NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1842, 20 June 1918, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Moscow has at least 1,800 churches.

There are 800 public baths ip Tokio, Japan. Nearly all the world’s asbestos is mined in Canada.

Spain produces over three billion corks every year. Private consumers in Italy pay £24 a ton for coal.

Nuts form the principal diet of the Somali soldier. The Protestants in the world now number 180,000,000. Honeycombs 18ft. high are built by the giant bees of India.

Malta is only seventeen miles in length, and nine in breadth.

Whirlwinds in Arabia will excavate pits in the sand 250 ft. deep. Holland has over 10,000 acres devoted the the cultivation of bulbs. Some of the beetles of Venezuela weigh as much as half a pound each.

Hampton Court Maze has been visited by 68,200 people this sea-

A racehorse galloping at full speed clears from 20ft. to 24ft. with each stride.

More public clocks are displayed in New York than in London and Paris combined.

The coal consumption per head is greater in England than in any other country. Last year the Corporation paid £94,602 for cleansing and watering the streets of the City of London.

The cost of maintaining children in some work-houses in England has increased from 6s to 9s week-

In the Royal Army Medical Corps there are 14,000 officers and nearly 125,000 of other ranks. For the position of organist at Burton-on-Tront (Eng.) Parish Church, the applicants included five blind musicians.

It is staled that every twentyninth person in the Uniled Stales is. (he owner of a motor vehicle of one sore or another.

A recent invest igaI or proves (ha t insects can distinguish a far greater variety of smells than human beings can distinguish. Statistics show (hat ‘ninety-five per cent, of our soldiers recover from wounds, and about ninety per cent, return to the firing-line.

Harps, with strings intact, have keen found in Egyptian tombs, and have given forth distinct sounds after a lapse of 3,000 years or so. A big London linn of carriers has a woman “welfare supervisor” of horses, who looks aftei the health and comfort of 700 horses.

During (he past year in England, the Salvation Army supplied 6,038,702 meals at cheap food depots, and 1,694,891 lodgings for the homeless.

Meat is plentiful in Buenos Ayres. A man who has recently been there declares that the inhabitants have tln-ee moat courses at each meal.

If each of the 8,000,000 families in the United Kingdom would save 4oof bread per day it would mean a saving of 180,000',000 41b. loaves a vear.

Investigators have found that electricity applied to soil that has been dampened with salt water will destroy insects without injury to growing crops.

There are in the sky about as many dark stars as luminous ones, the former betraying their presence by their gravitative pull and by eclipsing other stars. Liquid oxygen has been found to be as effective as dynamite as an explosive, provided it is used within ten minutes of the saturation of the cartridge with it. Mr J. Waters, manager of Messrs Shand’ s nurseries at Lancaster, has successfully experimented, by grafting a tomato plant on to a potato root, in producing what he calls a “toraatato.”

Eighty thousand persons have been hanged in Austria-Hungary since the beginning of the war for political activities and separatist propaganda, according to estimates recently made in London.

India-rubber trees which are tapped every other day continue to yield sap for more than twenty years, and it is a curious fact that the oldest and most frequently tapped trees produce the richest sap. Italian publishers recently held a meeting in Rome, and agreed to ask the Minister for Industry to issue an order doubling the price of all newspapers. The high cost of paper was the chief reason advanced. Hitherto the Jordan has been accounted the most crooked stream in the world. But it cannot compare with White River, Arkansis, which travels 1,000 miles in traversing a distance of 300 miles as the crow flies.