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Friday, April 20, 2001

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dated April 20, 1951: A woman at the war

One of the toughest assignments in journalism was war reporting. Quite apart from the general risk of losing one's life, the reporter usually had the greatest difficulty in getting a clear picture of what was going on. Then there was the hurdle of military censorship before the final problem of how to get the messages back to the newspaper one represented before they had become stale. The war in Korea had taken a heavy toll of pressmen. It was all the more remarkable therefore that one of the best reporters at the Korean front was a woman, Miss Marguerite Higgins, who had just published a book of her observations on the campaigns, including the famous Inchon landing. Miss Higgins got to Korea before the war started and she was on the job for nearly six months, from June to December of last year. (Before Korea she had spent four years behind the Iron Curtain in Poland and Berlin and had already scored high marks in the Journalist test of getting the news past the censoring authorities). The early months of the Korean war were reported, by Gen. MacArthur's orders, without censorship; it was only recently that the curtain had descended, with the consequence that, as one American journalist put it, the enemy probably knew more about the American troops than the Americans.

Netaji Bose:

Dr. B. V. Keskar, stated in Parliament, in a written reply to Mr. H. V. Kamath, that the Government had not received any special communication or news of any kind of evidence which might lead to the possibility of Subhas Chandra Bose, being alive.

The Deputy Minister for External Affairs, recalled the statement made by the Prime Minister in 1946, after due enquiry and the collection of whatever evidence, it was possible to gather to the effect that there was little doubt that Subhas Bose died on August 18, 1945. This conclusion, said Dr. Keskar, had been confirmed from reports received from the Japanese Government and their agencies and in particular by a statement of a medical officer of the Japanese Army who stated that he had made out a death certificate, the cause of the death, being extensive burns and shock.

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