NEWS TIT-BITS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 180, 29 July 1916, Page 13

NEWS TIT-BITS.

At many places in Germany a pound of horseflesh now costs 2/6. Thirty-si- thousand women are now employed on the German State railways. Irish emigrants in 1915 numberd 10,659 (6671 males), as compared with 20,314 in 1914. Sir William James Thomas has given £100,000 towards the establishment of a Welsh echool of medicine. A £20 Bank of England note was found by a Sheffield workman in a bird's nest which, he was removing from a water pipe. Twenty thousand Chinese coolies have arrived in Russia, to be employed as agricultural labourers. More will follow.

The question of universal physical and military training for all boys above the age of ten in Toronto public schools is under discussion.

"It costs more to qualify as a dentist than as a medical man," said Sir Bertram Wind!e at the General Medical Council.

A Wyandotte pullet belonging to Mr. J. Smethurst, a Sheffield fancier, has created what is claimed to be a record by laying 100 eggs in 103 days.

Mrs. Claude Grahame-White, wife of the well-known aviator, was granted s, divorce recently on the ground of her husband's desertion and misconduct.

The Salvation Army is abolishing its famous "bread line" in Cooper Square, New York, experience having proved that the line consisted mainly of beggars who will not work.

In the case of a 13-year-old girl named Esther Smith, who died in Hackney Infirmary of brain trouble, a doctor said she would answer two-day-old questions as if they had just been asked.

The Lord Provost of Edinburgh has received from a man in Vancouver, Washington, a dollar as "conscience money" for an apple stolen from a stall in tho Cowgatc forty years ago.

Increases in retail food prices in England during Aipril work out at roughly a halfpenny in' the shilling. On May 1 the increase since the outbreak of war stood at 6Jd in the shilling.

Dr. Watts-Ditdhfield, Bishop of Chelmsford, stated at the annual meeting of the SP.C.K. that what determined him to live and work in the East End was hw reading about Bill Sikes in "Oliver Twist."

The wife of a Liverpool doctor's dispenser was found dead alongside her ■husband and child, who were both unconscious, it is stated, from morphia poisoning. -

Upset by a dream and worried abont her three brothers at the front, a seven-teen-year-old girl named Mary Hogan drowned -herself in the river at Colchester.

At a meeting of Eton Guardians, Councillor Hibberd said people wasted as much bread as ever, although it was so dear. The Government ought to serve out bread tickets.

The wife and four children of a commercial traveller, Robert Taylor, who was killed in a motor-cycle accident, w*re. awarded £1,000 compensation at ■Worcester Assizes.

A Berlin shopkeeper has been fined £50 and sentenced to five months' imprisonment for selling margarine "diluted" -with water to the extent of 59 per cent.

A competition in the Peterborough district has resulted in. the destruction ol over 10,000 queen wasps in a month, the first prize being -won hy a • boy who brought in 1,132.

J* 1S all v ery well to ask sneeringly "What's in a name?" In Sheffield, Tasmania, the leader of the Baptist community is Pastor Heaven, and a leading member of the congregation is Bliss. When the name of Edward Smith (50), charged with drunkenness at the Thames Police Court, was called, Mr. Cancellor was informed the man had died in hospital from the effects of drinking rum from a cask in the docks.

A sidelight on the cost of coal in war time is afforded by the fact that in a prosecution at Sedgeley it was stated that during the past year 500 tons of coal had been stolen from one of Lord Dvdley's collieries alone.

In Kent the fruit crop is menaced by a plague of caterpillars of the winter moth. Owing to the dearth of labour It has been impossible to carry out the spraying, and apples particularly have suffered.

At Finsbury Park a woman who tried to rescue a child who was in danger of being run over by a motor-bus as she. was standing in the middle of the road watching an aeroplane, was killed, but the child escaped.

Rnn over by a tramway-car in Kensington Road, Lodnon, on a dark night last October, a Canadian private named Stuart Homer Scobie lost his right arm. He- has now been awarded £500 damages against the London County Council. The United States Supreme Court held that advertisers, even though they give purchasers value for their money, are guilty of fraud if, by an exaggerated advertising propaganda, they have led purchasers to expect more.

In appealing at Aberdeen to shipbuilding workers to do their .utmost to help increase the output of merchant vessels, Mr. Arthur Henderson, MJ.\, stid that there was a deficiency of workers, mostly skilled, of 30,553.

While playing at a disused rifle range iv Hermitage Wood, Woking, a schoolboy found the dead body of an elderly man in a sitting position ou the marker's seat. His arms were folded, and there was a clay pipe in his mouth, while round hie neck was a stout rope. At Manchester, Arthur Silvester Dillaborough wore the uniform of a captain, of the Royal Navy "to please the ladies" he said with a smile, which quickly faded when he was committed to prison for 14 days, to please the gentlemen on the bench.

At the Thames Police Court, after a man had been sentenced to two months' imprisonment for stealing and receiving articles belonging to his employer, the latter asked the magistrate not to send the accused to prison on the ground it was difficult to get labour.

A Surbiton man who has written a book entitled, "How to Avoid faying Rates," was committed last week at Kingston for non-payment The collector said the defendant had lived in the district for six years and had never paid a farthing in rates. He went to prison every year.

A retiring pension of £150 a year voted to Dr. Ethe, an unnaturalised Gorman professor at tho Welsh University, Aberystwyth, despite the protest of the Aberystwyth Town Council, was brought to the notice of the Chancellor of the Exchequer by Mr. Joynson Hicks Mr. McKenna said inquiries would bo made.