News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 20, 1913

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— The inauguration of Pres. Woodrow Wilson cost approximately $73,000.

— A disastrous fire, causing a loss of $100,000, destroyed thirteen business houses at Presque Isle, Maine, March 9.

— On March 8, 200 natives were killed and 400 others wounded in a fight between French soldiers and natives in the interior of Morocco.

— The British steamer “Lugano” went ashore on the Ajax Reef off the Florida coast, March 9. The 116 passengers were rescued by a passing tug.

— On March 7 an explosion of 340 tons of dynamite in the lower harbor at Baltimore, Md., destroyed two steamers and a tug near by, killed fifty men, and injured many others.

— Dr. Friederich Friedmann, the Berlin bacteriologist who claims to have discovered a serum which will cure tuberculosis, is now in this country demonstrating the efficacy of his turtle-germ vaccine.

— On March 10, King George and Queen Mary of England were the targets of a suffragette attack, and a London riot followed an attempt of the women to present His Majesty with a petition asking votes for women. Seven suffragettes were arrested.

— The United States uses one fifth of all the sugar made in the world.

— In the partial sterilization experiments of J. N. Harvey, an English gardener, steam at eighty pounds is forced through soil fifteen minutes, four or five cart-loads being treated in a day. In the treated soil the yield of tomatoes was increased eighty per cent.

— Air-ship travel is the remedy for tuberculosis advocated by Dr. Flemming at a recent meeting of the Berlin Aeronautical Association. High altitudes are known to be of great benefit, and he declared that no germ could survive fifteen minutes in the sun’s rays on a high flight.

— It is estimated that the loss as a result of the strike of ready-made suit workers in New York City, in effect since December 30, aggregates over $30,000,000. The manufacturers lost $20,000,000 of this sum in suspended business, the strikers themselves losing the remainder in wages.

— Intermittent flashes are being tested on Swedish railways in place of the usual fixed lights. Cylinders of acetylene are used, and control valves give ordinarily sixty tenth-of-a-second flashes per minute. There is the usual control of color by the semaphore arm. The signals are recognized with certainty at a great distance, and the special use of the system for express-trains should increase the safety of travel at high speed.

— As nearly as can be determined, the crops of the nation in 1912 had a money value of about $10,000,000,000. During the year there was expended in malt and spirituous liquors and on the jails, almshouses, and the asylums made necessary by the use of these poisons about $5,000,000,000. What this withdrawal of $5,000,000,000 from useful investment means to every individual of the country affords food for much thought.

— During the past ten years, according to the Christian Observer, through immigration the Roman Catholic Church has grown twice as fast as all the Protestant churches combined; and United States statistics covering a period of fifteen years reveal a Catholic increase of sixty-one per cent to our Protestant growth of thirty-nine per cent. There are twelve States in which the Roman Catholic outnumbers all Protestant churches combined. It is true of every New England State. In Rhode Island the Roman Catholics have seventy-four per cent of the total church-membership.

— Whooping-cough, usually neglected or carelessly treated, is responsible for 5,000 deaths in the United States every year,—a total equal to fatalities from scarlet fever, and half as large as those from diphtheria,—according to statistics compiled by the Georgia State Board of Health. Ninety-seven per cent of these deaths are among children under five years of age according to the figures, and the vast majority of them result from complications growing directly out of the cough itself. Pneumonia and kidney and heart diseases develop readily from wrongly treated cases, it is stated. Whooping-cough is highly contagious, the board further reports, the paroxysmal cough of the patient saturating the air with germs of the disease.