NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20596, 21 June 1930, Page 25 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

English rabbit farms produce about 150.,000 skins a year.

A road scavenger hes • a painting in the Folkestone Art Exhibition. In a Lingfield road in Surrey, a motorist lately saw a cat in full cry after a rabbit.

It takes about seven and a-half miles of hot-water pipes to heat Manchester's ■ Town Hall.

A good English waiter is the best servant in the world, according to one hotel expert. A quarter of the value of British ship- i building before the war was represented by warship work. There are about 360 clocks and watches in Windsor Castle, including the first lever . watch ever made.

Switzerland's oldest newspaper, called the New Gazette, recently celebrated its 150 th anniversary.

Tramways have been withdrawn from the centre of Rome, and all the traffic has been reorganised. . : Doctors who write prescriptions in illegible hands are liable to bo fined under a new Norwegian law. The title of Mobilisation Department has been changed by the British Admiralty to Manning Department. The Band of Hope, which has now 15,000 societies all over the world, was founded in Leeds 82' years ago. Many women in Britain now wear their wedding-rings on the (third finger of the right hand, instead of the left. Three pine nuts a, day and water is the diet on which a Korean hermit says he hopes to live for at least 200 years.

The Lord Mayor of London will visit Stockholm in September to study the machinery of municipal government. Switzerland has a total of 3600 hotels, employing some 61,000 persons, and representing a capital, of about £60,000,000.

People in Great Britain eat something like 6,000,000,000 eggs a year. Of this total more than £16,000,000 is imported. '. '

Recruits to the London Polica are so thoroughly trained that they are even taught the best way to blow their whistles. . • :

Really large precious stones, especially emeralds, rubies and sapphires, are in great demand. They may ma up to £IO.OOO in value.

Tho wolverine of the North American forests is a huge and very_ fierce and cunning weasel. Its skin is generally made up into rugs. Regimental flags were on to tho battlefield less Jfti 50 years ago; the practice was then dropped as it led to needless loss of life.

The first power-driven airship was built in 1852. It had a three horse-power steam engine. Tho first Zeppelin was built and launched in 1900.

Many fur farmers are doing very well with musk rats. These have threo to five litters a year, with two to eight in each litter. The pelts fetch about 12s each. Totem poles, the Redskin curios found in parts of North America, are now known to be memorials to the dead, and not heathen idols,, as was formerly, supposed. r ;•- New members to the number of iOO.OGQ enrolled in the British Legion last year< ',7 No ex-soldier asking, assistance is ever; ' turned away because he is not a member*

With total assets 'of more than £500,000,000, the world's biggest ban Mu- 11 corporation has been formed m New,. , York by the fusion of three big banking ' firms. 1 British cattle are so badly attacked •/ by the "warble flv," which makes holes in the hide to hold its eggs, that the ;•£ annual damage is estimated ■•''at about £1,000,000. In the air, Britain comes fourth among the great nations. This year France will havn 1310 first-line machines, Italy 1100, ;' v the United States 950, and Great Britain 780 The coal output in Great Britain during the week ended February 22 was 5,551,300 tons by 958,500 workers, compared with--5,609,000 tons by 957,900 workers the ■;| week before.

' In the overcrowded parts o? London, basements which were " damp and stale,'* with very little daylight, let readily at from 5s to 7s 6d. a week to-the poorest families to live in.

London has nearly 2000 taxicabs fewer than there were before the War, the present figure being 8500. The decrease is due, in part at least, to the luxury of the modern buses.

Owls and kestrel-hawks may kill a few game-chicks when hungry, but they more than make up for tlus damage by the vast crowds of .rats, mice, and insects which they destroy. Two pyramids about 80ft high, six miles apart and connected by a broad highway, were recently discovered in.tho jungles of Vera Cruz, Mexico, by aviators who were exploring this region.

Spiders' webs, which are used in aerial photography and surveying, are cultivated in Canada. In use they aro stretched across view-finders, helping operators to secure a more accurate direction. Britain is now building more than half the world's total -shipbuilding, the output of the Clyde yards alono amounting to. almost as much as the combined total of France, Germany, and Holland. The world's gold reserves amount to £2,582,000,000; of this huge total }he United States possesses £600.000,000. France is second with £326,600.000, and Great Britain third with £142,200,000. The heart of a turtle, detached from its body, has been kept beating, and, by means of an ingenious appliance, recording its pulsations, for 36 hours at Princeton, America's famous University. Somo of the finest native colleges in . . Africa aro to be found in the Gold Coast territory, while Accra, one of the Crown Colony's most important towns, has the | best-equipped native hospital in the world. As a compliment to M. Paul Doumer, President of the French Senate, who lost all his four sons in the war, the city 0f... Paris is naming a thoroughfare -the " Street of tho Four Sons of Paul Doumer." In the census being taken in the United States one of the questions to be answered is: "How mauy weeks is it since you worked at your present job ?" The census proclamation is being issued in twentythree languages. Civil employees of tho British Government, including industrial workers, numbered 430,300 in 1929, as compared with 390,500 in 1913-14. Their wage bill lias risen from £36,750,000. to £83,422,600 in the same period. Westminster. Cathedral—the great Roman Catholic edifice—is to be decorated all over inside with mosaic work, at £o a square foot. The whole task will cost about £1,000,000, and may not'be completed for about 200 yfears. Tho United States of America, with the enormous total of £88,000,000,000, heads the list of wealthy nations, according to statistics issued by a European bank. Great Britain's wealth is estimated at £22,500,000,000 and that of Germany at £19,500,000,000. A certain problem was sefr in a scholarship examination for London schoolchildren of eleven years of age; 50 ot them solved it correctly. Later, it - was sent to America, where of 700 schoolchildren, sixteen years old, not , one , could work it out correctly. • . '