GENERAL CABLES

Grey River Argus, 22 May 1947, Page 3

GENERAL CABLES

WASHINGTON, May 20, ■ The Labour Department announced the settlement, of the last phase of the nation-wide telephone strike to-day when the Communication Equipment Workers’ Association accepted an average wage increase of 111 cents an hour from the Western Electric Company The settlement of this last major aspect of the telephone dispute which lasted forty-four hours directly affected many telephone workers of other unions who had agreed to return to work but who refused to cross the communications workers' picket lines in about twenty states. The settlement is expected to bring a full restoration of all telephone services to-morrow. MADRID, May 20. A former Foreign Minister, Senor Suner, who is General Franco’s brother-in-law, discloses in a justpublished book of memoirs that Hitler in November, 1940, made three vital demands, all of which Spain refused. The demands were:—

1. The closing of the Mediterranean by an attack on. Gibraltar, as “the Italians have committed a grave and unpardonable mistake by invading Greece and it is necessary to act quickly by closing the Mediterranean in the West.' 2. Permission to send German troops through Spain. 3. The granting of a military base in the Canaries to Germany. Senor Suner claims that he did murch to prevent a German invasion of Spain. PARIS, May 20. The British, French and Belgian conference on the territories which the three Powers hold in West and Central Africa opened with the offi-cially-stated object of co-ordinating the public health, irrigation and communications service in those tP” ritories. The Baris newspaper Combat, however, says the conference fore-! shadows <he complete transfer with-; in three years of British military msDonsibilitv in the Mediterranean the United States. The line of the. British Emnire would then be drawn i through East Africa, Kenya, Rho- > desia and Nigeria, replacing Gibraltar as the western ba’lion of de fence.