Foreign News: Going, Going . . .

Sicilian separatists want independence from Italy. Last week Sicilian separatism reached the shooting stage. In Palermo, Italian troops tommy-gunned 2,500 rioting Sicilians, killed 19, wounded 102. In Rome dry, precise British Ambassador Sir Noel Charles conveyed to Premier Ivanoe Bonomi’s hard-pressed Government a precise, official message from London: any report that Britain was supporting Sicilian separation was utterly false.

Next day the Palermo shooting continued, casualties increased. The New York Times’s Herbert L. Matthews investigated. His judgment: the riots were due in part to economic misery, lack of food. But agents .provocateurs of the powerful Latifondisti (big land owners) had used this misery to promote Sicilian revolt.

Italy’s empire seemed about to fall apart. Marshal Josip Broz Tito was doggedly pushing Yugoslavia’s claim to Trieste, Fiume, Istria. (In the U.S. last week appeared Yugoslavia and Italy, a pamphlet quoting Marshal Tito, his Foreign Commissioner Dr. Josip Smodlaka and others, urging the Yugoslav claims.) In Athens, the Greeks demanded, and with British help would likely get, the Dodecanese Islands.

Harried Italians had British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s word for it that Italy’s African empire was gone. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah, licked his chops in the expectation of regaining Eritrea. In North Africa, the Grand Senussi Seyyid Mohamed Idris expected that Britain would hand him Cyrenaica under some form of protectorate. Disposition of Italian Libya and Tripoli had not yet been suggested.