NEWS CURIOSITIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 175, 25 July 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

NEWS CURIOSITIES.

JOTTINGS FROM WORLD'S PRESS,

Known to the police as "the man with twenty faces" on account of his skill at disguising himself, and also as the champion gaol breaker of Switzerland, Eugene Ivalbfuss has oncc more been arrested —this time in Lausanne. During the past 15 years Ivalbfuss has escaped 11 times from four different Federal prisons in which he has been confined on various charges of theft.

"Your obedient servant," "I have the honour to remain," etc., will no longer appear in letters from the post office of Colombo, Ceylon. Instead, post office officials are urged to address their correspondents in a jnore direct and conventional manner—"Dear sir" or "Dear madam," and ending "Yours faithfully."

An unemployed man has advertised in the newspapers at Shanghai offering to exchange his 10-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son for any kind of work. He is Hsu Wen-kwei, a Chinese, who explains that he has been driven to this action because he has been without work for many months and his family are facing starvation.

Anxious to test the infallibility of the popular Turkish belief that "wild animals do not attack naked men, a peasant of Bartin, in Anatolia, took off his clothes and went into the forest after a bear that was the terror of the district. While the villagers waited outside the wood he advanced to the lair of the beast. In less than an hour he reappeared, having tamed the beast. T-he villagers had it killed.

' In 15 minutes a young Melbourne man has lived a year and a day of his life. He went to the police headquarters to fulfil an order of a day's imprisonment for default on payment of a fine for a minor traffic offence. The police found against him an unexecuted warrant, issued 11 years before—when he was 11 —ordering 12 months' detention for habitual truancy. The young man was put in gaol fqr 15 minutes and then released.