News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 27, 1913

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— A recent earthquake in the vicinity of Guatemala City, Central America, destroyed several villages. One hundred children are reported to have been killed when a school building collapsed.

— Hollow Horn Bear, the noted chief of the Sioux Indians, contracted a severe cold on inauguration day. Pneumonia resulted, and his death occurred at Washington, D. C., on March 15. The remains were taken to the South Dakota reservation of the tribe for burial.

— Eleven men are missing, all believed to have been drowned, as the result of a New York harbor collision on the night of March 12, in which a steam lighter, the “Wyckoff,” was run down off Governors Island and cut in twain by an unidentified vessel, thought to be a laden tugboat.

— French engineering has triumphed in a task attended by tremendous difficulties—a railroad over the Alps. The last rail of the Loetschberg Railroad, joining Berne with Brieg, was laid February 28. The new road opens an international highway to north and south Europe by way of the Loetschberg and Simplon tunnels across the Central Alps. Immediately express-train service will be started over the new line.

— The Italian government is waging war against such moving-picture shows as are contributing to the perversion of morals and encouraging brutal instincts and criminality. A strict police censorship has been established. Films dealing with immoral subjects are absolutely forbidden, as are antinational subjects. Other things prohibited are representations of crimes, suicides, or sensational trials, especially if they lessen the prestige of the police; scenes of cruelty, involving men or animals, surgical operations, vivisection, and the like. This film campaign is due to the recent increase in crimes and suicides, which is attributed to the extension of the moving-picture business, the low prices of admission resulting in heavy patronage from the most ignorant part of the population.

— A recent number of McClure’s states that Jews are the greatest owners of real estate in New York, after the hereditary proprietors, like the Astors; that they control the clothing business, the theaters, most of the department stores, many great banking houses, and some branches of the city government; that the school-teachers are largely Jewish, the police force is becoming Jewish, and most of the prize-fighters are Jews with Irish names! The Jews are extremely influential in the railways of the country; they control the whisky business, eighty per cent of the members of the National Liquor Dealers’ Association being Jews; they make eighty-five per cent of the cigars, leaving the great American Tobacco Company only fifteen per cent; while 90,000,000 Americans look to them for their amusements. In a hundred years, a writer suggests, the Semitic influence may be the preponderating one in this country.

— Of girls in India who have not completed their fifth year more than 300,000 are wives and nearly 18,000 are widows, while approximately 9,500,000 girls fifteen years of age and under have entered the married state.

— Train service on the railroads in Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and South Dakota was tied up for several days last week as the result of a severe blizzard which swept over the Central West. Many trains were stalled out on the snow-covered prairies.

— The number of suicides in Germany is distressingly large. In 1909 there were 14,225 cases, about the same number of lives that Germany lost in the war with France. It is attributed by some writers to the growth of infidelity in Germany, and the consequent loss of hopefulness.

— Postage-stamps in mile lengths soon will be printed by the government, as the result of the invention of a machine by Benjamin R. Stickney, of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which will print, gum, dry, and either cut into sheets or coil in mile lengths the product of the press.

— British suffragettes have suffered a serious loss in the physical breakdown of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the militant leader. Mrs. Flora Drummond has taken her place. Suffrage meetings held in Hyde Park have been broken up by the London mob, the situation at times assuming alarming aspects. The best endeavors of the police were all that saved the women from bodily harm.

— As the result of a destructive windstorm which swept over portions of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee last week, thirteen persons were killed and many injured. Two days later, March 15, the worst rainstorm that has visited the South in twenty-five years swept through the same district, exacting a toll of more than one hundred human lives, and causing property damage running far into the millions.

— A London cablegram to the New York American says: “The exploration of the inside of the Sphinx has had interesting results, according to advices from Egypt. Professor Reisner succeeded in removing the accumulated sand of sixty centuries from the interior of the head, and gained entrance through the neck to a temple that runs the whole length of the gigantic body, measuring one hundred twenty feet. In the temple is a pyramid forming the tomb of Menes I, king of Egypt. It is supposed to contain his mummified body. Sloping passages from the temple lead to other chambers yet unexplored.”

— Four prominent army and navy officers appointed by the French government to cooperate with the United States in determining, by means of wireless tests from the station at Arlington, the exact longitude between Washington and Paris, arrived in the capital March 18, ready for preliminary work. These visitors will be the guests of the nation during their stay. All the nations of the world are cooperating in this effort to establish the longitude between the various countries and principal cities, and when the series of tests are concluded between all nations, the true map of the world will be completed for the first time.