NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3526, 19 August 1926, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

With 52 years unbroken service, Dr. Howell Williams has resigned, through ill-health, the post of, medical officer for Richmond, Yorkshire. “There is no such thing as a ‘plain girl,’ ” says the head of a big London store. “The old maid type of girl disappeared with the war.” Friends of a coal carman who was married at St. Pancras, London, attended the 'wedding in working clothes and pelted the couple with coal dust.

The town of Venice in California has been annexed to the city of Los Angeles, and its famous water highways are to be converted into streets.

Eight to ten hours’ sleep is necessary -to the business man who would keep fit and live to old age, according to the medical officer of Plymouth. Over 200 delegates, representing forty countries, will attend the Fourth International Boy Scout Congress at Kandersteg, Switzerland, next August.

At Oheadle, Cheshire, petrol pumps are in use which are fixed with a slot Which motorists may drop a shilling and obtain a shilling's worth of petrol. An inquiry into the teaching of Latin in 20,250 secondary schools in the United States has resulted in a report favourable to the study of the classics.

Ajmcrican farmers are interested in the prospect of a much cheaper fertiliser, due to a discovery of a process for making potassium sulphate from greensand. New York is proposing to erect a huge bell in Central Park to be tolled once a year on Armistice Day in honour of America’s war dead. It is to weigh 150 tons. Two huge electrical coal hoists have been installed at a New York power house. Every 24 hours they lift 6000 tons of coal 200 ft. above the street, and it is estimated that they do the work of 23,000 men. Mr. Mark Hunt, of Swainswick, a well-known Somerset farmer and market gardener,, has died, aged 86. .He was proud of the fact that hehad never seen the inside of a theatre or attended a race meeting in his life.

About 140 agricultural scholarships are being given this year under the British Ministry of Agriculture scholarships Scheme for the sons and daughters of agricultural workers and smallholders, including nursery gardeners. A young Glasgow lamp-lighter, who was setting out to be married recently, died from influenza on the stairs leading to his future wife’s house. Along with his brother he left his home in a taxi, intending to pick up his fiancee en route. Returning from Falmouth to Gerrans, Mr. Charles Collins saw a sheep floating with a lamb on its back. He rescued the lamb, but found that the ewe was dead. The ewe, worried by a dog, had put out to sea, and the lamb followed and climbed on its mother s back. It was stated in a Melbourne cable message on June 7 that the Marquis de Pinedo, the Italian aviator, intended making a flight, including New Zealand. The Dunedin Consul for Italy has now received 480 gallons of aviation motor spirit to hold pending their aviators arrival, but has no advice of the date. A spanner striking the tenninals of the battery on a motor lorry owned by George Wilson, of Ruatoki, Whakatane last week, caused a spark which ignited the benzine vapour arising from a filling tank. The flames shot to the roof of the building which was scorched and the lorry and goods were badly damaged.