Current Mention

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 2, 1903

— An earthquake at Melazgherd, in Asiatic Turkey, April 29, destroyed this town and several hundred houses in its vicinity, and caused great loss of life, the estimated number of victims being 2,000.

— Leaders of the national freight handlers union are planning a demand for a twenty-five per cent increase in wages. The fight will be made in one city at a time. Chicago is the headquarters of the movement.

— Tornadoes in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, May 27, caused the loss of ten human lives, and great destruction of property. Other casualties from storms were reported in Iowa and Nebraska, May 25 and 26.

— Prof. W. B. Bailey, of Yale University, has been studying suicide statistics in the United States, and finds from an examination of 29,344 cases that three times as many males as females end life in this way, the cause in the great majority of instances being despondency.

— Edgar Wallace Conable, of Colorado Springs, Colo., has purchased 8,000 acres of timber and fruit land in Benton County, Ark., where he will found a vegetarian colony. Colonists will be forbidden to use meat, alcoholic stimulants, or tobacco. The land is favorably situated in the Ozark fruit belt.

— One of the most noteworthy utterances at the Presbyterian general assembly at Los Angeles was a declaration by the Rev. Chas. L. Thompson, a prominent Presbyterian writer, that the only way to deal with the Mormon Church is to crush it. By what means this is to be done he did not state.

— A Pine Bluff, Ark., telegram dated May 27 stated that business there was almost at a standstill on account of the declaration by a negress who posed as a prophet, that the town would be destroyed by a cyclone the following Friday. Such occurrences indicate that superstition is still very prevalent in this “enlightened” age.

— The lowlands along the Des Moines River, Iowa, are flooded by excessive rains, and at Des Moines six thousand persons were driven from their homes and forced to camp in the open country. The city of Topeka, Kan., is partly submerged by a rise of the Kansas River, and tales of storm and floods come also from points in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Many lives have been lost, 20,000 or more people are homeless, and the damage to property amounts at least to several million dollars.

— Labor unions and other competitors of A. F. Norton, of Hartford City, Ind., who has been conducting stores there and in seven other cities in Indiana on the plan which he conceives Christ would follow, have forced him to vacate his place in the former city. Mr. Norton sold goods at cost each day after having made a fair day’s profit, and this philanthropic plan did not meet the approval of other storekeepers.

— An automobile race from Paris to Madrid which was undertaken by enthusiastic automobilists of France and other countries, was abandoned after the first stage of the contest had been finished, a sacrifice of life and limb having resulted which would hardly be exceeded in a small-sized battle. President Loubet has forbidden further contests of the kind on French soil, and automobile racing in all lands has received a serious setback. Some of the machines attained a speed of eighty miles an hour.

— The Interstate Commerce Commission has called on the United States courts to decide whether or not the commission has power to enforce its decrees upon railroads in this country. The commission is a body appointed many years ago, and invested by the government with authority to regulate interstate commerce; but its decrees were openly set at defiance by the railroads concerned in the Pennsylvania coal strike, and the decision of the courts will determine whether the commission is to continue and be an authoritative body, or whether it is to be relegated to oblivion as a dead letter.