NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1851, 11 July 1918, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The House of Lords lies GSB members.

Sixty persons in every million ore born blind.

London pets weekly 4,000,000 boxes of matches..

Eton boys ore dipping soldiers’ plots in England. Aliens in prohibited ureas in Britain number 1809.

Making' paper heels is a Shoreditch (London) trade.

Sixty thousand soldiers’ graves have been photographed. A locomotive going at express speed give's 1,050 pulls per mile.

Seven hundred and fifty thousand British shop assistants are on active service.

A “nickel” is American slang for the five-cent piece, and is equivalent to 21d.

It has been proved that plants thrive better under white glass than under green. Over 7,000 men and 30,000 tons of supplies are sent daily to France from England. The average depth of British coal mines is 800 ft. The limit of practical mining is 4,000 ft.

Seven thousand Canadians have been decorated by the British Government for conspicuous bravery. Of 2,585 Old Haileybnrians who have joined up, 1373 have won honours, including three V.C.’s.

Forty-three tons of farthings, or 15,000,000 pieces, were issued in eleven months of last year. Theh number of ears in the Province of Ontario, in Canada, has increased from 220 in 1903 to 100,000.

Sixty-one million out of the 121 million acres which make up Spain’s area are mountain and waste land.

Marble is still quaried in the way employed over 2,000 years ago, when the Parthenon at Athens was built.

During the past twelve months pay for the British Army amounted to £112,000,000, and for the Navv £13,000,000.

Owing to fraud and other reasons, 1,300,000 excess fares were collected on the London district railway (underground) last year. Babylon's population could never have exceeded 1,200,000. Probably the number of people in Rome was less than this figure. As the result of the simplification of divorce proceedings, 38,000 applications for divorce have been made in Petrograd since the Revolution.

A war gift of twenty-five thousand pounds Ims teen unanimously voted to the Mother Country by the people of Jersey Channel Islands. A tablet to Tbomas Gray, author of the “Elergy in a Country Churchyard,” has been unveiled at his birthplace, 39 Cornhill, London. Land in England and Wales under wheat on February Ist was 2,504,000 acres, compared with 1,225,000 acres on the same dale last rear.

Sir Swire Smith, who beeame M.P, for Keighley in 1915 when 73, died in London recently. He was the founder of the first technical school in England. Blinded soldiers at Si. Dun-tan's, London, recently gave Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury”; three Y.A.D.’s played the plaintiff and her bridesmaids. Soldiers' wives may not under any circumstances he evicted for non-payment of rent in Germany, according to a recent decision in the Berlin law courts. Since the beginning of 1917 the British output of high explosives has more than met our own demands, enabled ns to build np large stock's, and supply our allies. The fount ain pen is not a recent invention, as might he imagined; for it is referred to in Samuel Taylor's “I niversal System of Shorthand Writing,” published in 1786. An Imperial clogs office is Germany’s very latest war department. It will deal exclusively with the acquisition and distribution of wood suitable for use as soles for boots and shoes.

Confect loners in Austria have Seen lot-hidden to make cakes or pastry containing (lour or any (lour substitute. Bakers must use the flour apportioned to them exclusively for making broad.

The new Roman Catholic Bishop of Limerick, Dr. Hallman, refused the use of his cathedral for a requiem Mass for the late Mr Redmond on the ground that if would Ite introducing politics. Statistics show that the food hill of an average workman's family in Christiania, which in 1910 amounted to 645 kroner, is now 1,136 kroner. Christiania is the most expensive place to live in Scandinavia.