Disappearance of Amelia Earhart Opens Decades of Conspiracy Theory

Spanish Republican forces launched a counter-attack against the Nationalist troops besieging Madrid in the Brunete sector. It achieved some local success but proved anything but decisive. The Republic’s military position was poor and this kind simply frittered away what resources remained.

Having established a comfortable position in northern china Japan resumed its attempts to squeeze territory out of the Soviet Union. In defiance of an agreement reached the previous weak between Litvinoff, the Soviet foreign minister, and Shigemetsu, the Japanese ambassador, Japanese troop landed on a few worthless islets in the Amur River. In response to Soviet protests the Japanese foreign ministry first declared it knew nothing of any such move and then asserted that Japan would be entirely within its rights to do so. As the Soviets had evacuated the islets in an attempt to defuse tension, it was clear that this particular issue was not one over which Moscow was going to go to war.

On July 2^nd a heavily laden Lockheed Electra aircraft being flown by the celebrated aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae airfield in New Guinea. They were attempting a round the world flight and their next destination was a tiny island in the Pacific, Howland Island. They never arrived although increasingly faint and garbled radio messages were received. That was the last that they were heard of, ushering decades of speculation and conspiracy theory. Many claim that Earhart and Noonan fell prisoner of the Japanese and just recently an entirely ambiguous photographer has been trumpeted as “proof” of this.