International news was covered extensively and in detail and was given prominent position in the front of The Sunday Times, The spread of Communism was a major issue as was the fate of Palestine and the Middle East. Great hopes were held for the newly formed United Nations.although some on the Right saw it as an attack of American sovereignty and a tool of Communism. The Times also ran an update from the Nuremberg Trials, which were being closely followed by many New Yorkers. Franco's continued rule of Spain was a burning issue to the city's leftists. The wife of the president of France was in town and held a press conference. The continued existence of European colonies was the controversy in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Had the Japanese been defeated to run rule back to the British, French and Dutch?
Page One stories reported La Guardia's plea for more British and American wheat to deal with world hunger, Soviet attempts to annex the mouth of the Danube, the clash between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists in Manchuria, the dissolution of the League of Nations and Poland's attacks in the United Nations on Spain.
Some of the international news briefs that separated the ads that dominated the first few inside pages:.
British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin offered up the British Commonwealth as the model for how a world federation should work. Bevin was a former trade unionist from a working class background, a moderate Socialist, a staunch anti-Communist, and a strong supporter of US foreign policy and of the creation of the United Nations General Assembly and NATO. He helped maintain British international prestige even though the country, bankrupted by the War, was no longer a major power. He was vilified by some ardent Zionists for his policy on Palestine and by the Stalinist Left for his anti-Communism.
Three Russian journalists were on their way to the US as guests of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
There was a world shortage of rice.
In other stories:
The International Labor Organization approved a resolution condemning all forms of racial discrimination in employment at its Mexico City meeting. The final resolution was a compromise between Panamanian complaints that their citizens were not treated equally with American workers in the Canal Zone and the successful effort of the US delegation to exclude mention of this specific complaint in the final document. Instead the US representatives pledged to submit Panama's grievance to the Labor Department in Washington for prompt action. The ILO had been formed by the League of Nations under the Treaty of Versailles and in 1946 became the first agency of the United Nations. It still exists although it is fairly toothless to enforce any of its resolutions. It was meant to address issues of labor rights. Delegations are split among representatives of governments, unions and employers. Although the organization was founded by the western powers who intended it as a counter-balance to Bolshevism, US business interests kept this country out of the ILO until FDR became president. In the postwar years, there would be ideological struggles in the US with business and Right Wingers objecting to participation in a labor body that also included Communists.
Several reports from the US occupation zone in Germany painted a desperate picture of post-war life in that country. Food supplies were dangerously low. Bands of vagabond youths, some set loose by families that could not feed them, roamed the countryside "pilfering, spreading disease and begging." The conditions seemed ripe for Communism to prosper. On the other hand, because of the system of distribution set up for gasoline, some Germans were riding around in cars while US troops had to conserve their limited supply of fuel.
Novelist Pearl Buck, chairman of the Indian Famine Emergency Committee, issued a statement rebutting Truman's observation that rain had improved crop conditions in India. This was not true, she asserted.