No 10 says Falklands sovereignty rests with UK after report of US 'review'

By the Associated Press. The State Department has before it the question whether it shall reply to a British communication several months old which, while giving Comdr. Byrd permission to use British claimed territory in the Antarctic, sets forth that Great Britain had sovereignty over certain lands in that area. There has been no decision as to the necessity of reply by the American Government and there are no indications that any early action was contemplated. The announcement last February that Comdr. Byrd had discovered some new lands in the Antarctic brought out the fact that international law lays down the precept that discoveries such as made by Byrd and his predecessors of American, British, Norwegian and other nationality in the Antarctic establish a claim for the nation in whose name the discovery is made but do not constitute a permanent right to the land discovered. How far the discovery of an unsettled land gives a right to it, one international authority says, is a question which neither the law nor the usages of nations has yet definitely settled. The British government heretofore has taken the position that a discovery made by private individual in the prosecution of a private enterprise gives no right. Unofficially it was said here at the time of the announcement of Comdr. Byrd's discovery that if the question of validity as to the claim to the land for the United States should arise it probably would be settled by an international arbitr[ation].