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Show WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS . Farm Groups OK Brannan Ohcics; Truce Request Fai!s in Palestine; GM Wage Pact Could Set Pattern By Bill Schoentgen, WNU Staff Writer (EDITOR'S NOTE: When oDirHona are expressed In these eolnmns, they are- those of Western Newspaper Union's news analyst and not necessarily of this newspaper.) No Quarter Egypt RAELt::-. ? Current Events? Although they might seem a bit obscure to anyone ' who doesn't make a conscious effort to memorize the front page of a newspaper every day, these questions do have answers. As a matter of fact, the questions are so difficult that even the answers have answers. 1. Capitals of the seven Arab league states fighting Israel are: Mecca and Riyadh (dual capitals of one state) Baghdad, Damascus, Damas-cus, Amman, Beirut, Cairo and Sana. What states do they belong be-long to? 2. Sir Alexander Fleming has been awarded the American Medal for Merit for his contribution contribu-tion to medical science. What contribution? 3. Republicans meet in Philadelphia Phila-delphia this month to nominate their candidate for president. Where did the GOP nominate its last successful candidate? 4. When President Truman nominated Charles F, Brannan as secretary of agriculture it brought the total of Truman cabinet appointments to 10, 16 or 21? 5. Everyone knows that the Taft of the Taft-Hartley act is Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio. Identify the Hartley. ANSWERS 1. Mecca and Riyadh, Saudi Arab-la; Arab-la; Baghdad, Iraq; Damascus, Syria; Syr-ia; Amman, Trans-Jordan ; Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; Sana, Yemen. Ye-men. 2. He discovered the germ-killing properties of penicillium mold which led to development of penicillin. penicil-lin. 3. Last sucessful GOP candidate was Herbert Hoover, nominated in June. 1928. at Kansas City, Mo. 4. Mr. Truman has appointed IS to the cabinet. 5. Rep. Fred A. Hartley, Jr. (Rep., N.J.) Oratorical Flight APPROVED: Brannan President Truman's choice of Charles F. Brannan to succeed Clinton Anderson as secretary of agriculture has received the wholehearted whole-hearted approval of the national farm organizations. They consider the 44-year-old former assistant secretary of agriculture agri-culture "a friend of the farmer.' One of the bases for this feeling of harmony is the fact that Brannan Bran-nan and the farm organizations concur con-cur in thinking that the prewar parity law is badly outdated. Such crops as soybeans, for instance, in-stance, have attained a much greater great-er importance since the law was passed but still have no satisfactory price fixing basis. Other farmers, including cattle and dairy produca ers, claim their parity scales are out .of line in this postwar period. Ideas developed by Brannan to help remedy this situation have been largely adopted by the leading lead-ing farm groups and are incorporated incorpo-rated in bills now pending before congress. Unless congress acts by the end of this year the law guaranteeing guar-anteeing farm prices at 90 per cent of the fixed parity rate will expire. Serving quietly as assistant secretary sec-retary of agriculture for the past four years, Brannan has made himself the backbone of the administration's ad-ministration's drive to enact a long-range long-range farm program. Thus, the farmers think a lot of Brannan because he has demonstrated demon-strated that he is looking out for their interests in a realistic, levelheaded level-headed fashion. President Truman, it appeared, had made a good choice in putting Brannan at the head of the department. de-partment. Almost everybody was satisfied, and that, in an election 1 year, was a most desirable situation situa-tion for Mr. Truman. FAILURE: No Peace It was difficult to say who would suffer more from the Arabs' rejection rejec-tion of V. N. truce plea for Palestine Pales-tine the Arabs themselves, the Jews or the United Nations. Probably the Jews came off to better advantage in the world councils coun-cils of public opinion, inasmuch as through their willingness to accept a truce they now can appear in the role of a nation which has been wronged and is forced to fight a war that has been thrust willy nilly upon it. The Arabs simply brushed aside the idea of a truce with the contention con-tention that they could not halt the shooting war until the state of Israel is abandoned and the Jewish army demobilized. There never was any question in the minds of Arab leaders lead-ers about the truce. It was literally literal-ly unacceptable to them. Their position was stated definitively by the Egyptian premier, Mahmoud Fahmy Nokrashy Pasha, who said: "There never will be founded a state called Israel, or any other name, as long as the creation of that state relies upon the theft of Arab land, the extermination of its Arab owners and the sacrifice of moral principles of its Arab neighbors." neigh-bors." Nevertheless, the Arab refusal was a bitter blow to the U. N. security council. It had been organized or-ganized for the express purpose of' resolving just such disputes as this one in Palestine, yet it could do nothing more than make a weak gesture of placation. There was little doubt that the security se-curity council had been rendered toothless and impotent on the Palestine Pal-estine issue by the U. S. attitude, or rather lack of attitude. What position the United States would take as an individual nation with regard to the Palestine war was not clear either. At a ' conference with Chaim Weizmann, Israel's president. President Pres-ident Truman promised that the U. S. would provide financial support sup-port for Israel in the form of a loan of about 100 million dollars. Further, he hinted at the possibility that unless the Arab states cease fire the U. S. might provide arms for the Jews. Day after the conference, however, how-ever, Mr. Truman dismissed Weiz-mann's Weiz-mann's plea for a loan as something some-thing that could be handled by the export-import bank, and he completely com-pletely ducked the issue of raising the embargo on arms shipments to the Middle East. If Secretary oE the JNavy John Sullivan had possessed wings he probably would have flapped them in his enthusiasm when he went before the house armed services committee to urge congress con-gress to let the navy speed development de-velopment . of a 65,000-ton super aircraft carrier, costing 124 million mil-lion dollars. Fires of war between Arab and Jew continued to burn in the.Holy Land when the Arab states refused re-fused to comply with a U. N. request re-quest for a truce. Attacking Jewish Jew-ish forces at all points, the Arabs said they would not quit until the Jews renounced their new state of Israel. Meanwhile, as victorious Haganah troops took over Acre (1), Egyptian planes intensified the air attack on Tel Aviv (2) and Arab troops enjoyed their greatest great-est victories in Jerusalem (3). PAY HIKE: New Formula When General Motors corporation averted a threatened strike of 225,-000 225,-000 auto production workers by offering of-fering an 11-cent raise based on a cost-of-living formula it probably set a precedent which will be followed fol-lowed in settling other Industrial labor disputes. Under the agreement, described as an "entirely new approach to the living cost problem," GM production pro-duction workers get an 8-cent cost-of-living increase and a 3-cent pay boost based on annual industrial efficiency improvement. Terms provide that wages be adjusted ad-justed up or down ea ch three months to conform with fluctuations fluctua-tions in the consumer price index of the bureau of labor statistics. It appeared to be a sound plan and one that might be followed to good advantage by other industries. Biggest flaw in the scheme was the fa ct that General Motors might have to pass the cost-of-living raise on to the public, which step might have the eventual effect of nullifying nullify-ing the benefits of the raise to the workers. Significance of this adjustable cost-of-living wage formula can be seen in a review of the rise in prices since 1940. The cost of living liv-ing today is 69 per cent higher than in 1940. Using 1940 as a base year which is what GM and the United Auto Workers did in arriving at their agreement living costs now are at 169 per cent. VOICE: Belittling Voice of America broadcasts, which have never received a full measure of congressional approval, sank to an even lower level of 1 disesteem because of a series of ill-starred programs beamed to Latin America last winter. The scripts in question, denounced by senators as sabotage, slander and libel of the U. S., first attracted attention in March during house appropriation committee hearings on the Voice of America. In the sample script that the committee wanted to look over were some ill-chosen ill-chosen remarks about Wyoming. Stout-hearted Wyoming congressmen congress-men shrieked in anguish. Other scripts were examined, and Sen. Homer Capehart (Rep., Ind.) finally fin-ally aired the whole thing before the senate. The legislators shuddered as they heard Capehart read from the scripts such excerpts as: "New England was founded by hypocrisy and Texas by sin." "Nevada's two main cities compete com-pete with each other because people peo-ple get married in Las Vegas and divorced in Reno." The programs were handled by the National Broadcasting company under contract with the state department. Rene Borgia, the man who wrote the scripts, was fired, and Alberto Gandero, Borgia's supervisor, su-pervisor, resigned. CORNBALL: For Breakfast Some of the more sentimental hands around the American Broadcasting Broad-casting company's Chicago studios like to think of Don McNeill as a beautiful and vibrant symbol of the rise and snowballing success of ABC itself. At least they both were young together and both had to fight their way up through a welter of opposable circumstances circum-stances to find adjoining ad-joining places in the sun. As toastmaster of the uninhibited Breakfast Club program, pro-gram, McNeill will celebrate his 15th McNeill annivers ary on June 23 with the same kind of capers he has been executing five days a week between 8 and 9 a. m. since 1933. Despite the subterranean regard which this sophisticated generation purports to hold for the more direct di-rect and obvious types of humor, McNeill has found that being a cornball pays off. He works without with-out a script and his gags are strictly strict-ly off-the-cuff. He once invited a herpetologist (a student of reptiles and amphibians) amphib-ians) who visited the program, to "Come into the parking lot after the broadcast and I'll show you a rare specimen. A windshield viper." And when a New Jersey woman told him that her husband is a butcher and she is a corsetiere. he commented, "What an ideal arrangement. ar-rangement. He fattens them up and you pull them in." McNeill parlays this kind of extemporaneous ex-temporaneous patter with a feeling of genuine camaraderie for the plain people who are guests on his sh6w to produce a program that has had a nationwide cult of early morning listeners begging for more for 15 consecutive years. |