Plague, Famine, Eruption

The Jerboa or jumping rodents of Mongolia were reported last week to have become carriers of the Black Plague and to be spreading it with appalling mortality among dwellers on the steppes near Irkutsk.

At Odessa and Cherson in the Ukraine, famine conditions became so aggravated last week that martial law was proclaimed and troops were ordered out to protect the state grain elevators from mobs of hungry workers.

On the peninsula of Kamchatka, between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea, the volcanoes Montnovsky and Avatchinskayasopka erupted amid earth quakings and buried the snow covered city of Petropavlovsk beneath avalanches of molten lava.