Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 December 1897 — BREVITIES. [ARTICLE]

BREVITIES.

Fitzsimmons, the pugilist, denies that he will again enter the ring. The Minneapolis Board of Education says it will close the schools-of that city March 1 because it has no money to run them. Representative Smith of the old Logan district of Illinois has introduced a bill in Congress reducing letter postage to 1 cent per ounce after July 1, 1898. Three of the largest gas companies of Boston —the Brookline, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain —have been absorbed by the New England Gas and Coke Company. Secretary Alger has issued r. general order directing that the reprimand administered to Captain Lovering be read in full to the garrison at every army post in the United States. George W. Vanderbilt has taken out $1 ,000,000 insurance iu the Mutual Life Insurance Company. The policy is a straight life, twenty-year class, and the annual premium is $35,000. The trouble between lessees and fee holders of the Pioneer iron mine at Ely, Minn., growing out of the desire of the latter to lease the property to Carnegie, has resulted in the mine being closed down. A comiMttee of five of the Ohio Federation of Labor, to whom was referred for early report the subject of the influx of foreign labor, has reported a recommendation to ask Congress to exclude foreign labor for ten years. Two soldiers in the imperial service at the Yildiz Kiosk, the palace of the Turkish sultan, made an attempt fen the sultan’s life. The sultan had the men tortured in the hope of extracting the names of the instigators, but both died without revealing anything. -- ——— The New York Merchants’ Association, at its meeting passed the following resolutions: Resolved, That the Merchants’ Association of New York favors immediate passage of the proposed act of Congress known as the anti-scalping bill. Resolved, That the officers and counsel of the association be directed to co-op-erate in urging this enactment. Charles Zanoli, alias Charles Braune, alias Charles Suhiner, under arrest at New York on a charge of having swindled the Metropolitan Insurance Company, may turn out to be a second Holmes. He is said to have collected* insurance on the lives of four wives, three of whom died tinder suspicious circumstances, and a mother-in-law and his step-daughter. The Los Angeles, Cal., Chamber of Commerce has declared itself opposed to annexation of the Hawaiian islands . and passed a resolution declaring the annexation would materially affect the beet ip California.