ISLE OF PINES STORM TOLL IS 38; 17 AMERICANS ARE AMONG DEAD
200 Wild Buffaloes, Growing Wilder, To Be Killed Off on Salt Lake Island
The Evening Star of October 23, 1926, carried three wire reports of disaster and wildlife. An Associated Press dispatch from Leninakan described an earthquake that shook all of Armenia the previous night, killing many people, toppling houses and wrecking telegraph lines, while stressing that the American Near East Relief staff and the 9,000 orphans housed in old Czarist stone barracks came through without loss of life. A Havana dispatch relayed survivors' accounts that the Caribbean hurricane had killed 38 people on the Isle of Pines, 17 of them Americans, injured more than 200 and caused losses put at $50,000,000, with some villages destroyed. A Consolidated Press item from Salt Lake City announced that 200 increasingly wild buffaloes on a Great Salt Lake island would be hunted down in November, describing herds that fled to the peaks rather than let riders near.
Community Chest Bids Fair to Survive After Workers Give Aid
Storm Death List Shows Seventeen American Victims
Moonshine Booze Gets Chief's Okeh
The Montgomery Advertiser of October 23, 1926 led with a local fundraising rescue. Volunteers for the city's Community Chest finished on Friday handing out pledge cards that should have gone out on Tuesday, subscriptions rose through the day, and the campaign total reached $43,152.10. The paper presented the drive as the only way to avoid a return to disorganized monthly tag-day appeals. An AP dispatch from Havana carried the first news from the Isle of Pines after more than 48 hours of silence: Wednesday's Caribbean storm had killed 32 people, 17 of them Americans, and injured about 100. From Washington, the AP quoted Assistant Treasury Secretary Andrews, head of Prohibition enforcement, saying the only liquor worth drinking came from mountain stills in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, and complaining that the moonshiners were moving on to more profitable territory in other states.
The Vossische Zeitung of 23 October 1926 carried three political reports concerning Paris and Vienna. Its Paris service described how the German ambassador von Hoesch met Berthelot of the French Foreign Ministry and then Briand to go over the whole set of questions behind the Thoiry policy, while stressing that neither visit was an official démarche and agreeing with the Paris press that the first talk had been a non-binding general exchange. In a signed column, Karl Lahm wrote that the discredited Christian Social Party was turning back to its old leader Ignaz Seipel, and blamed provincial governors' bank speculation for the anger of the party's peasant voters. A third report relayed a semi-official denial in the Temps that the Conference of Ambassadors had taken any new decisions, but quoted its finding that German disarmament was still incomplete with regard to the police, sales of war materiel and the fortification of Königsberg.
The Journal de Genève of 23 October 1926 opened with an alarmed editorial signed J. M. on the federal budget. It argued that the hopes raised by the finance chief, M. Musy, had been undercut by the vote on social insurance, by Alfred Georg's revelations about the pension funds, and above all by the National Council majority, which turned against the Federal Council and adopted the "Graf scale" for officials' salaries, a decision the writer said would open a new hole of many millions in the budget. A foreign report described Moscow's ill humour at Germany's entry into the League of Nations, approved of Berlin's calm response, and called the new Soviet–Lithuanian treaty a warning to Warsaw and Geneva. A short signed column noted, half ironically, that cattle still grazed on the Montchoisy farmland at the city's edge and would soon give way to a rich neighbourhood.
Politika's issue of 23 October 1926, as read here, carried two very different pieces. In a signed column on the control of monetary institutions, Dr. M. Nedeljković argued that in well-run banks a key ratio should not exceed 3:1, or 3½:1 at most, warning that otherwise even the smallest losses would exhaust the bank's own capital and the damage would fall on depositors and creditors. A memoir of the years leading up to the regicide of 29 May 1903 portrayed the Serbian people as calm and silent, their discontent mute, and judged that most of them regarded King Alexander's 1900 marriage to Draga Mašin as a private matter, a reaction it put down to indifference and perhaps innate apathy.
The Leidsch Dagblad's front page of 23 October 1926 carried a report from a meeting of the Christian Besturenbond. There a speaker compared membership in 1919 and six and a half years later to argue that the Protestant CNV had more reason for optimism than the socialist NVV. He put growth at 1.2 per cent for the NVV, 5.5 per cent for the Catholic federation and 6.6 per cent for the CNV, and his audience applauded. The paper also began a list of further gifts for stricken families in Katwijk-aan-Zee. A notice told parents that children could be inoculated free against diphtheria at the same time as smallpox vaccination and urged all parents to take part. This reading does not include the list of gifts itself or the name of the body that issued the notice.
Chen Yi takes up the Zhejiang governorship from afar
Urgent notice of the Shanghai Bond Association
This Shibao page of 23 October 1926 carried late dispatches on the collapse of Xia Chao's revolt against Sun Chuanfang in Zhejiang. A report filed at 9 p.m. on the 22nd described renewed night fighting, Sun's troop trains carrying a brigade commander and a regiment to Jiaxing and on to Xiashi, Xia's men tearing down Bridge No. 115 on the Shanghai–Hangzhou line, and a supply train leaving Shanghai's North Station for Jiashan. It then reported that Xia, beaten at Wangdian, fled at 3 p.m., and that Chen Yi, Sun's appointee as civil governor, took up the post without being in the province. A partly legible notice from five Shanghai lottery-bond offices announced a postponed prize draw.
This page of the Beijing World Daily carried no news, only advertisements and notices. The largest legible notice promoted a monthly bound volume of the paper's literary supplement. The paper said the supplement was edited by Peking University professor Dr. Liu Bannong. Each volume ran to about a hundred and twenty pages and more than a hundred and fifty pieces, was handsomely printed and bound, and was pitched at students for their after-class reading. The Commercial Press advertised a second pre-order subscription for its Sibu congkan reprint series to mark its thirtieth year, and promised to keep the price of seven years earlier. A medicine seller promised permanent cures for ear disease and deafness.
This front page of Crítica for 23 October 1926 was built around cabled foreign news. A dispatch dated in Leninakan described a strong earthquake across Armenia: collapsed houses trapping their occupants, destroyed telegraph lines, dead livestock, and inhabitants who fled their homes believing nearby Mount Ararat had erupted. An Associated Press report from Paris said Argentina had let France defer repayment of a ten-million-dollar loan due next February, with France paying the interest and the loan renewing automatically. From Chicago, Silas Strawn, back from chairing the international commission on extraterritoriality, described China's republic as a farce dominated by rival generals, brutal troops and railways paying tribute.
The Veterans' Association's instructions for 28 October and 4 November
This issue of Il Piccolo reported that Italy's ministries were busy drafting legislation for a Council of Ministers expected in the first days of November, although no formal convocation had yet been issued; ministers were to report first to the Head of Government. From Paris it described a morning meeting between Foreign Minister Briand and the German ambassador von Hoesch, just back from Berlin with Stresemann's instructions. The paper asked whether talks to turn the Thoiry conversation into concrete results had begun, but found the meeting short, the ambassador without any precise proposal and Briand apparently disappointed. The veterans' association set out rules for 4 November: local, austere ceremonies arranged with the military, the war-disabled, mothers and widows, ending with the reading of the Victory Bulletin at the war memorial and followed by frugal mess meals rather than banquets.