RUSSIA it f’ ln Russia it was give and take today -- with the ped Array giving in one sector and taking in another. I It would appear that Soviet forces have lost tr.e city oi Kharkov. Berlin claims the capture ol the place, and Moscow gj^ves no indication that the Nazi claim is untrue.Berli\n' s latest statement declares that German troops have brokeiy into the Red Square at Kharkov. "Thu’s," states the\ Nazy dispatch, "the town is again in German hands s^ler three weeks of temporary Soviet occupation." [indications from both sides are that some of the war’s most savage fighting has been raging around the Kharkov area, with desperat street battles within the city. This clTlmax^s the" Germa^counter-attack on th^ southern Riissian front, the recoil that carried s' s' s' s^ s' .5 V all the Nazi forward a hundred miles -- after they ha pet reacted sg, fast and so far, hr the way trom Stalingrad A ^ the/Volga. It isn't clear what German stsatef.y may expected to foliowf the re^apture.^6^1 Kh RUSSIA . 2 w-fre'fcrhei* o*--n-o'b'-fe-fre-y wi of- ^ Soviets gave^Kharkov, they certainly took^Vyazma. The Red Army capture of that great salient was announced by both Moscow and Berlin today Soviet forces stormed into Vyazma, and found a scene of utter ruin — much of the city having been destroyed in the battle and the Nazis having blown up the water works, the railraod, and the airport. Moscow announces the capture of huge quantities of booty, mountains of abandoned enemy supplies. e Ped^Army^nas be'en^clos ing^n on Vy^ma for. ays. And evening af'ter evening we have noted the pdty seemed nea^r and 'hearer tq/a fall. its capture wipes vdut the' last great German salient thrust ward cow. SmALIN _ v_. An astonishing v/as evoked today. Think of it - Stalin under the table! Y/ho suggested that ^ V,rhy, President Roosevelt. lfcertn> ■feieheTrk Ilaa^e^e-±-t- - r L sj L b b ur^e h44-l—B-irtrtrlrftg t&gr^^zzdd:sxID»«ing—ef f~aI t n—o-f—B4-tr4-e—-—w-ltrh -&ta 1 ia> At the White House news conference today, the President was yasked about a remarkable story that is being told - a story that emanates from Erika Mann, daughter of the famous German writer, Thomas Mann. She has been giving some lectures, and in these she has been saying that Stalin was actually present at the Easablanca conference. Her version is that he res there ^elrtnVllth the President and Prime A Minister, and that this has been kept a secret. STALIN Tod&y the President gave the story the follo,,'in'' comment. If Stalin was at the Casblanca conference, he must have been under the table. Because neither Roosevelt nor Churchill saw him. To which the echo adds - if they saw him they certainly wouldff^t recognize him, with those mustachios. AFRICA In North Africa the British have driven the Germans into retreat west of the Mareth Line. ^ -------------------- * This Beans, oi course that the British are inside tnat .0 'tilled position along which Rommel and his Afrika Korps had been expected to make a stand. With the iareth Line a thing of the past, so far as the present military operations are concerned, General Montgomery^ Eighth Army is herding the Nazis north into the corridor that leads to Central Tunisia. / Rommel’s retreat follo’wed a violent battle in which the Afrika Korps smashed hard at the British, but was repelled. It was a wil'd melee o^- armor and air power, Rommel’s tanks launching a blow and British planes battering them badly. Whereupon the Afrika Korps abandoned its attempt, broke off the action and retired northward. the Last night,British Royal Air Force hit the Gprman industrial city of Stuttgart^ Four engine bombers dropped tons of block busters and incendiary fire makers on Stuttgart, and that ikH key industrial v<^( A Today the Nazis responded with a daylight raid against London. They bombed the outskirts, but center was left blaj^e4 and afla me/ none ;ot through to the center of the British capital. One German plane machine-gunned a crowded passenger train. That wasn*t much of a riad, but this was -- and it also happened today. American Flying Fortresses hit the Nazi-controlled Frencjjr City of Pouen, a great rail center. The Fortresses protected by swarms of fighter planes hit Rouen so har{ that flames leaped high into the sky -- flames ika* and immense clouds of black smoke from burning oil car*. ot a single fortress or fighter plane was lost, w..ii.e three Nazi fighters were shot down. The Stale Department in Washington has been receiving rumors that Hitler has had a collapse. This .7as disclosed tod-.y by Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who added that the reports were entirely unconfirmed. It has often been said that Hitler was the kind of neurotic who likely enough would have a mental breakdown in the face of Nazi disaster, and recently worldv/ide attention has been directed to the fact that the Fuehrer has not been seen in public in weeks. That produced the supposition a while ago that he might actually be dead - or ix at leas! kept out of sight by the German generels. More recently, the word spread that it was a case of collapse. hear that the rumor? haj^ been so^sridespreei^ and so tv . insistent that State Department agents* abroad have . e been picking them up, and relaying them on t<?;ashingto n> POST_V.AP Todov President Foosevelt stated that the piant i program for public works to provide jobs after the war is up *-0 ponrress. He referred to the huge program for post war planning that he has submitted to the legislators, and made comment on that one feature prtasrxsng - enormous public works. ^It to W deci-d-e w-h'^trfreT- w-e -slral-1 pl-ftn ~arrd~ a^iiofKri-a‘tre^brii.-l ion-s^ hA\~ iSHcUrt-nv;w to -take care o-f- an after —war^emplopmeivt “^4-tua-ir-i-on , or whether we shall lot trre -Ywh-o-le tliixLgu r ide Congress, meanwhile, is manifesting a good deal of opposition^lo t-he Py-gr; ident * s—p^st*Yrai— prog^ra-m^an4-^> -Is _njLap^--g3a no to study^th-Q- problem on—fte own^ ^ SALARY LIMIT The house of Representatives today voted to kill the tv. enty-live thousand dollar salary limit set by the President* This is a number one blow launched at tne White House by the legislators, who are in revolt against what the insurgents call "government by executive decree." President Roosevelt when he ordered that salaries be limited to twenty-five thousand dollars b ased a year, paxxaixJi his authority on the price fixing bill passed by Congress. This led immediately to the charge that Congress when it passed the bill had no intention of giving the President the power to restrict salaries to twenty-five thousand.The President, in return, proposed to Congress that not only should the salary limitation be retained but the idea should be extended -- that all income should be held down to twenty-five thousand Congress refused to accept that and now has * voted to put an end to the original limitation^ SALARY L1.41T ^ 2 The action taken was in the form of an amendment, a rider to th.£ bill about which there was no controversy at all -- the bill to raise the national debt limit j.rom a hundred and twenty-five billions to two hundred and ten billions. The rider procedure is an old one in Congress -- whereby something that the President -1 ., . A , he Ui may not like is tacked on to a bill of which.i^i A heartily, ufcfcRrijf „ in favor. Administration forces tried to kill the amendment, which was sponsored by Congressman Disney of Oklahoma, but lost out. The abolition of the twenty-five thousand dollar salary limitation now goes to the Senate where the whole thing is in doubt. The tactics of the Administration leaders will be to try and separate the amendment from the main bill -- thereby permitting the President to decide about each separately. In that « way, he could veto one without vetoing the other. TAXFS President Koosevelt once more today voiced his opposition to the Buml pay-as-you-go plan for income taxes. //e stated that the Ruml idea of skipping a tax year would cost the government money. It would mean that the Treasury would collect less revenue than it did last year. This was stated at the White House news conference, and renorters pointed out to the Presicent the contention made by Financier Ruml - that the Treasury would not lose. The President replied that there is ____ ' toJ^r 4. _ And’ he said the answer only one answer to that^===fiOT=CT^ is mathematically correct. #2 • under the Ruml plan some taxpayers would save money.- Some in the higher brackets ^Ji^P^.woufd save a great deal of money. * h ^ Presumably, ”eant some pe0ple Wh° & lot of profit last year and a smaller amount this year. They would save by having this yeans inco^e taxed TAXES -^2 instead of last year*s - which v'ould be skipped under the Ruml .plan. The Ways and 'deans Committee of the House of Representative, having tossed out Ruml and pay-as-you-go, today added a new gadget to the twenty per cent withholding tax. Under the system of twenty per cent deductions from all wages, a taxpayer could get on a pay-as-you-go basis by doubling up. That is - if he paid last year' ^-(and this year's__3 . . , nj„t + taxeT both during the course of this year, he wou^dn t owe anything to the Government next year - and the twenty per cent deduction from his wages would take care, at least in part, of the tax he would owe on his next year- income The Committee today approved of a clause wnereby nybody doubling up like that for pay-as-you-go would be ranted , per cent Tilc'tfnt -&4'p«r cent off is income tax bill- Te hear of a perplexing tax situation in some TAXES - 3 <>*1 industrial areas - like Cleveland. The Collectt^ of /V Internal Fevenue there stated today that thousands of Cleveland war workers are refusing to pay any attention to income tax this year. Their notion is - they won!t file any returns or pay any tax. He says he has reports that war workers are taking what he calls a - "Come and get me attitude." They've decided they won't file or -=2Hf£3^see what happens. The Collector adds that a good deal can happen. "These people," said he, "are laying themselves open to severe penalties if they do not file returns." Today tax returns in Cleveland are thirty per cent below the total received at this time last year A million are to be filed by the March|Fifteenth deadline Monday. But only half a million h^Vcome in to date. RATIONING It is interesting to compare what we’ll get under tne rationing oi meat, butter, cheese, and so on - with what the British^get under their wartime rationing. tt * get a lot more meat, two and a quarter pounds a week, A while the British get one and a quarter pounds; four and a half ounces c week^compared with the British ration of t’"0 ounces. But we’ll get much less cheese - less than two ounces a week compared with four ounces in Britain. It is well to keep in mind that this new rationing begins at midnight on March Twenty-Eighth, and that the limitation will app^y to every kind of meat%- not ooultry or game, Nor will fish be J A rationed, exceot the canned varied ies. The hard types of cheese will come under rationing, oui not the soft and perishable kind - like cream cheese, or Camenbert. Tne food shortage is certainly with us, RATIONING - 2 when the United States must resort to food rationing so extens ive 4X^2. -tboJsL, NIGHTMAPE At Minneapolis, a passing automobile driver was hailed early this morning by a boy who came running, and shouted in excitement: ’’Take me’to police headquarters’f n The lad, sixteen years old, was in his pajamas. He had run four blocks, after jumping from the window — — of his bedroom at home - had a slight cut on one Leg• "Get the police,” he panted. ”Y;e’ve got to rescue mother from those Nazi s: ies!” ' It appeared, from his breathless explanation, that the spies had locked his mother in a closet and were stealing the hidden blueprints of the secret war invention. It was all mighty bewildering to the man in -frjLuS'lp \ the agio.obile - scddecl, the lad »ok. »P,/. Yd » night»are - probably fro. too .uch rf . •fcrnXErs2Aspy movies t±c&sp?rb ^ o /~ t ~ w o~nn d ^crg 1 eirp^ o o ^ qjc m wop::rT;t: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins made a nrediction today about absenteeism - what we may expect. She said that most of the absentees had' good reason for not showing up on the job and only a small percentage were what she called "willful and deliberate truants." QJ jl & ju \ /CthJL/ latter/however,^5^ the ones>that ^ causing most of the complaint and uproar. And they, in the future, are more likely to be^ts^fl^than w^’aen. She spoke of - "young men who drink too added that these, in time to com are less likely to be the absentee e’ement than what Miss Perkins called "young girls who stay out dancing IT all-night."She pointed to the fact that the number of women war employees is increasing immensely, and hence the worker problem will be more 'and more in the feminine gender. So .ill the absentee proble.gW the feminine gender of is found mostly in the girls and their / /v WMEN WORKERS . 2 dr.ncing. They aren’t bad girls," said the Secretary of L b bor, but they must be made to feel their new responsibility." Veil, that’s always a problem - how to make people feel their responsibility. Sometimes your venerable grandfather doesn’t feel his sufficiently - 77.? VrO?KER I h? i a telephone call from 7/ashin ton which olo •' ig tiiat Lloyd Converse of ^assena, New York, is likely to get some sort of war decoration in addition to the congratulations that were tendered to him by ............................. n War Production Chief -^onald Nelsont ^ Lloyd Converse is A. being hailed as a hero of the production line, and a Number One enemy of absenteeism. He is forty-tvo years old, and he tends a furnace for the Aluminum Company of America at ^assena, New York. Lloyd lives.twenty miles from the plant w sffd.all traffic was tied .up by a blizzard that A A for two days choked the highways y .tith immense drifts of snow. Up to then Lloyd Converse had not missed a shift all winter* - a record. So what did he do when the blizzard stopped all transportation, an he had twenty miles to go? His regular •'shift began at eight o'clock in WAR WORKER - 2 the morning, and he left home at nine o^lock the night before - and started walking the twenty miles tnrough the huge drifts of snow^ Toward midnight he stopped at the home of his sister and had a bite to eat and a few minutes of rest. Whereupon he continued plodding his way through the snow for the rest of the night. He got to the plant on time the next monring - eg and was he all in? Not at all. Today a Company official stated: "Lloyd ceme to see me as soon as he reported for work, and was as fresh as man with K He \ ten hours of sleep behind him." Bat^not only did his job that day, but filled in for an extra eight hour stretch to take the place of a fellow employee who hadn't dared to venture out and brave the storm. A hero of the production line! f-wj? 'k yO j H',Xr; ^ *