NEWS IN BRIEF

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22172, 27 July 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF

In Richmond, Yorkshire, there are two men to every woman.

Nearly half Britain's population are either spinsters.

Clubs to the number of 2574 were registered in London last year. Official figures go to prove that women are living longer than men.

Babies now eat about four times as much as their parents did as infants.

Yorkshire is more than three times the size of Lancashire, but its population is 663,766 less. Britain has 3,000,000 families with one child, 1,600,000 with two children, and 900,000 with three. Since its inception, eighteen years ago, the British War Graves Commission has spent £11,878,.000. London contains only one statue of Queen Elizabeth. This is placed outside a church in Fleet Street.

Among the foreigners living in England, the greatest number are Poles, followed by liussiahs and Americans. A boy with six fingers on each hand and six toes on one foot, has been born in the Italian village of Piemezzana.

English is to be an alternative to German as the second compulsory language to French In k'ugosiav schools. Heinrich Mann; the German writer, who was deprived of his citizenship by the Nazis, is applying for Czech citizenship.

The first of three British expeditions to recapture world speed records on the salt beds of Utah sailed from England on June 26.

An explosion' costing £2900 will blast away 5000 tons of rock from a ledge in the Niagara Falls. Experts say that this rock is unsafe.

Six minutes after he entered the dock at Gloucester Assizes A. H. Franklin, a smallholder, was sentenced to death for murder.

At the age of ninety-four, William Gale, a farmer, of Knossington, Leicestershire, has made a rug containing 49,522 pieces of wool. " No. 1, London," is the popular name given to the Duke of Wellington's residence; it is the first house past Hyde Park Corner.

The estate of Mr. Benjamin Duke, the tobacco manufacturer and philanthropist, who died in January, 192y, was valued at £1,575,000.

The dropping of a lighted cigarette is believed to have, caused an explosion at the Audemard oil works at Nice by which two men were killed.

Rumania, with 32 per 1000, has the highest birth-rate among European countries; Sweden, with 13.7 per 1000, is at the other end of the list.

A- decree issued in Yiennh imposes severe penalties for maligning or ridiculing Austria or insulting tiie memory of a person who has died for Austria.

The belief that eyes have the power of influencing persons, animals, plants or inanimate objects is widespread among the Semitic, Hamitic and Negro tribes

By the action of the French Society of Fine Arts the destruction of a 400-year-old plane tree at St. Andre de Cubzac, near Bordeaux, has been prevented.

Wireless telephones' enabling the engine-drivers to communicate with signalmen are, in future, to be fitted to the locomotives on the French State Railways.

Describing it as a danger, to the health of its Riembtrs and hostile to the Nazi State, the Hamburg police have dissolved the Free Christian Society, a faith-healing body. A grim tragedy of the desert has been brought to light by the discovery of the bodies of four young men of the French colonial service at an isolated spot 111 the North Sudan.

It is claimed that experimental applications of light and heat, applied in a Canadian laboratory, have caused trout to develop twenty-five times faster than in natural conditions.

Imperial Airways ■ are now issuing family season tickets enabling husband, wife and two children under twenty-one to travel on almost any air line in Europe at considerable reductions.

A plan of a large estate at Beaconsfield, dated 1753 and drawn on a sheep's skin, has been dug up in Amersham. The plan was contained in a metal tube, and is in a perfect state of preservation. While a French naval aeroplane was flying at a height of 2000 ft., a sudden gust of wind blew the mechanic out of his seat, and the pilot landed safely with the other man hanging on to the tail of the aeroplane. Honey is the best "cure" for wounds, according to a leading Vienna physician, who claims to have used it successfully in some thousands of cases without one failure, it is also said to be effective with burns and carbuncles.

There are 600.000,000 Battle in the world, 750,000,000 sheep and 300,000,000 pigs. About two-fifths of the cattle are in the British Empire, between onethird and two-fifths of the sheep, and no more than 5 per cent of the pigs. The British boy of to-day is nearly ten pounds heavier and two inches taller than the boy of IS&3, Since 1919 e. thirteen-year-old schoolboys have in- {, creased 11? weight by an average of J s : five pounds, and are an inch taller. The Catalan Government has refused, on the ground that Madrid must decide the matter, the request of Professor Einstein, as president of an international association of Jews, for permission to establish farming colonies in Catalonia.

With a dial thirty feet in diameter, a huge clock is being erected at the Band Airport, Johannesburg. It will be let into the ground so that its face will be visible from the- air, and the works will be contained in a subterranean chamber.

Electrically-heated vegetable beds have been pronounced a great success in Erfurt, Germany. Wires were laid lft. beneath the surface of the. soil, and radishes, lettuces and tomatoes have responded to the artificial warmth with splendid results. Matilda Frantchitch, of Slavonski, Pozega, claims, to be the youngest grand-mother in Europe. She is only thirty-one years old. She ran away from home when fourteen, and married. Hoi daughter, born when her mother was sixteen, married a year ago. A grandson was born recently. The food consumed by London Zoo animals last year included: 145 tons of fodder, 122 tons of straw, 24,472 bundles of tares, 24 quarters of canary seed, 20 quarters of sunflower seed, 1089 pints of shrimps, lS9cwt. of monkey nuts, 203,064 bananas, 21,344 oranges, 4401b. of ant-eggs, 2G,100 eggs, 2571b. of golden syrup. A radio firm in Washington has introduced a novel bandit alarm. A bandit enters a bank flourishing a revolver, whereupon the cashier, simulating cowardice, pushes over a pile of coins, which he offers to the marauder. The action releases an automatic switch held down by the coins, sets a miniature radio transmitter in operation, and' warns all police cars in the neuutar.