NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18629, 9 February 1924, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Milk, properly treated on the pasteurising principle, will keep sweet for 24 hours. A ship's lifeboat wad found drifting empty in the North Sea by a Grimsby trawler. British railway companies saved altogether £55,000,000 on their wages hills last year. A pair of 'domestic fowls of the. "Silky" variety recently exhibited in London wero valued at £1000 each. Streets without trees and Hyde Park bare of flowers were features of London about sixty years ago. London's milk provided the highest number of bacteria out of samples obtained from 45 cities and towns. Prize mice, bred as carefully as any other livestock, fetch large prices and are of many different colours. To be rebuilt at a cost of £130,000, Trent Bridge, Nottingham, will he 80ft. —the widest in England. The population of Tokio is now 1,500,000, there being a reduction of about 60 per cen*. since the earthquake. Babies born since the war are said to be stronger and more intelligent in every way than those of pre-war days. Of the 60,832 persons sent to prison in Britain in the year ended March iast, no fewer than 3728 were debtors. The grandson of one of the richest men in the world, Godfrey Rockefeller, has started' work as an office boy in a bank. Over £162,000 was collected in Paris for the benefit of French scientific laboratories on the occasion of Pasteur's d;iy. Mrs. Matthews, Middlesbrough, England, wife of a bricklayer's labourer, recently gave birth to two boys and two girls. Drug traffickers now use carrier pigeons to smuggle, their commodities over the Mexican border into the United States. A beggar woman of 81, who died at Montpellier, France, had £12 in gold and scrip of the value of £1200 secreted in her room. Workmen from Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Czecho-Slovakia are being taken into France owing to the shortage of labour. Chlorine is now being made use of by some British millers to bleach flour for making bread, which is getting whiter every year. Under the Moscow Government marriage in Siberia is only a matter of taking out a licenso to wedj divorce is equally easy. "Pillboxes" and concrete dug-outs built by the Germans are still a problem in France; there are 6000 in the Nord "Department alone. Forty-six different bodies have a right to break up the streets of London, while there are 117 different authorities responsible for repairing the roads. Following a report of Hull city analyst that a ton of soot fell in a day over every mile in Hull experiments are being carried out with smokeless fuel. John M. V. Pugh, 39 years of age, assistant master at Queen's College, Taunton, was found dead in bed with a disconnected gas tube in his hand. Earthquakes such as the one which recently devastated Tokio may be caused by the sea suddenly penetrating into the molten core beneath the earth's surface. An order has been issued abolishing the Geneva Cross sleeve badge, hitherto worn by warrant officers, non-commis-sioned officers and men of the R.A.M.C. A detailed study of common colds 13 to be made by the United States Public Health Service in co-operation with a number of the country's leading universities. The late Miss Jessie Aitken, of Glenbervie, Larbert, left the residue of her estate (which amounted to between, £40,000 and £50,000 gross), to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Exhibits at the recent/ National Dog Show ranged from a diminutive Yorkshire terrier, weighing about 21b., to a huge champion St. Bernard, which turned the scale at nearly 2cwt. . ;.r

Claimed as the most wonderful set of church bells in the world, a carillon ia now being cast in Croydon; it will include 53 bells, and is to form a memorial to a millionaire's mother.

A new cable from Turks Island to Barbados, branching to Trinidad and British Guiana, and measuring in all 1700 nautical miles, is to be added to the all-British chain of submarine cables. •".■ ; ;,.;

i l Four new islands were "born" last year. .Two appeared ■'off : the coast of Cochin China, one off the Japanese cois'. and the fourth, ,1000 ft. . long and ZOi J. high,.in the Bay of Bengal. '■'

The Liverpool justices refused to extend the hours of opening of public houses on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve from, 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Manchester magistrates granted extended hours.

British air-pilots have flown some 2,000000 miles, and .carried nearly 30,000 passengers during the last four years, during which period only, six air travellers have lost their lives. i . .<•

A ballet of women dancers, soft lights, and cinematograph films were recently used in a New York church during a sermon; the crush to get in was bo dense that many of the congregation fainted.

Harold Steen, alias Walter J. Harmon, who has been arrested at Juneau, Alaska, accused of forgery, is said to have been married nine times on the Pacific Coast, and nine times before in New York. King crabs, found mostly off the isßnds cf Japan, measure from oft. Vo 6ft. from tip to tip of their great claws; the largest ever caught is recorded as having been 19ft. from tip to tip and weighing 401b. "My name is Pansy. I am going to Chicago. Please give me food and water and keep my bed clean," read a label attached to a kennel containing a Pomeranian shipped at Liverpool in tho Cunard liner Laconia. When some ' boys broke the, ice. on a pond at Dalton-in-Furness, the head of a man appeared. The police later re-: covered the body of Robert Watson, aged 48, of Dalton, an iron ore miner, who had been missing for some days. Allen Ford, a young 'cellist, formerly a fitter at Crewe railway works, wa3 declared the winner of the £160 scholarship at Manchester Royal College of Music, which was a feature of Blackpool Musical Festival last October. The London County Council has decided to reduce the maximum ordinary fare on the tramways from 6d to sd. It also decided that day return tickets should be issued at 5d for the 3d stage, 6d for the 4d stage, and 8d for ths Sd stage. ■ An Oswestry naturalist took two foxes away from his tovra premises where they had been reared, and locked them up a mile away. Whilu he was feeding them j one escaped, and next morning the owner was awakened by it scratching at the door of his town house. Albert Edward Herbert, a labourer, pretended that he had" lost a hand at Arras, and bogged in Oxford Street, London. A policeman found that his hand was all right, and he was sentenced at Marlborough Street Police Court to three months' imprisonment. A goosehord in the province of Roga* land, Norway, found a magnificent brooch of gold, dating from the Viking era, which the geese had scratched up from the mud. The valuable relic was taken to the Stavenger Museum, the curator of which stated that the brooch was one ol! the finest examfles of Viking goJdsmHE* art yet discovered^ . ...