NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20898, 13 June 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Seven out of every ten people in London are London-bora. Rice paper is made not from the rice plant, but from the pith of a tree growing in Formosa. Measures are being taken to make the ittractions of Gibraltar as a tourist resort better known. The fact that fish sleep has been proved by Mr. Boulenger, director of tho London Zoo Aquarium. Bricks more than 3500 years old have been used in building a small railway station in Mesopotamia. It takes about six weeks to give one of the great Atlantic passenger liners her annual spring clean. Tho amount paid in coal mining royalties in Britain for the year ended June 30, 1930, was £5,800,000. Since 1918 nine British battleships of tho Queen Elizabeth class have been modernised at a cost of £2,870,000. Women drivers are involved in only two and a-half per cent, of the fatal accidents on the English roads. Millionaires are getting scarce in Britain. In 1924-25 there were 601, while in 1928-29 tho number had decreased to 487. Income tax is paid by 2,250,000 people in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Ten years ago there were 3,000,000 taxable incomes. The Royal Albert Hall, London, contains its own printing works, painters' and carpenters' shops, and its own blacksmiths' forges. What is claimed to be London's oldest lift is still in use in the Royal Albert Hall. It works by hydraulic power, and is 60 years old. Four bishops of the Church of England receive £2OOO each. At the othen end of the scale is the Bishop of London,- who receives £IO,OOO. The stock of fowls and ducks on agricultural holdings in Great Britain was 58,820,000 in i 920, as compared with 48,087,000 in 192& » Experts, working on official figures, estimate that there is now a world total of 24,000,000 wireless sets, valued at £200,000,000, in use. In 1929 the number of deaths from tuberculosis in England and Wales, was 37,990. In 1915 the number of deaths from this cause was 54,295. On January 31, £2,193,956 was standing to the credit of the Miners' Welfare Fund in Great Britain. Tho amount paid out during 1930 was £1,361,466. British women live longer than their American sisters, whose death-rate between the ages of 25 and 64 is more than 30 per cent, higher than in England. In the last 20 years there have been 301 explosions in' British coal mines caused by firedamp or coal dust. Tho number of deaths so caused has been 1377. There were 15,393 books published in England last year, an increase of more than 1000 on the figure for 1929. Of last year's publications 3922 were works of fiction. A German flying company which is making a strong bid for a share of the holiday and tourist traffic has been offering 12 days' flying tours in Europe for £4O. A rainfall of one inch over the whole basin of the Thames River equals 55,000,000,000 gallons of water, or a sheet of water 670 miles long, 250 ft. wide, and 10ft. deep. Periodical checks show that the average number of homeless people found sleeping out of doors on any night in London is now about 90; not very long ago it stood at over 2000. H.M.S. Birmingham, one of the last coal-burning cruisers and the first vessel to sink a German submarine in the war, left Portsmouth recently for Pembroke to be broken up. In 1929 28,574 boys under 16 years of age were employed underground in the coal mines of Great Britain. Of this number 40 were killed and 7122 were seriously injured. Certain foodstuffs contain more iron than others, and should, therefore, be eaten freely. They are spinach, egg yolk, apples, lentils, strawberries, peas, beans and wheat. German holiday-makers favour Switzerland, Italy, France and Czecho-Slovakia, while the tourists who visit Germany are chiefly from Scandinavia, Holland, Eng- » land and America. The Junker Works at Dessau, Germany, are constructing a metal aeroplane with an airtight cabin for an attempt to reach heights where the air is too rarefied to support human life. <■ As bad eyesight threatened to end the career of Sally Dun, .an American racehorse, she was recently • fitted .with " g oi ?gl es > M afterwards coming in first in one race and second in two others. The approximate kngth of overhead telephone and telegraph wires at present in use by the British Post Office is 1,300,000 miles. The total mileage of underground wires is 7,600,000 miles. About a third of the work in connection with the £1,700,000 scheme for the electrification of the Hungarian State railways between Budapest and the Austrian frontier has been placed in England. In the United Kingdom in 1911 there were 1675 cases of sentences of the birch. In 1928, the latest figures available, tho number had dropped to 199. To-day such sentences are believed to be practically non-existent. The averago weekly earnings of a]l persons employed in coal-mines in Greats Britain during the nine months ended September, 1930, were £2 3s 9d. For the same period in 1929 tho average earnings .were £2 5s 6d. The total number of immigrants entering Canada last year was 104,806, as against 164,392 in 1929, Regulations restricting immigration wero passed in 1 August last, and wero in force before the end of the year. Headphones are supplied for the use of the deaf in some theatres in Chicago 'and Germany; this is an innovation in regular theatres, although it has already been tried successfully in at least one London "■ talkie " theatre. According to the president of the Board of Trade, tne national income of England has romained at £4,000,000,000 for the last 10 years, while the wages of the working * class have been reduced by £700,000,000 a year. The number of British civil servants earning £3 per week or less is 94,000. ' There aro £174,000 who earn £4 per week , or less, and 205 who earn £5 per week or less. Tho number who earn more than £5 per week is 61,000. Seats that become sleeping-berths,, a buffet, and a wireless are to bo fitted to ' new luxury motor-coaches to run between 1 Paris, Barlin and Warsaw. The trip • between Paris and Berlin will cost about * £3 and occupy 27 hours. 1 Under the Feeding of School Children ' Act, tho number of children who received meals each week in 1930 in England an< . Wales was 146,000. Only 152 out of 317 ' local authorities exercised their : fo ' the provision of meals during tha J i Tho total amount of compensation paid . to workmen or their cependenb m , • Bri.tf.in in the great inclustr '^ e g on . L n-ines, quarries, railways, docks, .con I sti uctional work £6,457,273' in 1928 and £6,569,918, in A