NEWS BY mail.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 February 1922, Page 4

NEWS BY mail.

JEWEL THIEF CHASE

VEVEY, Dec. 10.

A jewel robbery followed by a dash across the frontier into Germany and subsequent arrest was committed yesterday in daylight in Geneva by two young Germans. At one o’clock a well-dressed man summoned a taxicab from a rank in one of the principal streets and instructed the chauffeur to drive to a block of flats on. the outskirts.

Here the chauffeur was ordered to bring down the man’s luggage from the top story. Coming down after a fruitless search he was astonished to line! is taxicab had disappeared. The passenger had driven direct to the Quai des Bergues, in the centre of the city, where a confederate was awaiting him in front of a jeweller’s shop. While the taxicab was still moving the confederate flung a big stone through the window, seized a tray containing jewels worth at least £4,000, sprang into the rah, and dashed through the city at top speed. The police gave chase and warned all frontier stations. While the officials at the frontier station of Moillesulaz were answering the telephone the taxicab dashed over the frontier. Outside Anvemasse the bandits abandoned the taxicab and went into a cafe, where their German accent excited the suspicion of a customer, who informed the police. The police having already received a warning from Geneva quickly overpowered the two men.

WOMAN QUELLS MUTINY. PARIS, Dec. 23

Revolver in hand, a young woman fought for an hour with a number of armed convicts yesterday and prevented them from breaking out of the gaol at Ajaccio, the capital of the island of Corsica.

The convicts, most of whom were serving long terms of imprisonment for minder and other crimes of violence, escaped from tTieir cells by knocking down and seriously injuring two warders who were bringing them tlieir evening meal. Led by a convicted murderer named Fogacci, they locked the oilier warders in the guard room and rushed to the chief warder’s office, through wliicfi they had to pass to got to the main gates of the prison. The chief warder was wounded by the convicts, hut his wife, Colomba Ruggieri, a tall, hard-haired woman, seized her husband’s revolvers and went to meet the prisoners, some of whom were armed with rifles taken from the warders and others with bars of steel. She fired at them, and with her first shot hit Fogacci. Profiting by the confusion this caused she closed the door of her husband’s office and barricaded it with desks and other heavy furniture. The convicts made another attempt to get out of prison, hut Mine. Fuggeiri was reinforced by gendarmes whom she had called by telephone. Two gendarmes were seriously wounded and one of the convicts, named Angeletti, was killed before the mutiny was quelled.

BIG JOB AND A LITTLE KEY

TOWYN, Dec. 23 Side by side in a little room at the Transatlantic Wireless Station at Towyn, Merioneth, all day and all night, sit two men who exchange aerial “conversations” with two men sitting in a room at Broadstreet, New York. One of them, with telephone receivers over ibis ears, listens te the shrill piping of the American wireless stations. The other sends across the Atlantic a shrill piping from England. I saw these bridgers of space at work, sitting at a little chest in view of the wet and misty Welsh landscape. The one who took my attention most was a red-headed young man in a tweed coat, who was clicking away busily at a small key, for I knew that he was actually operating the great transmitting station at Carnarvon, 45 miles away. - As he clicked the man beside him wrote quickly on a pad of paper the message which he was receiving from the United States in dots and dashes of sound in his telephone receivers. Just as his companion was operating •a distant station, so was this recorder of signals in space listening to a message received at the opposite side of the town of Towyn, in a tiny Tittle Gxperitnental receiving hut, with its switches and wires and wax cylinders and coils, where the stream of messages sent to this country from the United States for most of the week was received. Earlier in the morning I visited this hut. On both sides of the stove pipe ran a vertical wire to prevent a telephone cord, which hung from a sliding

loop on a wire running beneath the i ceiling, from being burnt. j I placed tlie receivers at the end of this cord on my ears. At once I heard I the rapid flow of the Morse signals like the irregular chirping oi a loud and shrill cricket.

“What is it?” 1 asked the operator. “Tuekcr.tou, near New York, sending to Germany,” he said. “It’s Spanish, 1 think.”' STOLEN BABY. BARLS, Doc. 22.

A tragic story has com© to light in l connection with the theft of a baby from a> young woman, Mine. Rassepont, in Paris about three weeks ago. It now appears that the child was taken to Marseilles by a Mme. Luclos, of Lyons, who, after hawing read' the story in the newspapers, left the ha by outside a Marseilles hotel and then attempted to commit suicide by swallowing veronal. The child was picked up and will be restored to its mother. Mme. Duclos is in hospital at Marseilles, and it is believed her life can be saved. In a written confession reported by the Lyons correspondent of the Havas Agency, Mme. Duelos says that upon the death of her crfl'd almost immediately after its birth some weeks ago she ' asked' if it would not be possible to obtain another baby.

She gave all the money she had, about £4O to the midwife, who she alleges, a few days later, brought her a baby which she took from Paris to her home at Lyons. Beading the newspaper accounts of the real mother’s despair, she realised that she must give up the baby, to which she had already become attached. In a state of desperation she went to Marseilles and abandoned the baby in a place where she felt sure it would 'soon be found. “I have drunk the poison and am waiting,” the confession alleged to state. “I ask forgiveness for the alarm have done, but I have at least the! satisfaction of atoning for it. I ask Mme. Passepont to forgive me.”