EUROPEAN SUMMARY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1423, 8 June 1899, Page 36

EUROPEAN SUMMARY.

(Per R.M.S. Moana, at Auckland.) SAN FRANCISCO, May 18th. At Valladolid the Students and Naval Cadets attacked eacF other, and several cavalry officevs and others joined in the fray. Several persons were wounded before quiet was restored, and one was killed. At Breslau, in Germany, a murder trial of exceptional interest is nowbeing conducted. The accused, a shoemaker, is charged with sixteen murders. He killed four women, and cheerfully confesses to having put twelve of his own children out of the w-ay because “I could not keep so many.” He is an amateur photographer, and killed the children by administering three drops of cyanide of potassium to each. Germany is suffering from floods.

Large districts have been inundated by the rivers Elbe, Oder, Saale and Bode. All the Silesian rivers are flooded, and several persons have been drowned. Russia has determined upon extreme measures against the Jews. On May 12 all foreign Jews, not even excepting French Jews, were ordered to leave St. Petersburg at once. At Xieolieff rioters wrecked hundreds of Jew--ish houses and shops, desecrated Jeivish graves, and killed or captured a large number of men and women. Hundreds of rioters were arrested, after a fierce battle with the Cossacks.

At Madrid, 'General Polavieja, Minister for War, has made public a letter ho has just despatched to General Weyler, in which he threatens to shoot the former Governor-General of Cuba. The Minister asserts that he knows all about Weyler’s absurd conspiracies, and adds, “I know you are incapable. Without risking your own hide you excite the passions of civilians, who are ignorant of your meannesses. But I am disposed to shoot generals, if need be, as if they were common soldiers.”

A “Times” cable messags says : “There is no single liigh-class educational establishment open to Russians to-day, save in Finland, where loyalty survives even the blow made at independency. All the schools have been closed by the police till the end of the year.”

The prisons of St. Petersburg cannot find room for more students; yet arrests and domiciliary visits continue. Many students have been sent to Siberia, and one day in April the police ordered 230 girls in a women’s high school in St. Petersburg to leave the city within, forty-eight hours.