NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 1978, 17 May 1919, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Air raid shelters at Dover cost £O,OOO. Perhaps the most curious cabinet meetings were thtose held during premiership of Pitt, who was a great sufferer from gout. 1111611 he was unable to leave his bed cabinet used to meet in his bedroom.

On the Liverpool overhead electric railway near the docks, one can travel the whole seven or eight miles of its length for the same fare as between station and station. Before the war this fare was twopence.

The death is announced of Captain Alexander Simpson, aged 84, the last of the old whaling captains of Scotland and the only survivor of the search party sent out to the arctic by Lady Pranklin in 1856 in search of Sir John Franklin.

In 1830 there were no railroads, no ocean steamships, no telegraph, no cheap post, no free press, no public education, no pure water, no main drainage. Trade unions wer;« criminal associations, and Dissent-,

ers were regarded as rebels. The most extraordinary typewriter in the world was a machine designed and built for Li Hung Chang, the great Chinese ambassador. It was lilted with 20 sets of Chinese characters, comprising a collection of no fewer than 1800 keys. The world famous road builders, the Homans, refused to recognise obstacles when carrying out their wonderful feats of road construction. They deviated neither for marshes, mountains, ravines or lakes. They virtually made no detours.

On the Italian side of the .Alps is a monument to the first airman who who succeeded in scaling that mighty European barrier by means of (light, lie lost his life in the performance although he had actually performed the feat before his death.

Comparison of the casualties caused by enemy bombardments of London and Paris reveal the coincidence that the number of deaths, if those due to the long distance shelling of Paris by “Big Bertha” are included, reached the same total of 522 in both capitals. The British Government has just completed an 8-inch pipe line across Scotland. It is reported that the line was constructed for the purpose of securing a continuous adequate supply of fuel for the British Navy, with a minimum risk of inlerferance from enemy submarines.