NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12070, 13 September 1902, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Fop. five months no ram lias fallen, in Greece. Japanese coiners are alleged to be Hooding Korea, with counterfeit cash. There has been unusual activity of latf among the Costa Blear/ volcanoes. Staindrop Parish, Darlington, has only; had two vicars in the last 106 years. India-rubber and guttapercha trees have been .discovered in German New Guinea. Orders have been given for the removal of the wire fence encircling Johannesburg. Japanese national flags are alleged to be practically unobtainable just now in London. Capetown's subscription to the Cecil Rhodes memorial fund now amounts to £3800. Efforts are being made to organise a' general strike among the Spanish railway workers. Germany's annual consumption of beer works out at over thirty-sis gallons per head of population. Twenty ancient- bronze axe-heads have been found in a peat-bed near Connies, Montgomeryshire. The Capetown pro-Boer organ. The South African News, resumed publication at the beginning of August. Capetown's British and Colonial Exhibition wiil he opened in November, 1905, for » period of four months. There are seventeen pupils at the Sand* gate Board School who have not missed an attendance for seven years. Trieste waiters, it- is reported, have struck owing to their objection to tips, which their employers decline to abolish. Four hundred thousand pounds has l>eeu expended on the defences of Aden since they Were initiated twenty years ago. Cheap soft goods made in Belgium and Switzerland are rapidly ousting .Manchester fabrics from the Mozambique market. Lieutenant Peary, states a Xew York paper, is inspecting Greenland with a view to its purchase by the United States. The Marquis Saigo, one of the most distinguished Japanese statesmen, Ins died at the age of sixty-three of internal cancer. . Thirty-eight miles an bom- was the mean speed attained by the new turbine rover \ elux during her preliminary run at sea. Gaelic is the only language spoken bv 9442 inhabitants of Gal way, 2458 of whom ate between three and eighteen years of age. Uncle Sam. the American yacht which won the lirst prize in the special class at Kiel Regatta, has ben purchased by the Kaiser. Extensive purchases- of land on Bahrein Island, in the Persian Gulf, are reported to have been made by the Russia Consul at Bushire. Obsolete stamps and postcards to lie value of £2.200,000 have just been destroyed in Berlin by order of the German postal authorities. After eating every green thing in the neighbourhood swarms of locusts have takeu complete possession of all the houses iu two Algerian villages. A Cymric genealogist has discovered that, the Cecil dynasty is descended from aWelshman bearing the delightfully consonantal name of Syssyllt. Mr. Richard Pilley, of Doncaster, who had witnessed every St. Leger run since 1826, died recently. He was live years old when he attended his first. A young woman, named Marguerite Danrremoud, near Xncy, France, declined to be, thrown over by her lover after a. sis years' courtship, and shot him dead. Mme. Holub. the widow and travelling companion of Dr. EmiJ Holub, the African travellei, has been granted a life pension of £100 a year by the Austrian Emperor. Hitherto the clerics employed by the Berlin Town Council have not been granted a summer vacation. Now they are to receive a week's holiday each annually without pay. One of 1 he imitation cigars now being sob! as a cure for the tobacco habit, is more dangerous to the smoker than a dozen tobacco cigars, declares the French Hygienic Council. Holiday lectures on religious and historical subjects are being organised for workmen at Moscow by the Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovilch, Governor-General of the city. When the boJidary between Bulgaria and' Roumelia is definitely demarcated a neutral 2one of a mile and a-quarter wide is to be established on either side of the frontier line. Subject to the consent of the Local Government- Board it has been decided to order a motor-ambulance for the London Metro-' politan Asylum Board, at a cost not exceeding £1000. German troops on the inarch must give way to the tire brigade when it is proceeding to a fire, a Berlin' magistrate has decided. The decision has met with the Kaiser's approval. News comes from Johannesburg that among the Boers there is neither bitterness nor friendship. All they ask for is ]K-ace and quietness while they devote their time to the work of reconstruction. Seven directors of the Prussian Mortgage Bank, found guilty of issuing false balancesheets, have been sentenced to from six years to nine, months' imprisonment, and ordered to pay fines of from £50 to £750. After many years of wailing two old lovers, whose united ages amount to 200 years, have become engaged a second time at Skuleni. Rouuiania. Feodor Monteau, the swain, is alleged to be 120 years of age. Four millionaires are among the directors of a building trust, which is being formed in America with a. capital of £12.000,000. The trust- is said to have been asked to erect several sky-scraping buildings in London. It has been decided that only four special service medals will be issued in, connection with the Spanish-American; war. They will go to Captain Hobson, of Merrimac fame, and Lieutenants Ward, Back, and Blue. * Mrs. McKune, a resident of Coney Island, United States, has given birth to a 251b boy baby. It is 22in long, and is the largest baby born in New York in several, vents. Both mother and child are doing well. II is stated that Lucchini, the murderer of the Empress of Austria, and the victim of the terrible punishment of solitary con--finement, has lost his reason, and is now incarcerated in a lunatic: asylum near Geneva, Lord Methueu has undergone a successful operation in London, several spent bullets being removed from his injured leg. There is every prospect of a speedy recovery, although it is expected that the limb will be slightly contracted. For causing a native to be executed beforo' an appeal on his sentence had been heard the Public Prosecutor of the Congo Free State, has been imprisoned. When the appeal was heard the sentence was reduced to one of ten years' hard labour. The Hampstead Borough Council has among its crossing-sweepers a former M.C. at the Argyle Rooms, a former harlequinin the Christmas pantomimes, an ex-circus clown, and a former shop-walker in a wellknown West End drapery shop. Professor Proust, of the French Academy of Medicine, declares that every vessel on which plague-infected rats are found should be subjected to the same sanitary measures as it the pestilential disease had been discovered among the passengers or crew. Russia will send her Minister of War, chief of staff, seventy-three generals, fortysix officers, and 100 soldiers to the Bulgarian' celebrations in connection with the twenty-' fifth anniversary of the battle of the Schipka. Pass. They will be the guests of he Bulgarian Government for four days, and their entertainment will cost £40,000.,