The Sunday Times carried several reports from the Pacific Rim where postwar independence movements were brewing in the European colonies. In America, some America Firsters who had opposed US entry into the war in Europe had seen Japan, rather than Nazi Germany, as the real prewar threat to American interests. To some of these Americans, Germany's greatest sin had been its alliance with Japan. Other observers wondered how we could liberate countries from the Japanese only to return them to rule by European colonial powers. The Japanese occupiers had attempted to turn anti-colonial feelings to their advantage in the territories they had occupied, stressing "Asia for the Asians" in their propaganda.
The Times reported that anti-American feelings were boiling over in the Philippines due to recent action in the US Congress reserving privileges for American businesses and government agencies after the US possession became an independent country on July 4. Many Filipinos saw this as a direct assault on their future sovereignty. The US government said it was merely formally codifying the right of US interests to property they already owned.
The Dutch and the Indonesians were negotiating the future of the Netherland Indies. The story also said that some 325,000 Japanese troops were still in the Dutch colony, including 35,000 at large in the interior.
US military authorities were finalizing plans for the mass deportation of Germans still in China. Most were in Shanghai where the situation was complicated by the presence of 20,000 German Jews and other refugees from the Nazis who were alarmed over the possibility of being sent back to Germany. Modified orders now exempted those not suspected of Nazi sympathies or collaboration. Some 1,400,000 Japanese nationals already had been repatriated with another 670,000 scheduled to be sent home by May. Eleven thousand Koreans also had been booted out with another 51,000 due to leave soon.
The 71-year old white Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, expressed confidence that his subjects would approve his plan to cede his North Borneo domain to the British crown. The Brooke family had ruled over the rubber plantations, oil fields and native population of Sarawak for 100 years. His brother and his nephew, Anthony Brooke, who had been next in line as ruler, opposed the move, favoring independence, but Brooke said that he had deposed his nephew as crown prince.
The US Navy turned down an offer by British interests to develop the copra industry in the Marshall Islands which the Navy occupied pending a UN decision on trusteeship. Copra was a critical commodity as a result of the war, but the British companies insisted on a monopoly. The article said "the Marshallese are inclined to laziness" but readily learn new skills. The archipelago had been ruled by Spain, then Germany, then Japan under a League of Nations mandate before being seized by the US during the war. Later that year the US would drop an atom bomb on Bikini,one of the islands in the archipelago. The upcoming tests were a subject of controversy in April with some worried about the effect that the bomb might have. There was not too much concern expressed over the effect on the "lazy" islanders.
Meanwhile, a DC-4 plane had cut the flight time between San Francisco and Australia to 36 hours, 59 minutes, a drop of one hour and six minutes from the previous record.