PO BAG 1: WWII

11 January 2017

Journalist Clare Hollingworth, who broke news of WW II, dies

This is a Monday, Oct. 10, 2016 file photo of Clare Hollingworth, center, a British former longtime foreign correspondent, is surrounded by friends and admirers at her birthday party at Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club. British war correspondent Clare Hollingworth, who broke the news of the Nazi invasion of Poland that started World War II, has died in Hong Kong Tuesday Jan. 10, 2017, at the age of 105. She spent her life on the front lines of the world's major conflicts, reporting from the Middle East, North Africa and Vietnam, for British newspapers, then lived her final decades in Hong Kong after being stationed in China in the 1970s.

As German tanks encircled the Polish town of Katowice, rookie British newspaper reporter Clare Hollingworth picked up the phone and dialed the British Embassy. An official there didn't believe what she told him, so she dangled the phone out the window so he could hear the ominous rumbling for himself.

"Listen!" she implored. "Can't you hear it?"

Hollingworth was 27, and just a week into her job with the Daily Telegraph of London. She had the scoop of a lifetime: World War II had just begun.

29 December 2015

South Korea, Japan reach landmark deal on WWII sex slaves

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se, right, ushers his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida at the start of their meeting at Foreign Ministry in Seoul Monday, Dec. 28, 2015. The foreign ministers met Monday to try to resolve a decades-long impasse over Korean women forced into Japanese military-run brothels during World War II.

An apology from Japan's prime minister and a pledge of more than $8 million sealed a breakthrough deal Monday in a decades-long impasse with South Korea over Korean women forced into Japanese military-run brothels during World War II.

The accord, which aims to resolve the emotional core of South Korea's grievances with its former colonial overlord, could begin to reverse decades of animosity and mistrust between the two thriving democracies, trade partners and staunch U.S. allies. It represents a shift for Tokyo's conservative government and a new willingness to compromise by previously wary Seoul.