Tribune: "Commodity distribution set August 15." The racket is you have to buy a P10 share in the Manila Consumers Cooperative Association to get your P0.275 worth of prime commodities and P3.50 worth of cigarettes.

"Capture of Hengyang effected after only five days of fighting" (the fifth day of the fifth offensive).

Public Pulser Amado Alovera asks how a family can get along with only 150 grams of edible oil. And "with the distribution as rare as Halley's comet," he can't figure out why we get 1/2 box of matches.

The average poor family has one breadwinner working for the Japanese. Even girls of 12 years and under get full wages and 600 grams of rice for working in the airfields and construction sites. The rice, cooked as lugao, feeds a family of five, with the barest bit of vegetable or camote added for taste or variety. Even among the better off, there are few people who haven't lost weight. Most of them could afford the loss; the poor had no surplus weight but were at least healthy before the war because food and medicines were cheap. Now the dreaded scourge of the country, the almost perennial (though almost conquered) Tuberculosis is on a stampede.

At last, Manolo delivered my radio today.