GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2089, 12 February 1920, Page 1

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

The funeral look place recently at St. Paul's, Bedford, of -Mrs Pest ell, aged 96. She was married at the sante ehnreh 73 years ago that day. ■Some of the strange reasons why the cannibals'of Nerv Guinea persist in their hereditary habits were mentioned by Lieutenant P. W. Pearson Chinnery in a lecture in England recently. ■ In parts of' the island, he said, a youth is not supposed to have attained the soeia.l stains of manhood and to be eligible for marriage until bo has lolled his man. The British are trying to induce the 'tribes that the killing of a wild boar is an equally sound proof of val'our, and in many instances they have been successful. In other parts of the island there is a conviction that a new house should not he occupied, or a new canoe launched, until it has been sprinkled, with the blood of a man killed for the purpose. The first'of a new type of British cruiser, the Raleigh, launched a few weeks ago, is expected to give the navy trouble, to find her suitable work. The Raleigh is of 9,750 tons, with a speed of 35 knots. She was designed to hunt raiders, such as the Mo owe and the Wolf. She was given guns' larger than the guns ac-. luajly placed on light cruisers, so she might be able to out-range any' commerce raider the enemy might send out,. Now that there arc no German raiders, it is conceded by the navy that she is much in the nature of a white elephant, being too costly for a light too light for service with a battle cruiser squadron. The Raleigh is armed with 7.5-inch gnus, provided with an underwater “bulge” which is designed to make her torpedo-proof, and is so divided fhat any two of her main compartments may he hooded without, endangering the vessel. She has anti-aircraft gnus, and’burns oil-fuel only. Three white men were shot dead and two wounded during, a pitched battle round a garage at Bogaiusa, near New Orleans. All the victims, who were trade unionists, were shot while protecting the negro Labour leader, Saul Dechus, from arrest at the hands, of large bands of special service officers, assisted later,by a, number of men from the Loyal League, which consists largely of discharged soldiers. Mr L. E. Williams, the owner of the garage, who was among those killed, was the President of the local Allied Trades Council, and editor of a Labour newspaper. The other two were carpenters. They marched down the village streets, guarding with shot guns the negro, for whom the • officers had been searching the night before. The officers surrounded the garage and demanded the surrender dt the negro. This was refused, and a battle ensued. Only one special officer was wounded, and then not seriously. During the battle the negro escaped with the others who had been.defending the garage. A more extraordinary or a worse career of crime could not he imagined,” said / Mr Francis, the Westminster magistrate, when James Jarlcin, 26, was convicted of stealing a bicycle.. Parkin is a recently demobilised South African, who joined up at Capetown in 1914. De-tective-Sergeant Lynch said the .man was in France sentenced to death for desertion on the battlefield, but the sentence was eommunted to live years’ penal' servitude. While in charge of an escort taking him to prison there was a wait at a railway station in Northern France on which bombs were dropped from a German' aeroplane. The two men in charge of the prisoner and many others were killed, and it was at first thought that lie had shared the same fate, but he escaped, and afterwards I'obbcd a sleeping soldier at a hostel

of Treasury notes and papers. Eventually he got to Seaford in military custody, and twice'made Ins escape from there. At Tower Bridge Court he was sentenced for robbery in February last. For some time at large after this sentence he obtained money by posing as a shellshock victim and-by other impostures. In May of this year has was again locked up, this time at Westminster —for stealing blankets from a soldier’s home, his pretence then being that he was a repatriated prisoner of war. He had passed as a Canadian and n Austrlian, and in different names, giving .the authorities much trouble before his identity was established.