p. 20 | News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Jun 6, 1912

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— During the recent celebration of the Passover, the oldest feast of the Jewish calendar, the Jews of Chicago consumed 2,000,000 pounds of matzoth (unleavened bread) and 150,000 bottles of wine.

— A great project for a French trans-african railway, extending from Tangier to Juba, on the banks of the Indian Ocean, has been revealed by Senator Gauthier. The cost is estimated at $600,000,000. The motive power is to be electricity, generated by waterfalls in the neighborhood of Lake Tchad.

— An indication of the approaching completion of excavation work on the Panama Canal is found in the comparatively small amount of dynamite to be used during the next fiscal year. The canal engineers estimate that 3,986,500 pounds of the explosive will be sufficient, and bids for supplying this amount have been asked for. During the present year 8,533,000 pounds were bought.

— Municipal authorities in many larger cities might take note of a hygienic reform just instituted in Montgomery, Ala., where street-cars are to be cleaned every night, and thoroughly disinfected twice a week.

— The old frigate "Pensacola," first under command of Admiral Farragut, later a flag-ship at foreign stations, and in recent years a training-ship, was recently destroyed by fire in a remote section of San Francisco Bay.

— Thomas A. Edison recently announced that he expects to spend $3,000,000 and devote eight years to the work of perfecting a repertory of educational films that will meet the requirements he has set to make the moving picture useful in the schoolroom.

— It is stated by Major F. F. Russell, of the American army medical corps, that as the result of antityphoid vaccination that disease has practically been wiped out from the army. He declared that 1,580 deaths resulted from typhoid during the Spanish-American war, but during the army maneuvers in Texas last year only one case developed.

— Much anxiety is felt regarding the outcome of affairs in Cuba. A condition of insurgency exists among the Negroes of Matanzas, Santa Clara, and Oriente provinces, especially in the last named, and the government is straining every nerve to stamp out the rebellion by the use of all the military forces at its disposal, even at the cost of reducing the garrison at Havana to a few companies.

— Instead of laboriously digging out coal and bringing it to the earth's surface for use as fuel, Sir William Ramsay has proposed the ingenious scheme of burning the coal where it is, and bringing the gas thus generated through pipes to the surface, there to be used in running gas-engines. Experiments are to be made in trying out the plan on a small scale.

— In a Negro school at Utica, Miss., the commencement program, following the example set at Hampton and Tuskegee, formed a practical demonstration of the industrial pursuits taught. Hats were made before the audience; a girl's waist was cut, sewed, and finished; iron was forged and welded; clothes were washed; and a farmer's dinner was cooked, served, and eaten on the platform.

— Why is the range of wireless telegraphy so much greater at night than by day? Mr. Marconi, in a recent address, said that this fact, first noticed by him in 1902, is due to the ionization of the gaseous molecules of the air affected by ultraviolet light. Ionization is a term used in describing electrolytic decomposition. In ordinary language, the sun's rays seem to deaden electrical potency just as they appear to kill the flames of a fire.

— It is rumored that the street railway interests of the country are becoming quite seriously concerned at the prospect for restoration of the three-cent piece to the national currency. The bill recently passed by the House authorizing the coinage of a three-cent and a half-cent piece was warmly-indorsed by the mayors of Ohio cities which have three-cent street-car fares. The bill is now pending before the Senate Finance Committee.

— An expedition from Yale University, led by Professor Hiram Bingham, is to make further explorations this year in Peru, in the regions where a Yale party last year found human remains supposed to be not less than twenty thousand years old, embedded in glacial deposits.

— Massachusetts has a new law which makes it necessary for persons who have been divorced and apply again for license to marry, to produce a certified copy of the decree which granted them divorce. This certificate is presented to the town clerk, who issues the new license to marry, and is furnished to the minister for his information. The object of the new regulation is to make it clear whether remarriage on the part of the divorced is legal.

— Among other centenaries celebrated this year is that of the manufacture in France of beet-sugar, which has become one of the most important and lucrative of French industries. There are sections in the French provinces where the beet is the king of products, and where for miles around the sugar factories the ordinarily good French roads are often pulpy with the beets that have dropped from farmers' wagons on the way to the great yards, where they are piled in readiness to go through the factory processes.

— The tide of immigrants pouring through the gates at Ellis Island bids fair to swamp the government officials, and overtax the capacity of quarters provided for their care. It is said that more than 100,000 came in during the month of April last. To provide sleeping accommodations for 25,000 people each night is a task for a whole war department. To examine all these people, many of whom are children, and pronounce upon the condition of their health and mental powers, as the laws require in order to protect the country against physical and mental peril, seems to be impossible.

— The Erie Railroad recently dedicated at Harriman, N. Y., a monument commemorating the first telegraph train order ever sent over a railroad. This order was transmitted in 1851, when Charles Minot was general superintendent of the road. This is the order sent: "To agent and operator at Goshen: Hold the train for further orders. Conductor and engineer day express: Run to Goshen regardless of opposing trains." This message marked the transition from the days when trains crawled over single track, haphazard from switch to switch, to the present day of speed, limited only by the capacity of the locomotives.

— The Rothschild oil interests, a dominating financial factor in almost every European nation, have secured a lease on Southern Pacific land, facing the outer harbor, and purpose to make Los Angeles the seat of war against the Standard Oil. On April 24 application was filed with the Harbor Commission for permission to erect on this land oil-tanks and a distributing base that will represent an immediate investment of $5,000,000. Forty big tank steamers, which are used by the Rothschild interests for transporting Oriental oil along the commercial highways of the Pacific Ocean, will bring petroleum from the oilfields of the Far East.

— It is claimed that a little zinc patch on the roof of the church of the Holy Sepulcher, was the occasion of the Crimean war. There was a leak in the dome of the building, but neither the Latin nor Greek churches would allow the other to make the needed repairs; hence the deadly war.

— Marine insurance companies have sustained this year probably the severest losses in the history of such companies — that of the “Titanic” which may amount to $10,000,000, and that of the “Oceana,” which went down with $5,000,000 in specie aboard. The Spanish galleons of old, with their fabled treasures, represented no such sums as these.

— The Territory of Alaska has yielded to its owner, the United States, $206,600,000 in mineral wealth; and $222,710,036 in fish and furs; and it has paid directly into the United States treasury $14,792,461 in cash. Adding the tribute of fisheries, furs, minerals, and cash, the people of the United States have within forty-two years taken $444,102,500 out of Alaska. The territory was bought from Russia in 1867 for $7,200,000.

— A bomb explosion in Oporto, Portugal, recently was the means of revealing the existence of an extensive bomb-making industry. The explosion was caused through the accidental substitution of a loaded bomb for an uncharged one with which a man was experimenting. The premises were demolished by the explosion, and thirteen persons were killed. The police discovered nearly 500 uncharged bombs in the ruins, and also a considerable sum of money in gold and notes.

— Mr. and Mrs. Isadore Straus, who perished in the “Titanic” disaster, are widely and deeply mourned. They were noted for their activity in humanitarian and philanthropic work. Among their later manifestations of this spirit have been provision, made during a visit a short time before starting home, for the poor Jews of Jerusalem. Mrs. Straus had been so disturbed by what she saw during a visit to the Ghetto that her report made to her husband led him to provide the sum of $10,000 annually for three years to support a soup kitchen. Since then between five and six hundred persons have been fed daily by this agency. The news of the death of their benefactors caused 30,000 Hebrews at Jerusalem to enter upon a season of fasting and mourning.

— In its policy of readiness to crush the Negro rebellion in Cuba, growing hourly more serious, the United States government on May 26 ordered two divisions of the battle-ship fleet in command of Rear-Admiral Osterhaus, commander-in-chief, to steam to Key West after taking 1,300 marines aboard for emergency service on the island. The rushing of this display of naval strength to the proximity of Cuban waters is admitted by all to be the last step which this government will take before actually intervening with armed force in Cuba. The army stands now ready to set 15,000 troops in motion toward Cuba at the tap of the gong, but the State Department is careful to explain that no actual intervention is ordered, and that the navy is merely carrying out the government’s orders to be in readiness to protect American life and property if necessary.