NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2155, 27 July 1920, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

During the last two months the Berlin police* have confiscated typewriters which had been stolen to the value of 750,000 marks (nominally £37,500). One of the greatest advances in modern surgery is the 'method of removing foreign bodies from the lungs, gullet or stomach without any cutting whatever. By means of the radio compass it is now possible for airplanes to locate and find one another even though no rendezvous has been made in advance.

A person usually begins to lose height at the age of 50, and at the age of 90 it is estimated that on the average he has lost about one and a-half inches. The total convictions for drunkenness in London for the 17 weeks ending April 25th were 10,524 this year, as against only 3,478 for the corresponding period in 1918. Throughout Siberia the bear is an object of worship, or, at least, of veneration. Among the Tuugus tribes of the north he is sacred, and figures as the hero of numberless folk tales.

The early dentists of China used to pull teeth with their lingers. They practised by pulling pegs ftom a wooden board until they bad a grip with a lifting power of 300 or 400 pounds. An ocean steamer of the first class, going at full speed, cannot be brought to a halt in less than three minutes. In the meantime she will have traversed a distance of about half a mile.

The biggest motor ship in the world has just been launched at Copenhagen'for an English shipping company. The ship is called the Africa, and is 445 feet long, with a displacement of 14,000 tons. The London Zoological Society occupies ground in Regent’s Park measuring 34 acres, for which it pays £358 per year; the estimated value of the land commercially is over £IOO,OOO a year. Edward Bull, who has just died at Guildford, aged 90, was the last survivor of the party that laid the first Atlantic cable. He also received the first. cable message from' America to England. Austrian waiters and cooks, interned in England during the war, have returned to Vienna to find that they can no longer get employment, owing to the decline of the restaurants in consequence of the food prices.