News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 14, 1913

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— The Norwegian Parliament has refused to vote a proposed credit of $40,500 to cover the expense of Norway's official participation in the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915.

— An Illinois man has invented a calendar pen. The barrel contains a revolving rod with the dates on it. Every morning the piston is turned to show the date, and it remains in that position till altered the next morning.

— Recently the seventieth anniversary of the introduction of the first adhesive stamp was observed in London by philatelists. Sir Rowland had recommended its use three years previously, but they came into force in 1841 only. There is but one block of nineteen stamps of this issue now extant, which is valued at $1,500.

— State Excise Commissioner Farley has announced that New York State has officially gone into the liquor business in having passed a law which provides for the selling at auction of all wines, liquors, and malt drinks confiscated through his department. The first item on the list for the forthcoming sale is 900 barrels of wine. Previously all such liquors were poured into the sewers.

— Plans for extension, improvement, and reduction in rates of the parcel-post have been announced by Postmaster-General Burleson. The changes which have been proposed include an increase from eleven to twenty pounds in spect maximum weight of parcels, a material reduction in the postal rates in the first and second zones, and the abandonment of the parcel-post map as a means of computing rates and the substitution for it of a rate chart individualized to every post-office in the United States.

— A bill to pension old people over sixty-five years of age whose income is under ten dollars a week has been introduced in Congress. The provision is to pension those with incomes of less than $6 a week at $4 a week; incomes of from $6 to $7 at $3; between $7 and $8, $2 a week; and from $8 to $9, $1 a week. The bill would disqualify all criminals, lunatics, and inmates of almshouses, and all men over sixty-five years old who, for any extended period, failed to earn according to their ability. The bill is drawn upon the plan of the British old-age pension law now in operation.

— The report of the American Bible Society for 1913 states that the total issues of the society at home and abroad amounted to 4,049,610 volumes. These consisted of 399,734 Bibles, 713,891 New Testaments, and 2,935,985 portions. It was an advance over any previous year in the society's history. It was more than twice the issues of five years ago. For twenty-five years preceding, the annual issues averaged 1,500,000. Of the total issues, 2,107,859 volumes were issued from the Bible House in New York, which is an advance over the issues of last year of 270,503 volumes, and 1,941,751 volumes were issued by the society's agents abroad, being printed on mission and other presses in Turkey, Syria, Siam, and Japan. The total issues of the society in the ninety-seven years amount to 98,268,175 volumes.

— July 27, marked the end of the Paterson, N. J., strike, when the handful left of the original 26,000 striking silk-mill workers, refused permission by the authorities of Haledon to hold a final protest meeting in the little borough on the outskirts of Paterson, decided to go quietly back to work as fast as the mills can make places for them. The strikers are returning to the wages and the conditions they left on February 25; they have a loss in wages of $5,600,000 to struggle against, the city of Paterson is out $50,000 spent for extra police protection, the manufacturers estimate their loss at $1,000,000, and admit it may take years for the silk city to entirely regain its prestige as a manufacturing center. Hundreds of merchants, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and small capitalists, who have faced extinction during the bitter industrial war, when sixty per cent of the working population was not earning a dollar, are bravely trying to recoup their losses.