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Show Washington, D. C. JOB TO DO IN LONDON Those close to Secretary of State Hull say he is not happy over the mission to London undertaken by energetic young Undersecretary Ed Stettinius. Originally, the trip was planned partly to please the British, who hinted that we had sent no important im-portant emissaries to London since Harry Hopkins' call on Churchill two years ago. However, Stettinius is on the way to turning the mission into something some-thing really important. He is scheduled sched-uled to discuss five important subjects sub-jects with the British. They are: 1. Stabilization of the dollar and pound after the war. 2. A world bank. 3. Stabilization of commodities. This would mean the application of Wallace's ever-normal granary to all basic commodities such as tin, rubber, rub-ber, copper, sugar, with a system of buying and selling to keep prices stabilized. 4. Oil and the Near East. The United States wants to avoid a cutthroat cut-throat battle for oil such as occurred j with Britain after the last war and which is already threatened as a re- j suit of the ' Arabian pipe-line wrangling. 5. The future boundaries of Germany. Ger-many. German boundaries were tentatively tenta-tively discussed at Teheran, but now Dr. Isaiah Bowman, famed geographer, has accompanied Stettinius Stetti-nius to London to talk details. Bowman Bow-man was Woodrow Wilson's geographic geo-graphic expert at Versailles, and some officials are critical of his chopping-up of Europe. This imposing agenda has irked Secretary Hull. Apparently, it was pretty well arranged while he was in Florida. Also, Hull was always jealous of the trips Sumner Welles took to Rio, Rome, London and Berlin, Ber-lin, and now it looks as if his new undersecretary might also becrowoV ing him for the limelight. MORE HORSE LEATHER Representative Calvin Johnson of Illinois has been badgering the war department and the War Production board to get more harness for farm horses. With leather short, and harness har-ness buckle metal diverted to war production, harness is scarce. Also, the army has bought up tremendous supplies of harness. In campaigning for more harness, Representative Johnson suddenly bumped into the fact that the army was only just now releasing from jts Jeffersonville, Ind., quartermaster depot a total of 30,000 sets of harness har-ness carefully stored away since the last war. FREE RADIO TIME Broadcasters are wondering how nany other congressmen will follow the example recently set by Maryland's Mary-land's Senator Millard Tydings. At the close of his regular weekly broadcast, he announced that he would discontinue the series because he did not wish to subject the radio station, WBAL, to charges of unfairness unfair-ness during the coming senatorial campaign. OIL SUBSIDY , The OPA has now recommended a system of oil subsidies to Economic Eco-nomic Stabilizer Vinson ranging Erom 25 cents to 75 cents a barrel for all lowproducing wells, namely those oil wells averaging nine barrels bar-rels per day or less. This would give a subsidy to about 80 per cent Df the nation's wells and would cost the government about $60,000,000 a year. The plan was secretly worked out oy some of the independents but, when the big companies heard about it, they raised such a howl that the little fellows backed out, stating publicly pub-licly that they had not been cooperating cooper-ating with the government in devising devis-ing the subsidy scheme. However, it looks as if the plan would go through. Pennsylvania wells, which are the deepest, will get the highest subsidy. MERRY-GO-ROUND d. The United States is cutting off Its nose to spite its face in regard to De Gaulle and the Free French. We sre still freezing French funds in order to hamstring De Gaulle, which means that we will have to dig down Into our own U. S. treasury to pay France's share of the UNRRA fund. Each nation is supposed to contribute contrib-ute a share to this world relief fund, and since we are tying up French tunds, we will have to find the money some place. C. In Recife, thousands of cheering Brazilians welcomed Mrs. Roosevelt by singing "God Bless America" in Portuguese. D, A conspiracy is on to euchre another sizable hunk of the manpower man-power problem out from under Paul McNutt. Undersecretary of War Patterson, Pat-terson, rubber czar Bradley Dewey and WPB's production wizard, Charles E. Wilson, want to take the leferment of skilled industrial workers work-ers away from McNutt and put it under a special committee headed Dy Wilson. 0. Reason for sparse publicity on the First Lady's Latin-American tour was the war department's refusal to let the newswomen who usually eover Mrs. Roosevelt go along. |