The Daily Colonist, November 29, 1914

#dailycolonist1914 - News out of Victoria, British Columbia, 100 years ago today:

• Big map of the Russian front centred around Warsaw on the first page.
• Germans are taxing flour sent from the United States as relief for Belgians, and
• in the same article, concern that starving Belgian civilians may attack German garrisons for food. "In Berchen and the neighboring villages, there has been for some time no food available except what was got through the [relief] commission." [My maternal grandparents, 10 and 14, are in two of those villages.]
• A ship load of wheat will be sent to Belgium from Halifax, via Rotterdam.
• Two spies caught with British troops in Codford, England.
• Germans cut telegraph cables in the Baltic, severing connection between Petrograd [St. Petersburg] and Denmark. The only cable connection left from Russia to the west is now via Sweden.
• Editorial speculating on the duration of the war. "The war will last until 1917."
• Belgians living abroad are asked to return to serve in the military. Travel costs will be paid by the Belgian military.
• Not actually news, but an ad. The Bank of Montreal prints their annual statement for 1914, with the bottom line being $1,232,669.42 profit. One line item is a $100,000 donation to the Canadian Patriotic Fund [imagine now a bank donating over 7% of their profits in what is effectively a voluntary tax, also imagine if banks, while as publicly traded corporations do still have to publish annual reports, had to do so this transparently and publicly.]
• The magazine section war technology page this week is on horse-drawn artillery [!!]
  http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist56y302uvic#page/n18/mode/1up
• Essay on "The Origin of Life" on the "Hour with the Editor" page [which I usually skip as a bunch of wanking crap, but this article from 100 years ago, so perfectly mirrors the sort of pseudo-scientific babbling one sees in the comment section of just about any article or post about almost any scientific subject, including the tired old 'evolution is just a theory' refrain. An entire century later and people still think they are smart for "figuring out" the same backward sophistry.]
• And finally, the usual excellent summary of the week's events in the children's section.

http://www.britishcolonist.ca/dateList.php?year=1914