Current Mention

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Jan 2, 1908

— Statistics compiled from the reports of life-saving stations and other sources show that 135 lives have been lost on the Great Lakes thus far during the year 1907. The property loss during the same period is estimated at $2,600,000.

— The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions has received advices from the interior of Turkey showing unusually severe famine conditions. Bread is double its usual price, and prices for other necessities are four or five times higher than fifteen years ago.

— The State council of Switzerland has approved a plan of the federated railroads for the immediate construction of a second Simplon tunnel through the Alps. The first Simplon tunnel has been opened to traffic only since May 19, 1906, and is estimated to have cost $14,000,000.

— The clash of the striking nitrate workers with the authorities at Iquique, Chile, was more destructive to life than was at first reported. Fully two hundred strikers are reported to have been killed in an encounter with the government troops December 21 and 22, and the situation is still serious. From Santiago it is reported that several thousand men have returned to the mines.

— An eruption on November 28 of a submarine volcano about 600 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands is reported by the crew of a vessel recently into port. A column of water about 50 feet in circumference was forced 150 feet into the air, and the sea within a radius of half a mile appeared to be boiling. The disturbance was watched for more than an hour, and for two hours detonations could be heard.

— There is prospect that the treaty for the annexation of the Kongo now before the Belgian Chamber of Deputies will be withdrawn, as in caucus on December 18 the liberal members of the Chamber, upon whose support the government has relied, voted unanimously to oppose the treaty on the ground that its conditions unduly limit the sovereignty of Belgium and disregard her rights.

— Justice Gould, of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, has granted an injunction forbidding the American Federation of Labor to boycott the Bucks Stove and Range Company of St. Louis, or to print the company's name in the "Unfair" and "We don't patronize" list of the official organ of the federation. But the January number of the Federationist, a part of which was printed before the injunction became operative, contains this firm's name in the forbidden list.

— The legality of the action of President Roosevelt in discharging without honor three companies of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, on account of the affray at Brownsville, Tex., is to be tried in the courts. Action has been brought in the District Court of the United States for the southern district of New York against the government, in behalf of one of the soldiers, to recover the amount of pay which he claims from the day of his dismissal to the day of the termination of his enlistment.