NEWS IN BRIEF

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22006, 12 January 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF

No more new cinemas may be opened iii Germanv until the end of March. 1935. Rouging the tips of the ears is the latest fad among smart women in New York. About 40,000 tons of pepper is the annual consumption for the whole world. Passengers to the number of 83,100 were carried on British commercial aircraft in 1933. There are more than 5154 licensed houses, including hotels and restaurants, in London. The world consumption of wood every year is 50 per cent more than the quantity grown. Two hundred women were widowed and 800 children left fatherless by the recent mining disaster at Gresford. Hvthe, Kent, one of the Cinque Ports, notorious 200 years ago for smuggling, has chosen a Customs officer for its next mayor. Twenty years ago the only mechanical transport of the British Post Office consisted of four motor-cars and one steam tractor. A waterfall Bft. high is to form one of the features in a roof garden now being built on the top of a skyscraper in New York. Borrowers who keep ISgjtks over time from the Croydon and Surrey public libraries pay. 011 an average, over £IOO a month in fines. The world's record rainfall has been registered at Cherrapunja, Assam — 36.4 in. in 24 hours. In one week 116.5 in. of rain were recorded. Horseshoes of rubber, invented by a manufacturer in Prague, are claimed to be non-slipping and to last ten times as long as metal shoes. Britons are eating more. The food sales for July last year in the shops were nearly 5 per cent higher than for the same month in 1933. An oil painting declared by experts to be a Titian worth £SOOO was bought by a Hungarian art student in an "old curiosity" shop for a shilling. Three youths put pepper into the air suction fan of an Arkansas theatre. The cooling system was turned on and the theatre emptied in record time. Valued at £200,000 an ojjnce, the world's rarest metal, named actinium, is stated to be much more powerful than radium and lasts 20 times as long.

Household management, cooking, and dress-making have all formed part of Princess Marina's training. She speaks six languages —French, German, Bussian, Italian, Greek, and English fluently. A Bible in a Berlin library is printed on palmleaves. One in the Vatican Library weighs a quarter of a ton, while in the" Bodleian Library, Oxford, is a Bible so tiny that it fits inside a walnut shell.

It is more than fifty years since the younger son of a British sovereign married a foreign princess. In 1882 the Duke of Albany, Queen Victoria s fourth son, married Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont.

Eight hours' sleep, morning exercises, three good meals a day, and a regular " constitutional "—of course, in addition to their daily patrols —is the prescription given by the New York commissioner to the police of that city. A market • gardener in California claims to have "cleared his garden of a pest of grasshoppers by the use of a vacuum cleaner. This is only one example of uses never contemplated by the manufacturers of various articles of commerce.

So manv official guests—peers, members of the Diplomatic Corps, foreign royalties, etc. —had seats allotted to them for the Royal wedding in Western inster Abbey that there was room for only about thirty personal friends of the' bride and bridegroom.

Hamelin, of Pied Piper fame, will be the first town in tho world to supply poisonless gas to houseuolders. A plant is being constructed at the gasworks, which, it is claimed, will neutralise the poison present in the gas before it is delivered to the householder.

Marija Hrelinitch. of Zagreb, Croatia, gave a gispy woman '£o for a cup of what she was told was a love potion that would bring back her husband b love. It turned out to be ordinary tap water and had no effect on her husband —except for his temper.

Great Britain's bill for cut blooms, which far exceeds any other nation, is £10,000.000 a year. At the height of the season more than a quarter of a million roses a day are sold at Covent Garden. The year's output of carnations reaches two., million dozen blooms. The fire brigade at Stockholm answered a call to a burning beefsteak recently. The firemen broke into a flat from which smoke had been noticed, and found that the steak had been left on a gas grill. The occupants of the flat had gone out without having turned off the gas.

Concrete piles, driven thirty feet into the ground, will support the new buildings of tho University of London. They are to cost £3,000,000 and are planned so that any necessary internal alteration to meet requirements for years to come can be made without touching the outer shell.

The Duke of Kent, who was attached to the Foreign Office in 1929, is the first member of the Royal Family to become a Civil Servant. He is widely travelled, having visited South America, Soutli Africa, and. tn.6 Belgian Congo, in addition to his service elsewhere with the British Navy.

i\n electrically-operated time-table is being tested by the Southern Railway in England. It is surmounted by a frame. At the back i 5 a list of 300 stations, opposite each of which is an index number. All that is needed is to press the button of the index number of the destination required. This raises a card in the frame containing the train services needed.

Although no record can be found of a species of spider having wings, most spiders can travel great distances through the air. They do this by spinning a long sdken thread and launching it into the breeze so that it serves as a balloon or a parachute. Spiders and their ballooning silk threads have been found in the air hundreds of miles at sea.

Heirs to £2,000,000 are wanted in Canada. An Edinburgh solicitor in Dundee, who is endeavouring to trace the heirs to the estate, has revealed this. He is making a search of newspaper files of more than a hundred years ago, m an attempt to find the legal heirs to the estate of the late Mr. Andrew Mercer, once of Edinburgh, who made a fortune in landed estate in loronto and died in Canada in 1871.

Believing that the names of places are easier to remember than numbers of rooms a Berlin hotel is remodelling its accommodation for guests on this principle. Each room bears the name or a place, and is furnished accordingly with photographs, of scenes in tnac locality. Thus, instead of living in room 13 or 99, for instance, one may choose a room named after the T.ergarten and thus claim to be residing m Berlin. Hvde Park. ' '