NEWS IN BRIEF

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21278, 3 September 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF

It takes 50,000 rosebuds fco make one ounce of oil of roses. A canary's broken leg was recently set by a doctor at the Seaman's Hospital, at Greenwich. In repairing the famous Verdun fortifications the workmen are constantly coming across live shells. Twelve round trips a day are mada by passenger aeroplanes between New York and Washington. An American . has given a recreation ground to Westoning, in I edfordshire, as a memorial to his sister. The first newspaper vrta printed over 1200 years ago. It was the Peking Gazettf, which was established in 714.< Britain's first automatic - telephone exchange was opened twenty years ago. The 1000 th has just been opened. To restore the penny postage in Britain would lead to a drop of £6,000,000 in revenue from the Post Office. For the first time in the histosy of Bow Street Police Court, there were no night charges for hearing, on July 9. Figures issued by the London Board of trade showed that 4,212,Q00 umbrellas were made in England l?st year. Hotel salaries in Britain range from five shillings a week for the pages up to £2OOO a year or more for the manager. Out of 39,000 sentences passed on prisoners in Britain in 1930, 20,394 of the offenders had been in - prison before. A customer at a shop at Romford, Essex, walked through a plate glass window in mistake for the door. He was not even scratched. Mrs. Sam Robinson, aged 70 years, won the first prize for having the most graceful ankles at a recent competition at Hatfield, Yorkshire." The captain of an average liner receives £1250 a year in salary. Stewards receive less than £2 a week, but usually more than treble this figure with tips. The cheapest horse that ever won the Derby was Little Wonder, who was bought for less than £7O in 1838, and won the " Blue Riband' in 1840. The Cunard liner Samaria recently struck a shark 150 miles from shore, and carried it on her bows to Galway, where it was towed clear by the pilot boat. William Allen, the negro lorry driver, who found the-body of the Lindbergh child, has been given an engagement in vaudeville at 300 dollars (normally £6O) a week. There was not one death sentence passed in Scotland," nor was" there one execution in Scottish prisons, throughout 1931.

London is becoming noisier. A year ago it was ten per cent less noisy-than New York; now it is almost, if not quite, as noisy as that city. The weekly food bill of ,a first-class hotel in London, may amount to as much as £2500, the largest single item figures usually being poultry. Road accidents in Britain last year were responsible for 6691 deaths and 202,119 injured; in 1926 the respective figures were 4886 and 155,888. V Chemists working in the Government laboratory in London test upward of 500,000 samples, jranging from, foodstuffs to the finest steel, every year. Four hundred worshippers .attended the annual conventicle at Soutra Aisle, onLammermoor Hills, to commemorate the old hospice founded about 1164. . "Talkies" are to become a regular .educational feature in Chicago, where the ! tfmvsrsity is producing a" dealing with th^ sciences. The Chukchee, of Eastern Siberia, a nomadic tribe of. reindeer breeders take great pride in their animals, and will travel many miles to race their reindeer. A magnifying-glass is needed to see the bust of the Pope which has been carved in a grain of rice by a converted Chinese. This curiosity was recently presented 18 the Pope. . Domenick Roche refuses to leave the Hartford prison in Connecticut. He has applied for leave to stay until Octobers to finish the typewriting course he began in prison. , Faked antiques—furniture, jewellery, china and needlework —are now being turned out so skilfully that they baffle experts and ofteti fetch as good a price as the original; < 1 An air survey of Rio de Janeiro and the Federal District of Brazil hag' been completed after three and a half years. By ground methods this survey would have taken 15 years. While waiting outside the labour exchange at Coalville, Leicestershire, lately, to draw unemployment pay, Levi Piper, iaged twenty-^evan, a miner, suddenly; died after asking for a drink of water. The British film censors ordered cuts, ranging from one small incident to as much as 1000 feet, in eighteen per cent of the films submitted to them last year. Forty films were completely rejected. Germany's oldest steam-engine, a single cylinder stationary engine, has just been scrapped in Koenigsborn. It was imported from Great Britain in 1799 and has worked "a pump day and night ever since.

When Mrs. Graham aged 90, who lived alone at Galo, County Fermanagh, Ireland, and who was believed to be penniless, died, the house was searched and over £IOOO in gold and deposit receipts and securities were found. Three families of lion cubs were lately born in the Crystal Palace menagerie in London within six weeks. This is believed to be a record for any zoo. The total of cubs to make their appearance was eight and six were alive and well. The Society of Dog-Lovers in Japan has asked permission to arrange dog-fight* in order " to make Japan more alluring to tourists." According to it, dog-fights are "a most wholesome and manly sport that will appeal strongly to the Uste of foreigners." An Englishwoman at Cannes found a note in a cauliflower which she was cooking, saying that the grower had received one halfpenny for it, and asking th» buyer to inform him the price paid for it in the shop. The cauliflower had oost the woman Is. 6d. Suits of clothes made from a new fabrio that will banish colds are predicted by Mr. Maurice Holland, of tne American Research Counqil. He is aiming at a fabric manufactured from cotton in such a way that it will absorb perspiration and regulate body heat perfectly. A statistician of an American motor association has computed that drivers m American cities wait from 27 to 32 years each day for the green traffic light. A better co-ordination of the signals permitting continuous running would cut this waiting time, he suggests, though he finds four-fiftha of it is necessary. Buried at the same depth as the bones of sabre-tooth tigers and other animals that roamed the earth 20,000 years ago, a mammoth's skull, containing an « rr °T head has been found near a Florida beach. Scientists interpret the discovery as ev* dence that man and mammoth existed on the earth at the same time.-* From a publication issued by of Nations it is shown that Bntain is largest „pwt« oj to Britain, France and America were largest exporters.