GENERAL NEWS.

Patea Mail, Volume XLIV, 1 December 1920, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS.

Nineteen goods wagons broke loose while being shunted at Troyes, France, and rushed downhill towards a station, A shunter jumped on a bicycle and raced along the track parallel with the train, and then, jumping on one of the fast-moving kagons, applied the brake and prevented a serious collision. CRAFTIER CRIMINALS. Crime is becoming a more educated profession every year, said Sir Leonard Dunning, Home Office Inspector of Constabulary, at a Plymouth police inspection. There are, he added, more men of education earning their living by dishonest means than ever before, and if the police are to protect the public from that sort of thing they must be bettor educated. In future the police will have better opportunities for education than their comrades had in the past. DOG’S REMARKABLE INSTINCT. The remarkable instinct of a fox terrier was again proved when recently a dog of that breed belonging to a Maidstone farmer found his way homr* when his head was imprisoned in a drainpipe and so firmly lodged there that he could not. release himself. The terrier disappeared from his home, and was gone several days, the farmer and his family meanwhile fearing he had been lost or stolen. Finally the dog, half starved, was seen crawling backwards across a field towards his house dragging with him the drain pipe in which his head was tirmly wedged. It was necessary to break the pipe before the tender could be released. If is thought that he got trapped in the pipe while pursuing a rabbit. iti/iOO THEFT CHARGE. Upon a charge of stealing £6GOO from his employers, Lloyds Bank, Ltd., a young bank cln.K, Erie Eea Gnscoiti Pearce, was committed for trial at the Portsmouth Police Court. It was stated that Pearce ha 1 charge of the till of the bank at Southsca, and admitted ho was £GGOO short. After wards bags which should have con tainod the money were found filled with paper. Pearce, it is alleged, said in a written statement: When I started work at the bunk I was getting only £lO5 a year. I tried to manage or, this, but my room cost £2 iis at least every week, and I hand only £2O in the world when I loft the Army. I started backing horses to make .more money. FEENCH USE MOKE TOBACCO. Although the French population decreased nearly 2,000,000 as a result of the war, the directors of the French Government’s itobacco factory report that there has been an unprecedented increase in the use of tobacco and cigarettes. Despite even the presence of American cigarettes on the French market, it is impossible to satisfy the smokers’ demands, and fifty new machines are to be installed in the State’s cigarette factories, with a view to rolling 800 million more cigarettes every year. According to the French officials the cigarette habit has not boon adopted by French women any more than In other countries, the increased demand coming from returned soldiers, who during four years of warfare in the trenches developed a peculiar nervousness which only the French “caporal” can console. BEICKS OUT OF RUBBISH. A notable example of conservation is to be found in the scheme just announced by the Paris Municipal Council for the use of the city’s rubbish, which is gathered daily in trucks from apartments and buildings. Henceforth this will be heated to a temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and then chemically treated until it forms a pulp to be mixed with chalk found in abundance near the city. Special mills have been constructed to transform the garbage pulp into bricks for the reconstruction of houses and streets in the devastated rogionss. Experiments have proved that such bricks have greater lasting qualities than those of ordinary red clay, and can be manufactured at ,one-tenth the cost. The heating process also releases electricity used in the operating of the garbage destroyers, with a balance loft for lighting the streets of one of the city's largest suburbs. GERMAN PRINCE'S DEBT*. According to the anti-Semitic Deutsche Zeitung, the silver plate of the Kaiser’s cousin, Prince Fricderick Leopold, at Glicnicke Palace, near Potsdam, has been placed under official restraint, “because he has had so little regard for the well-earned claims of his employees that it has been necessary to assert their rights in this 'manner,” The objects sequestrated arc said to have a value of several millions of marks. It is added that as a consequence of his views the ground here had become too hot for him, the Prince is now “amusing himself at Lugano with more than questionable international society. n Prince Freidrich Leopold is a son of Prince Fricdcrich Karl, who was the brother of the Emperor William 1., and, as ouo of the army commanders in the war of 1870-71, won the sobriquet of (lie “Eod Prince.” The Prince’s sou, Fricdcrich Karl, was the only Hohenzollern to sacrifice his life in the war. He was shot down in an aeroplane, and died at Eouen in April, 1017.