NEWS OF THE WORLD

Evening Star, Issue 20486, 17 May 1930, Page 7

NEWS OF THE WORLD

GUILTY M'LORD WHOLE VILLAGE CHARGED A record In “criminal” annals has been established by the Serbian village of Zude, near Belgrade. The entire population was found guilty of stealing wood. Sixty-eight men,.with their families —practically the whole village—were inarched into court, escorted by gendarmes with bayonets fixed. “Levelling the municipal forests and .using • the trees for firewood” was the charge. INTERRED ALIVE DOG’S SEARCH FOR FOX A terrier belonging to the Essex Union Hunt went down an earth hole after a fox at Ongar and did not return. For six days diggers tried to locate it, and at last succeeded. The exhausted terrier was given brandy and milk to revive It. ■Then it tried to get back into the earth again. OVERTIME AND A LIFEBELT Awakened from a heavy sleep by a sea ,which flooded his cabin, the first thoughts of a fireman on the Saros were of his lifebelt. His second thoughts were of the overtime book. At any rate, this is the story going the rounds on the Saros, which reached Sydney recently after a stormy trip from Queensland. The men are.emphatic that the fireman appealed on deck clad only in his shirt and lifebelt, the book clasped tjghtly under his arm., To his astonishment; he found that the ship was proceeding on its. way. . EXHIBIT “A” LAYS EGG CONTEMPT OF COURT Sergeant Phillipson, t Newcastle police prosecutor, recently received his first Easter egg. With startling suddenness the cackling of a fowl rudely shattered the judicial air of Newcastle Police Court one morning recently. Quite unperturbed by the legal battle raging around it, a prize Black Orpington hen, an exhibit in a poultrystealing case, laid an egg in its crate in the court. - The sergeant succeeded in escaping from the court with the egg intact despite the playful efforts of solicitors and constables to seize it. A * ' BOBBED HORSES ASSIST IMPECUNIOUS PEASANTS Peasants of Russian Turkestan have voted to cut off the tails and manes of all the wild horse.s and sell the locks to buy tractors. This action is being taken in response to an appeal from the Commissariat of Trade in Moscow. “Horsehair is a valuable article for export, and would give the Government foreign credit with which to buy more tractors,” says the Moscow bureau. It is estimated by the Turkestan peasants that 1,000 horse tails and manes would yield enough for one tractor, and they are out to get 25 tractors, even though the countryside May look as if all the horses had taught the fashions of bobbing, shingling and Eton-cropping. THOUGHT PHOTOGRAPHS SCIENCE’S LATEST MARVEL Photographs of thoughts and measurements of cogitations are among the latest marvels of science. Muscular reaction to, a thoughtwave, it is said, can be expressed in terms of electrical energy. It is now held to be certain that mental processes are functions involving the whole body, rather than the brain alone. Dr. Edmund Jacobson, of Chicago University, declares, after two years of experiments, that thoughts, in a final analysis reduce themselves to nerve-and-muscle reactions, which are measurable^ He does not measure the idea as n exists in the brain, but registers the muscular outgrowth of the thought. Electrical energy involved in projecting a thought is so slight that it would require at least 2,000,000 persons hooked together and thinking “in phase” to light a sitting-room lamp, CAT RETURNS AFTER DOG’S DEATH Because a cattle-dog given to Mr. G. Scawert, of Mulgoa, Australia, was taken Into the family circle, a pet cat tnd her five offspring left home. Recently Mn Scawert’s horse bolted with his sulky which ran over the dog, killing It Instantly. *1 ' A few hours later the cat and her kittens returned and re-established themselves in the home. Instinctively t '*mwing that their enemy was dead. >. ’ * DOCILE SNAKES TAKE DAILY CONSTITUTIONAL Two huge pythons at the London Zoo have become so tame that they are permitted to take exercise outside their den. ■ One—the reticulated python presented by the Prince of Wales in 1922 ■—is over 27 feet long. It is only recently that this python’s docility was discovered. The two sections of the door had been tied together with rope, and in the keeper’s absence the constrictor burst the bonds and was discovered half way out. As It returned to its den by being merely guided there, it was afterwards allowed to leave its cage.. The experiment proved so successful- that it is now permitted periodical trips around the keepers’ hall. The second snake —a 17ft African python—was for a long time unapproachable.

LABELLED FOR 3,000-MILE JOURNEY “My age is three years. My mother is dead, and I am going out to my daddy in Saskatoon. lam travelling alone, so please be good" to me." This was the label attached to little Jean Baxter, who, unaccompanied, left Liverpool for Halifax, Nova Scotia, recently. Jean and her mother were to have gone to join Mr. Baxter this summer, but the mother did not recover from an illness which developed. Since her mother’s death Jean has been living with an uncle. Her journey to Saskatoon was one of 3,000 miles. FATHER AS GAOLER DAUGHTER KEPT IN CELLAR An upper class Russian peasant, Ivan Skarpinsky, has been sentenced to death' in Rybinsk for locking up his daughter, Vera, in the cellar of his hut, and keeping her there for 11 years to prevent her marrying a Bolshevik. Now 28 years old, she has become deaf and dumb from terror and undernourishment since she was locked in her cellar. Soviet agents questing for hidden grain found the girl. ELECTRIFIED DOOR-HANDLE LUNATIC’S GRIM JEST In order to give a “shock” to his friends who were coming to celebrate his release from an asylum, an exlunatic, at Budapest, connected the door-handle of his bedroom, with the electric main. When his wife opened the door to bring in his breakfast she was /Instantly electrocuted. REVERSION TO TYPE BIRD-HEARTED BOY Doctors and medical students of Washington are deeply interested in a 16-year-old youth there who is found to have the heart of a bird. This is classed as an “evolutionary throw-back” or “reversion to type.” Dr. C. W. Stiles explains that bird families develop the right aorta, leaving the left atrophied: while mammals —including human beings—develop the left aorta, leaving the right atrophied. In an examination of the youth, it was found that his heart had developed along “bird” lines. STRANGE SUICIDE BECAUSE PET ROOSTER DIED At breakfast, John Dalton, aged 39, of Vitq Vite, near Cressy, Australia, mentioned to his wife that a rooster on their farm had died during the night. “The old crower has gone west,” he said, and went into another room. Immediately afterward he blew the back of his head off with a shotgun. MULTUM IN PARVO HEAD FIRST IN PETROL TIN Like an ostrich which buries its head la the sand, a dwarf-like Chinese went head down into a petrol tin in a desperate attempt to escape his pursuers—the policemen. He was one of a party of 11 Orientals caught by the Sydney police playing fan tan. Eleven of them —seven, Chinese, : three Japanese, and one European—were taken by surprise when the ■ police raided the den to catch the lot fully absorbed iaj the game of fan tan. They were lined' up and cpunted. There were eleven of them, but when 1 a few minutes later they were being 1 removed in the Black Maria there were only ten. 1 The missing one—perhaps the 1 tinest Chinese in Australia —was later 1 found in the petrol tin head down 1 with only his legs and feet showing. : THIRTY SHILLING BOAT PERILOUS ATLANTIC CROSSING ; With one companion and a kitten a : man crossed the Atlantic In 1906 In a 1 boat that had cost him 30s. Recently he left Southampton in the Majestic the world's biggest liner, for New York. He was Captain William H. Small, formerly of Merseyside, and now State Fish and Game Warden of New Jersey. "I made the trip in the 50-foot ketch 1 Catherine,” he said, “to realise the ; dream of my youth—the recovery of £1,000,000 of treasure buried by the notorious pirate, Jean Lafltte, “I bought a battered hull of the ■ Catherine for 30s and then spent my savings in fitting her out. “In August 1906, I set sail, and for I weeks was alternately battered by ’ storms and becalmed, but finally reached New York, where I was told that one of my sons was 111, and I immediately started home again, abandoning all thoughts of the treasure.” THE FAMILY TREE GETS RATHER TANGLED • We gather from a perusal of the following letter of an Australian woman that she is her own uncle. She writes:— “My grandmother on my father’s side and my grandmother’ on ray mother’s side each had three sisters who married brothers. “Then, my mother’s brother married my father’s sister, so that brother and sister married brother and sister. “Later my mother’s cousin married my father’s cousin and my father’s youngest brother married my mother’s oldest daughter. “Two of my father’s cousins only distantly related married, and about 45 years ago another cousin of my mother’s married a cousin of my father’s.” i