WIDE-WORLD NEWS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3101, 9 January 1922, Page 8

WIDE-WORLD NEWS.

Princess Philip of Coburg, the daughter of the late King Leopold of Belgium, is being prosecuted at Vienna by an opera singer named Eosa Nahler for obtaining money under false pretences. The princess, who is known throughout the world by reason of her financial troubles and her love affairs, resides in Budapest. She is alleged to have received a large sum of money from Rosa Nahler in order to obtain for the singer Belgian francs at a pi’ioe far below the rate of exchange. Rosa Nahler waited for the money for several months, and although she wrote to the princess repeatedly she received no reply. A storm of indignation among American women has been aroused by a statement by Dr Frederick Starr, professor of anthropologic at Chicago University, that there is no real beauty in the United States. “It is only our American good nature which makes us call a girl pretty when she is not phenomenally ugly. A handsome woman or a handsome man ia the rarest of all creatures. Real beauty is only to be found among the Liherthn and kindred. African races. African belles are thq pure strain, but Americans are too hybrid to be beautiful. Our standards of beauty would be denied by any European nation. The yellow races frequently surpass us in beauty, and the Irrogotes from the Pliiliumne Islands, who came to Chicago in 1892 at the Columbus Exposition, caused people everywhere to marvel 1 at them. Beauty in a blonde race is next to impossible.” The ratepayers of the English town of Lewisham were saved £238 as the result of one week’s working of the guardians’ stores for supplying relief in kind. At a meeting of the board the clerk reported that the guai’dians had paid £941 for goods which, bought from the local would have cost £1479. The unemployed had been given additional supplies, consisting of groceries, meat and bread, valued at £2BB, and the'cost of woi'king the stores had beexx £SB. Thirteen hundred and fifty families, or 4000 persons, had been provided for during the week. Snakes in the London Zoo have been making records. The latest recorded was a grass snake caught in the act of devouring a viper almost as large as itself. To appreciate these gastronomic feats it should be understood that the grass snake is supposed to feed exclusively on frogs, newts, and small fish —with, perhaps, an occasional toad when there is nothing better about. The grass shake, in this instance, deliberately seized the viper by the tailj It was not until it had swallowed three parts of the unresisting victim that it came to the conclusion that the meal was unsatisfactory and disgorged the adder, which was none the worse for its experience. The grass snake is immune to the bite of the viper, just as the king snake of America is to the poison of the rattlesnake or the fer-dc-lance. Nevertheless, the king snake is not thus protected against venomous snakes of the Old World. If the grass snake had chosen another poisonous species for inclusion ixx its menu it is possible that it would not have beexx so fortunate.

England has commenced making her own sugar. A beet sugar factory was opened lately at Kelham, near Newark, in which tho Government hold half the capital. In performing the opening ceremony, Sir Arthur Boscawen, Minister of Agriculture, said 4ieet sugar introduced a new form of agriculture into the country. It was a remarkable thing we did not produce sugar in this country before. We could and would produce it. There was no more reason why we should import our sugar than we should import our milk or potatoes. The Government wanted to see the scheme have a fair commercial test. The reason for financial help was not to manage or control. There is an unrecorded experience of the late W. S. Bruce which throws a light on his taste for adventure. When Mr Bruce waststationcd at the Observatory on Ben Nevis, he and a friend, gripping each other’s ankles in turn, hung over on© of the precipices. Afterwards, getting his feet behind a loose boulder, Bruce pushed it over the edge, down on to a ridge a thousand feet below, where it flew into fragments. The experiment gave both mountaineers such a shock that for many nights they started out of a distracted sleep, clutching at the bedposts to break an imaginary dive after the boulder.

A crack in a bathroom pipe is bev licvecl to have been the cause of the mysterious flooding of the Canadian Importer, which drifted about the Pacific Ocean for weeks, disabled and waterlogged, was twice lost and found again, towed .‘IOO miles to port, and then was found to ho practically intact as far as her hull was concerned. Workmen in the dry dock found a crack two and a-half feet long in the bathroom pipe where it passed through one of the vessel’s holds. The pipe pierces the hull just at the water line, and the crack in the pipe is just inside the ‘skin” of the ship. The schools of Zion City, founded by “Prophet” Howie, hut of which Wilbur Glean Voliva, the overseer, is now president, have adopted his new theories of a flat world and the absence of gravitation, and the 1000 school pupils believe them implicitly, according to their teachers. The new course of study at the Zion schools teaches: That the earth is a flat, circular world, with a north pole in the exact centre, with no south pole, and is surrounded by a wall of ice which keeps venturesome mariners from falling off the rim. That the earth has no motion, hut remains stationery in space. That the sun is not millions of miles in diameter and not 91,000,000 miles away, hut is really a little orb thirty-two miles across and only 3000 miles away from the earth. That the law of gravitation,is a fallacy, and that when objects are thrown into the air they continue to rise until the force which propelled them is expended and- then fall back to' earth because they arc heavier than air. Yoliva, in a recent sermon, said that God would not have made a sun to light the world and then put it so far away. Henri Pochette, the notorious French financier , whose arrest was made in Paris, was born in Molun in 1878. He started life as a groom at a small cafe. With Ids savings he took lessons in book-keeping, and became a bank clerk. Learning that the big financiers were booming the Rio Tinto copper mine, he lanched the Rio Tenido, also a copper mine. The public was invited to invest its gold in exchange for shares in this mine which contained no copper, and Rochette, to keep his promises of dividends, called on his clients to invest their savings in a bank ho was starting. In 1906 lie had raised his capital to 20,000,000 francs. By the end of 1907 Rochette owned five hanks with M sub-agencies distributed throughout the country. All were very prosperouson paper. In March, 1908 he failed, and was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Political influence secured his release, but, although financially broken Rochette climbed up hill once more, only to fall with a crash. He disappeared in 1912, and his later career was very varied and was divided between America and Europe, and included a brief period of service in the French army during the war.