Current Mention

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 25, 1902

— Civil war is reported to prevail in Afghanistan. The brothers of the ameer have conspired to secure his overthrow.

— Wednesday, November 19, was a national “day of penitence and prayer” in Germany. Newspaper work was suspended, and all the theaters were closed.

— Severe cold weather is reported from France and Germany, and German meteorologists predict that the coming winter will be the hardest in many years.

— A fuel famine is reported from the town of Greensburg, Kan., no coal being obtainable because all that is ordered is confiscated by the railroads. The residents have telegraphed to Governor Stanley for assistance.

— Reports from Milford, Utah, state that an “extinct” volcano in the Wasatch Mountain range has broken out into activity, throwing out smoke, dust, and lava, accompanied by explosions that are heard at a distance of twenty miles.

— Protestant ministers in Bayonne, N. J., have begun a crusade against Sunday baseball and football games in that city. Those against whom the movement is directed threaten to retaliate by stopping other forms of Sunday recreation.

— The butchers’ association of New York City has brought its power and influence to bear to secure a strict enforcement of the Sunday law in their line of trade. The result is visible in the closed doors of butcher shops in the metropolis on Sunday.

— Owing to an unprecedented freight blockade in Pittsburg, 60,000 men in that city are idle. Mills and shops are forced to close, and business is turned away because of the inability to secure raw material. A shortage of railway freight cars appears to be the chief cause of the trouble.

— Horse flesh is being extensively used in Germany in the manufacture of sausages, and much of it is also sold for “beef,” owing to the scarcity and high price of the latter. Old and broken-down horses are imported from England and other countries, it is said, and are fattened to be sold for food.

— Inhabitants of St. Vincent are reported as being in a desperate situation owing to the repeated eruptions of La Soufrière, which have affected almost every part of the island. The refugees have crowded into the southeastern end of the island, where there is a scarcity of water and much suffering for the necessaries of life. Something must be done, and no one can tell when the volcano will become permanently quiescent.

— The United States is negotiating for the control of a strip of land at least three miles in width on each side of the Panama Canal route, and for control also of the cities of Panama and Colon, situated at the terminals of the route, in order to be able to enforce proper sanitary regulations during the construction of the canal. This concession to the United States is viewed with distrust on the isthmus, and for this reason the negotiations have been prolonged.

— It is reported from Vienna that King Leopold of Belgium is suffering from mental aberration.

— The Indian government has appropriated £1,500,000 for the relief of sufferers in India from drought and famine.

— A monument was erected November 19 in Bartholomew County, Ind., to mark the location of the center of population in the United States.

— It is believed that between 2,000 and 3,000 people lost their lives in the recent eruption of the Santa Maria volcano, in Guatemala.

— A report from St. Petersburg states that two hundred persons perished in a conflagration which destroyed the trading town of Resht, Persia, recently.

— Great suffering is reported to exist among the peasants in Finland, on account of a failure of crops, which were ruined by frosts and floods. Thousands of families, says a St. Petersburg paper, are suffering from starvation, and from diseases due to lack of food.

— The Ministerial Alliance of Salt Lake City has begun a fight against the election of the Mormon, Reed Smoot, to the United States Senate. If he is chosen by the Utah Legislature, the ministers will, they say, draft a petition to Congress calling for his rejection by the members of that body.

— A young lady in Peoria, Ill., recently took a quantity of a preparation guaranteed to produce a beautiful complexion, and died from its effects about a day later. A lady “magnetist and beauty specialist” of that city who had compounded the stuff and persuaded the victim to buy a bottle of it, is under arrest. Her “medicine” was found to be composed largely of arsenic.

— A young man nineteen years of age was arrested at Winamac, Ind., for stealing, and at his trial it was discovered that he had made arrangements for being caught in the act, in order that he might be sent to jail, where he would have opportunity to learn a trade. He explained that the rules of the labor unions shut him out whenever he applied for work, and he could get employment only in the streets or on a farm.

— Anti-Catholics in Great Britain are making an effort to have the Jesuits and priests of other Catholic orders expelled from that country, under a law passed in the reign of George IV, which decreed that any person in the kingdom of Great Britain who should become a Jesuit or member of any other like religious order should, upon conviction, be banished “for the term of his natural life.”

— Some hope of the dawning of a brighter day for Russia comes with the announcement that M. Pobiedonosteff, the procurator-general of the Holy Synod, who has, since his accession to the office in 1880, been the strongest enemy of liberal ideas in Russia, has resigned on account of the infirmities of age. “His retirement,” says the New York Sun, “will mean the removal from public affairs of the strongest man in the empire and the greatest enemy of anything approaching representative government.”

— Another great hotel, larger and finer than any now built, is projected in New York City. It will occupy the site and take the place of the old Hotel Brunswick, and will fill the entire block on which the latter now stands. Nearly $5,000,000 will be spent on the building.

— President Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, said, at the recent annual session of the organization in New Orleans, that “unless our unions radically and soon change their course and cease quarreling among themselves over jurisdiction, we shall at no distant date be in the midst of an internecine contest unparalleled in any year of the industrial world, aye, not even when workmen of different trades were arrayed against each other behind barricades in the streets over the question of trade against trade.” The statement caused a great sensation among the convention delegates.