News in Brief

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23145, 17 September 1938, Page 17 (Supplement)

News in Brief

Germany has concluded a contract with tho Mexican Government for the exchange of 25,000 tons of nowsprint for 500,000 barrels of oil. Spectacles of which the lenses are tested by dropping a steel ball on them from a height of six feet have lately been on exhibition in London. A monument to tho French poetess, Anne, Countess Mathieu de Noailles, who diod in 1933, was unveiled recently at Ampijion, on tho Lake of Geneva. A record is claimed in Berlin for a carrier pigeon which flow 300 miles from Apcldoorn, Holland, to Berlin, at an average speed of 66 miles an hour. Mr. H. A. Taylor, President of the British Institute of Journalists, has been elected an hon. member of tho American Press Society. Ho is tho first foreigner to have been thus honoured. A wedding ring found in a. tin of sardines by an Ostend soldier has been returned to its owner, a woman sardine packer, at Strasburg; it had slipped off her finger whilo she was at work. There seems to bo no end to the uso of tho coconut; we hear that Ceylon has found that brown paper can do made out/ of -coconut husks, and is trying to develop an export trade in this new industry. In Britain's Parliament at least, women are not the talkative sex. Last session Miss Kleanor Rathbone, tho "lost talkative woman M.P., filled only columns of Hansard, tho °'ncial report; the most loquacious man vva.s A[ r , Stanley, President of the •Board of Trade, with 167 columns.

"No child is born truthful," says a British expert in child study, who adds that tho virtue of truth has to be and can be acquired. The Italian Air Minister has opened a competition to Till 3,870 vacancies for air apprentices, in which Italians living abroad may compete. Sark, one of tho Channel Islands, has its own language, a form of old Norman French. It is understood by only about 500 people. Tho American women's monthly magazino, Women's Homo Companion, published in New York, has been banned in Germany. Although thero are fewer brewers in Great Britain, their total profits have risen from less than £10,000,000 a year before tho War to £28,500,000 last year. Every child born iu Hungary is to receive an official number which will be entered on all official documents referring to him, from birth certificate onwards. From the summit of Snowdon, highest mountain in England and Wales, about thirty-six mountains and thirty-two lakes are said to be visible,'given good weather conditions. Cardiff holds the record among British cities for largo families. There are six couples with twenty or more children, and more than twenty with between fifteen and twenty. The first mention made of windmills in old documents occurs about the end of the twelfth century. The oldest still standing dates from 1665. It is at Outwood, Surrey, and is still working.