of how much influence PAC would have in the 1946 election. While three of the states showed only light interest in the primary, there had been record-setting registration by veterans in Alabama promising a higher than usual turnout. Blacks had been permitted to register for the first time in the primaries in Alabama and Florida. Neither state, however, expected a large black turnout.

In New York, four young men, one of whom was a former Navy radio technician, were arrested for 75 burglaries and 42 safe robberies as police alleged that they used walkie-talkies in the operations, all of which had taken place since Christmas. Two persons were stationed outside a security agency to monitor the operation while a robbery or burglary took place. They were also trying to develop a device utilizing infrared light to camouflage their presence at the scenes of their misdeeds.

The four, whose ages ranged from 16 to 20, occupied an apartment together and threw large parties, including one recently for a hundred persons, having stolen from a Swift plant fifteen hams for the soiree.

Now, they were going to be fresh meat for awhile, cooling their dogs. Call it the infrared blues.

In Albany, N.Y., Bertram Campbell, who served 40 months in Sing Sing for a crime he did not commit, was awarded $40,000 by the Court of Claims of the State of New York for the State's little error. He had sought $140,000, $40,000 of which represented lost earnings and the remainder, humiliation and emotional distress. He had been convicted in 1938 for allegedly forging checks and sentenced to 5 to 10 years in prison, the conviction occurring during the term of Thomas Dewey as District Attorney for Manhattan. Governor Dewey assisted Mr. Campbell in bringing the lawsuit, providing a pardon to him after a forger who resembled him confessed to the crime the previous summer, and convincing the Legislature to pass a special bill to allow the lawsuit to proceed.

A photograph shows former President Herbert Hoover, special presidential envoy investigating worldwide hunger, leaving the residence of Lord Wavell in Delhi, India, accompanied by Mohandas K. Ghandi, after discussing with the British Viceroy the food situation in India, which Mr. Hoover stated had not yet reached the stage of famine but would were food supplies to the country halted.

On the editorial page, "How Does It Look in Russia?" comments on the President's proposal for an Inter-American Military Cooperation Act to provide for common military operations with other North and South American countries for mutual defense. It was premised on maintaining military strength in the Western hemisphere, consistent with the President's proposals for universal military training and opposition to sharing of the atomic secret.

"John L. Lewis Is Forcing the Issue" states that the UMW leader was without a friend in the world among labor, other than miners themselves, as he had gone too far as an individualist.

"Visitor from the Far Left" tells of a report written from Atlanta by Max Lerner for PM, finding the new advances in Georgia, eliminating the poll tax and opening up the primary to blacks, to be encouraging steps forward, along with the defeat in Richmond County of the Gene Talmadge forces of the Cracker Party.

A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, "Why Not Smaller Packages?" asks what had happened to the nickel loaf of bread and the half-pint of milk. Ten-cent loaves and full bottles were fine for families with several children, but individuals living alone and small families could not consume the larger quanties before the bread would become stale or the milk sour, resulting in waste. The same was true of other types of food. It suggests smaller packages.

Drew Pearson provides his second in a series of pieces on lobbying efforts against OPA in Washington, again discussing the cotton and wool lobbies and their impact on the supply of clothing, as more women's garments were being manufactured because they brought higher prices. Arthur Bease of the wool manufacturers was able to cajole Civilian Production Administrator John Small not to issue an order to shift manufacture of wool fabric for women's clothes to men's clothes.

We told you so.

Marquis Childs tells of Washington being in bloom to receive veterans and their wives reunited after the long gloom of war. The tulips were full and the ancient Queen of India tree had put forth its purple blossoms.

Samuel Grafton, still in Manteo, N.C., once again on the trail of the loose and fast leviathan, tells of the water in Oregon Inlet being glassy, with cormorant, ducks, and geese flying about over the water, but no life apparent in or on the water.

Each discoloration of the water could mean a tide rip or a school of channel bass, some blonde, some brunette, but all tinting the water with their variations in golden brown. An acre of menhaden floated by, with the gulls darting down to prey on them and discuss them.

But then the waters calmed to the point where it could be bottled and sold by the apothecary.

During lunch, still without prospect of a catch, there was "impulse to say the unexpected and the trifling, even the obscene; to mock with a show of life the mockery of the lifeless sea." Meanwhile the boat pushed along "from nowhere to nowhere".

"It rounds, as it goes, an invisible corner." Suddenly, the line was grabbed and made taut as the shapes of the brown bass were in view. The struggling catch finally came aboard, shoulder-high to a man, and tired.

"One gives him a glance, and looks over side to see more of the strange upending turbulence."

"It is gone, and the world is back in place again." The guide was not perturbed by the sudden pull on the line from the bottom of the ocean, "but is trying to work it so that he will be given the fish to take to market to sell."

To provide a sense of full understanding, we should relate that in the summer of 1964, August 'twas, we were with our papa in Eastern North Carolina, in the Pamlico Sound region, and, specifically, passing through the Mattamuskeet and Swan Quarter preserves on a Saturday afternoon. It was our habit in those days of yore, to pass the time while riding along on the long black ribbon of rhythm to dawn, especially when lovelorn as we were, having lost one love, yet preparing, though knew it not we did it was to be, to find another, to play songs through our head. On this particular afternoon, we recall distinctly, the Trio, back from San Francisco, having sufficed the previous day, we switched to, well...

Not so long ago, but two and a half years, we went there again to those preserves and passed through, once more playing those songs through our head. We did not know at the time that Mr. Grafton had been in that neck of the woods though. He might still be there.

A letter writer, a farmer, finds unreasonable an Army order that POW's, as of November, 1945, who were assigned to help farmers could not any longer perform work which would aid in raising or harvesting the 1946 crop. He states that he could have raised more grain for Europe had the POW's been able to work in raising the year's crop.

A letter from the American Friends Committee comments on the arrival in the United States of Vera Brittain, a Briton being sponsored by the committee. Ms. Brittain had written many articles for magazines and several books. She would speak on the recovery in Europe and how to maintain the peace. She would also talk about famine and the spiritual regeneration of Europe. Her talks would take place in Winston-Salem and Asheville.