NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

Taranaki Daily News, 2 June 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

THE WORLD AT A GLANCE .

The average size of shoes worn by women is five and a half.

A trained nurse, it is stated, is seldom able to earn an adequate livelihood after she has passed the age of thirty-five.

Big Ben is not a clock; it is the bell on which the great Westminster dock strikes.

Miss East and Mr. West were married at the Roman Catholic Church at Beccles, Suffolk, England, recently. There are 89,790 people in Great Britain who have £2OOO or more a year, but only ninety-four have more than £lOO,000 a year.

More than half the workmen of London between the ages of. twenty and sixty-five draw more than 61s a week in wages.

Girls are said to work a seventy-two-hour week in some of the textile mills in Quebec, Canada, for one penny an hour.

President Roosevelt has received 22,000 ' telegrams and 1,620,000 postal letters and packets since taking office about a year ago.

More than £1,000,000 was allocated last year from the Welfare Fund of the Miners’ Welfare Committee, to be spent for the benefit of colliery workers.

Passengers carried by the London Transport Board have the use of 3156 carriages, 5312 omnibuses, 2518 tramcars, 459 motor-coaches, and 60 trolley ’buses.

Out of 6,000,000 British school children, 800,000 receive a ration of milk everyday. This is paid for either by the parents or by the Public Assistance Committees.

In spite of the humorists, there are more Welsh and Irish than Scots in London. Three years ago the figures were: Irish 64,800, Welsh 60,000, and Scots 54,000.

Wife desertion has been on the increase in the county of Middlesex, where 513 wives were deserted by their husbands last year. This is 142 more than in the previous year.

Kashmir, in Northern India, is notorious for its frequent fires, many of which are caused by the small braziers of live coals that natives wear under their clothing to keep themselves warm.

There was not a single road death in Hartlepool, England, last year; the credit for this is given to the policeconstables, who visit the schools and give the children lessons in “safety first” British bachelors resident in Germany ‘ must now pay bachelor tax k the proceeds going to the marriage fund from which the Government lends £73 to needy German couples on their marriage. A health resort in the Frozen North is being planned by Russia, as the ultraviolet rays of the Arctic sun contain wonderful healing properties for bone fractures 'and similar injuries. An old road-worker of Finvoy Co., Antrim, John Dunlop, was buried in a £lOO coffin made of stainless steeL It was a present from his rich brother William, living in Philadelphia. Strangest of all marriage customs comes from Esthonia, where brides, when first entering their new homes, throw money on the fire. The fact that someone has money to bum, even today, is news! Two years of unbroken slumber have 'just been completed by Miss Patricia Maguire, a twenty-nine-year-old Chicago typist. She has cost her family over £lOOO for special foods' and medical treatment calculated to revive her. A splash of lime-water accidentally hitting the blind right eye of James Morren, a 30-year-old employee of an Elgin distillery, restored its sight after twelve years of blindness. A specialist affirms that the lime burnt away an unsuspected film.

One of the rarest hobbies in the world is that of making pictures from human hair. The only person believed to be following this peculiar avocation today is a barber in Scotland, who makes astonishingly realistic scenes with hair cut from heads of customers.

Perhaps the loneliest mdilboat in Australian waters is the 26-ton -lugger, Noosa, which operates monthly between Burketown (N.Q.) and the mission stations and settlements in the southwestern portion of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The vessel, covers nearly 11,000 miles on each trip, and crosses waters which have never been charted.

One of the cleverest tricks ever devised by a crook misled a world-famous detective agency for more than six months. Its men searched for a notorious criminal whose fingerprint was found on several broken safes. Finally they discovered that this criminal had been dead for 'a year, and that a partner was using his amputated thumb. Unearthed recently at Petrie (Queensland) * was a relic of the pioneering farming days of Queensland—a crude, all-wood plough. It is constructed simply of a flattened fork with an. angled upright third member used for guiding the implement In a remarkably wellpreserved condition, it was forwarded to the Queensland Museum, where it is now on view.

As cotton growing is confined entirely to Queensland,- southern people scarcely realise the importance of that industry, but in the. picking alone thousands of workers are employed. Some remarkable performances have been recorded by followers of this pursuit, and when it is considered that it requires anything from 50 to 200 bolls to make one pound of seed cotton, the tallies of the record-breakers “guns” seem well-nigh incredible. As winter takes a firmer grip upon the country many birds which have been summering in Australia will fly northward to lands where summer is just beginning. Every spring Australia is invaded by swarms of migratory birds, such as the curfew, snipe, swift and between 30 and .40’ other species. In the autumn these feathered adventurers return to such far-off. countries as Japan, China, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Siberia.

A curious family of ants, a species o£ Camponotide, is found in North Queensland. Instead of digging nests, it makes them by sewing leaves together in * ball in a green tree top. The mature ants have no power to spin thread; this is done by the larvae, while the leaves are held in position by some of the adults, others keeping up the supply, of leaves. The ants, although not provided with stings, can give sharp nips, and fight savagely if there is any inter-, ference -with their easily destroyed homes, which form a mass as large as a football. From these ants the abos. make a drink; their bodies when immersed in water give out a sweetish fluid. - ■ s • .