Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a bloody military coup had taken place in La Paz, Bolivia, in which President Gialberto Villarroel was assassinated and his corpse then stripped and paraded through the streets on a tank, finally hung up on a lamppost. The President had first been wounded in the chest and claimed to the rebels that he was a leader of the Leftist Party, begging them not to shoot him, but was killed when he sought to fire a revolver. His corpse was then thrown from the balcony to the mob below.

The police chief, also at the palace, was being beaten by the rebels when a nurse intervened and saved his life.

The victory of the rebels followed four days of bloody fighting in which an estimated 2,000 persons were killed, including all of the President's immediate circle. One of the Cabinet members, Minister of Finance Paz Estenssoro, was listed in the United States Blue Book as a leading fascist. Parenthetically, Sr. Estenssoro, despite his political sympathies, was subsequently President of Bolivia three times, from 1952 to 1956, from 1960 to 1964, was in exile following a 1964 military coup until 1982, and then was elected President again, serving from 1985 to 1989.

A provisional Government was established by the dean of the Superior Court until elections could be held.

Partially burned corpses of political prisoners were found in ammunition boxes at police headquarters, indicative, according to the rebels, of the repressive measures of the regime. On November 20, 1944, rebel leaders were arrested and many were never seen again. Prisoners were also rounded up after an unsuccessful coup earlier in the month. Among them had been two Senators.

The rebels promised immediate restoration of civil liberties.

An armed band destroyed a substantial portion of the King David Hotel in Palestine, setting off a bomb at 12:30 p.m., destroying the British Army and Palestine Government offices, killing at least 50 persons. "Jewish terrorists" were blamed for the bombing.

In Atlanta, Drew Pearson had, on Sunday, given his nationally broadcast anti-Klan speech from the steps of the Georgia State Capitol, amid intermittent boos and cheers from a crowd of about 2,000. Mr. Pearson quoted former Governor and Democratic nominee, essentially Governor-elect, Gene Talmadge as saying that key officials in law enforcement agencies would be Klansmen in his new administration. The columnist also said that history would ridicule the fiery crosses which had been burned on Stone Mountain, breaking faith with the Cross on Calvary.

The House-Senate conference decided that under the revived OPA, price ceilings on meat, poultry, eggs, milk, and other basic foods could not be restored until August 20 and thereafter left to the discretion of the three-person oversight board. The conference completed its work and sent the bill back to the House and Senate for final approval. The final conference vote was 11 to 3 for the compromise bill. It remained unclear whether the President would sign it.

The Senate War Investigating Committee determined that it would examine pre-war delays in fortifying Pearl Harbor. The committee had attempted to do so two years earlier but were frustrated in the attempt by the refusal of Representative Andrew May—now under investigaion by the committee for possible intervention in war contracts for profit—to release a key witness to the committee, Col. Theodore Wyman, Army district engineer in the Hawaiian Department at the time of the attack.

Army trucks and 200 soldiers took over distribution of bread in Belfast, Northern Ireland after 1,500 deliverymen refused to make deliveries. Housewives, however, had stocked their shelves with bread prior to the strike.

Attempts by Labor Party members in Parliament to cancel the rationing program were continuing. There were few queues observed in London waiting for purchase of bread, as a great amount of buying had taken place on Saturday. Many bakery clerks had quit their jobs rather than accept ration coupons.

Harold Ickes provides an open letter to President Manuel Roxas of the newly independent Philippines, in which he says that he had on June 21 charged that President Roxas had been a chief collaborator with the Japanese during the war. The same day, General MacArthur denied the facts on which Mr. Ickes had relied. President Roxas also responded, saying that the claim was false, but without specifying what facts were untrue. He claimed that he had not signed a declaration of war, even though Mr. Ickes had not so charged, stating only that he had "supported" the declaration of war against the United States.

He asks Mr. Roxas whether he had done so and whether he had aided in the writing of the constitution for the puppet government. He also asks whether he was an adviser to the puppet president. He wanted to know what percentage of the food had gone to the hungry children.

Mr. Ickes charges that Mr. Roxas had, in his inaugural address, cited only "moral error" by the collaborationists and urged their forgiveness. Mr. Ickes terms it instead treason and believes that the Philippine people should mete out appropriate punishment to the quislings, just as the formerly occupied nations of Europe were doing.

In Holloway, England, a 46-year old woman, a former acrobat, was found Sunday morning strangled in the bushes outside St. Luke's Church. According to her husband, she had left home to attend a movie in the evening. He asserted the belief that, being a strong woman, she would have put up a fierce struggle. Scotland Yard was investigating to determine the responsible party.

In Braintree, Mass., a retired shoemaker had become a centenarian, finished stacking a five-ton load of hay in his barn, claimed with a smile that his longevity was the result of his having remained a bachelor all of his days.

On the editorial page, "The Case Against Chapel Hill" takes on the recommendation of the Medical Survey Board that Chapel Hill become the locus of the new University medical school rather than Charlotte, the other primary competitor. Two board members had recommended that the proposal be abandoned completely and expressed, in any event, opposition to Chapel Hill as the location, reasoning that the town was small, without even a community hospital, and was thus not fit for support of such a massive facility, especially with Duke Medical School and Hospital but twelve miles away.

"The Realtors and the Chiselers" suggests that the proposed 15 percent increase in rents recommended by the Charlotte Real Estate Board was reasonable, given that landlords also faced higher costs of living. But unaffiliated land owners had raised rents from 50 to 83 percent and told their tenants in the process that they were following the recommendation of the Board.

A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "...Fireman on the Salt Lake Line?" asks how many firemen were on the Illinois Central train which crashed in 1900 with Casey Jones at the throttle. A man named John Eubanks, 72, had recently passed away in Madison, Wisconsin, claiming that he had been shoveling coal on the train and barely missed being killed in the wreck.

It quotes from the ballad on the wreck, attributing to Mrs. Jones the statement:

"Go to bed children and hush your cryin'
'Cause you got another Poppa on the Salt Lake Line"

That, however, was declared to be a libel on all concerned. And no one had ever claimed that there were two firemen.

The piece has no conclusion to make and wonders if any readers had an explanation for the variance.

From April 22, 1946, incidentally, "Sergei Koussevitsky" is now here, even if now under the baton of another conductor. "Cold barn" is now here. Those who continually grub for money as Fascist Punks, and do not read, look, or listen to their elders and their wisers, with prior experience out of which learning took place, wind up... Well, we dare not say.

Drew Pearson is in the blur today as he informs that Senator Alben Barkley might resign if the second OPA resurrection bill were vetoed. So, we shall have to await some other explanation of this theory, the hypothesis of which never came about.

Marquis Childs discusses defeated Senator Burton Wheeler, retiring from the Senate at the end of the year after 24 years. As The News had discussed his career the previous week in the wake of the defeat, we shall let you read this one for the most part on your own.

Mr. Childs suggests that Senator Wheeler suffered from "Potomac fever", having stayed too long in Washington, causing him to identify his own voice with the will of the people. And his lengthy tenure assured that he had plenty of yes-men surrounding him. In the process, he rarely visited Montana and had lost touch with his constituents.

The late Senator George Norris of Nebraska had been an exception to the rule of "Potomac fever" despite long tenure in the office.

Some had thought it strange that the President had endorsed Senator Wheeler, but it fit with his intense loyalty to friends, of whom Senator Wheeler had been one from the early days of President Truman's own time in the Senate, beginning in 1935.

This loyalty to the defeated Senator, however, given his isolationist past, would do Mr. Truman no more good than his loyalty to Ed Pauley, whose nomination earlier in the year to be the Undersecretary of the Navy had to be withdrawn for his controversial alleged proposal to collect, as treasurer for the DNC, $300,000 for the Democrats in exchange for Secretary Ickes and the Administration changing their position on Federal control of tidal oil lands, in favor of the states being able to continue to collect royalties from private producers operating under leases.

Samuel Grafton, the lower third of both of his columns also being in the blur, writes again from Los Angeles that the Russian press was urging a central German government comprised of Germans. But at the same time, Russia opposed writing of the peace treaty with Germany and favored a long period of occupation—the last statement by V. M. Molotov in Paris having recommended 40 years instead of the 25 which Secretary of State Byrnes, the British and the French desired. During that lengthy time, the Russians proposed to test the Germans to insure that they could be trusted to govern themselves without rearming.

A letter, the lower portion of which is in the blur, comes from Mr. Meek to Mr. Middleclass—whose first name may or may not have been Marvin. He suggests that Mr. Middleclass's backbone was broken for clinging too long to the status quo, that the bulk of the spine was being pushed downward into the realm of the Meek—which begins to sound a little strange since he claims to be "Mr. Meek", thus, by logical inference, claiming that he also was down there in the lower regions, "just below the sacrum", sounding as a bit Faustian.

A letter writer who had also written recently, from Phoenix, starts in the blur, responds to the letter which had taken issue with the newspaper's column of January 14 regarding crime in Chicago versus Charlotte, in the wake of the Suzanne Degnan and "lipstick" murders in Chicago. He states that he does not know what Chicago crime statistics were since the Al Capone days but if lower, it was because the criminals had all drifted to Phoenix. But, he ventures, it would not last long as Al Capone and his henchmen had once tried to set up shop there and were forced out by local law enforcement.

He urges that Charlotte send the Chicagoan to Phoenix and they would then sell him some property at an inflated price and buy it back in six months for half the amount he had paid, the way they treated "smart guys from Chicago".

That begins to sound like a conspiracy to commit fraud on the trumped-up handy-dandy of an outsider's mere arrogance, not a just excuse for fraud.

A letter, most of which is not discernible, urges that President Truman be held to his promise of carrying out the program of President Roosevelt.

Herblock.