NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

Taranaki Daily News, 15 July 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

THE WORLD AT A GLANCE

A ewe on a Stoney Middleton (Derbyshire) farm has given hifth to five lambs.

fire alarms cost the ratepayers of London between £30,000 and £40,000 every year.

Whalebone is not bone at all, but an elastic substance found in the mouths of whales.

The world’s total of motor-bicycles is placed at 2,750,000, 85 per cent, of them, being in Europe. Travellers on board. British ships run so little risk of death from fire that it works out at less than .00003 per cent. The world’s cheapest stamp is to be found in Goa, a Portuguese possession in India. There stamps cost one penny for 12—and the buyer provides his own gum. We are said to be acquiring gradually the power of shutting our ears to noise; this is Nature’s. response to the increased noise of modem life. Swordsticks, consisting of smart malacca and other canes containing a slim steel blade, are becoming increasingly popular in Great Britain. Private flying is increasing. There are now over 400 private aeroplanes on the British register, while 16 light-aeroplane clubs receive, the subsidy. Four hundred boxes of matches were found undamaged in the debris of a shop destroyed by fire at Bury St. Edmunds (Eng.) „

The maintenance of education and public health costs £1 5s 6d per head of the population every year in Great Britain.

Cowboys from the Texas ranges are now coming regularly to the beauty parlours of Kansas City for face massage and manicure treatment. “Husbands are invariably to blame for matrimonial disputes,” said Judge Morschauser after 28 years on the New York Supreme Court Bench. The health authorities of Paris estimate that there are 3,000,000 rats in the city. They destroy £2,000,000 worth of food every year.

Last year’s output of films was the lowest for 20 years; there was, however, an increase in the number of British films.

Smokeless fuel, motor spirit, and heavy oils can be obtained from any suitable kind of coal by the use of a brick retort of a new type. | A woman beggar arrested in Prague told the police that her collections brought her in an income of £l2OO a year.

Professor Lazarev, of the Leningrad Academy of Science, says that by nourishing and stimulating the nervous system men and women can live for 180 years.

Mary Young, 12, of Seattle (U.SA.), who was bitten by a monkey two years ago, has been awarded £l5O damages, because she has had “horrible dreams” about monkeys ever since.

Judge Alfred Harrington, of Mount Vernon, bought a fat hen for his Sunday dinner. Before she was killed she laid an egg. The judge ordered her reprieve and had fish for dinner instead.: A South Caroline lumber company squirts red, blue, green, and purple dyes into growing trees. When the trees are cut and sawn they provide brightly coloured timber.

By replacing a top section of a patients skull with a piece of celluloid Dr. Karl Ney, of Manhattan Homeopathic Hospital, claims to be able to cure cases of epilepsy. 1 ; .

Charles Aldrich, a professor of psychology at Carmel, San Francisco, foretold the day and hour of his death a month in advance, though his doctors insisted that he was in perfect health. A tax of one farthing in the £, amounting to a total of £4666 13s 4d, is paid by ratepayers of the City of London for the upkeep of the Royal London Militia, which exists only in name. . . One village in Wiltshire, Stockley, has no church, post office, school, or publichouse for its population of sixty-nine, of whom more than one-third are drawing the old-age pension. .•> Half a million frogs’ eggs have been distributed to American schools by the American Museum of Natural History so that the school-children can watch the evolution of the egg into the tadpole, and so to the perfect frog. Charts are being made for the first time of the dangerous coasts of Labrador by Challenger, the survey ship of the British Navy. It is estimated that it will take 50 years to complete the survey. ’ Mere than one out of every five ships of the world’s tonnage is laid up just now, so low has the world trade fallen. Another factor in the decrease is that nations other than British have doubled their tonnage in recent years. Finger-print tests in,Munich have established the fact that several disputed pictures are genuine “old masters painted by Durer. Durer, who used his thumb to help out his brush work, died in 1528. A recent invention .is a slot-machine “message board” used by persons who cannot wait to keep appointments in stations, hotels, and other meeting-places. Messages for friends are left by inserting a coin, opening a glass shutter, and writing in the space provided. At Klagenfurt, capital of the southwestern province of Carinthia, 81 old peasant families have received diplomas for having tilled the soil for centuries. The family of the Perkonigs have been working as peasants for 364 years without a break. Prohibition agents seized the illicit still of a bootlegger at York, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. The Board of Tax Appeals at Washington has permitted him to deduct £2500 from his income tax return, on the ground that the seizure of the still constituted a business loss. For the first time for five years the number of road deaths in Great Britain last year showed a decrease on the previous year. The figures were 6651 in 1932, as compared with 6691 in 1931. On the other hand, the number of nonfatal accidents had increased. Passengers in the liner City of York, during a recent voyage from India, witnessed a battle royal in the Indian between a 25ft. shark and a swordfish. The fight lasted for 35 minutes before the shark, ripped from mouth to tail, was killed. Alps has .revealed a tragedy of the depth of winter. Thirteen Italians were crossing a pass 7500 ft above Locarno with « load of coffee and sugar which they were smuggling across the frontier when an avalanche swept them over the mountain side, burying them under snow, ice, and rock 3090 ft below. The bodies of six of these adventurous smugglers have recently been discovered under the dehbris of the avalanche.