NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2235, 5 February 1921, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The rat population of Great Britain and Ireland is variously estimated at 40,000,000 to 200,000,000. If a pre-war calculation be accepted that each rat costs the country 7s Gd per annum, the total annual cost to the country is at least £15,000,000. The Greco-Roman baths of .the United States Senate, installed nearly eight years ago, but never put into service, are now being cleared of the cobwebs, and will be in shape to offer their luxuries to the j members of the new Senate when it ! assembles. The bronze from the statue of the ex-Kaiser at Metz, which was taken down after the armistice, has j been sold for £3,000. The money ■ will be used to erect twß statues* one o f the French “Poilu” and the other to the patriot, Paul Deroulede. The ape, when gathering nuts, is not deterred by the hard shell,. He overcomes Ihe difficulty with a couple of large stones, between which ne will crush the nut with just the necessary force to crack the shell without crushing the kernel inside. When a desirable banana is out of his reach, lie will also fetch a stick with which to knock it down. So enormous is London’s passenger traffic that every 24 hours 2,500,000 persons travel on her omnibuses, 1,300,000 in'her underground t rains .alone, and 560,000 in , her trams. So many, in fact, are her day’s passengers, that if they

' were formed into a column, four abreast, at intervals of a yard, the head of the column would be on (lie sell front of Brighton before the rear rank had left John o’ Groats. Airs Kerr, a.lady who has died at Cliertsey at the age of 92, made j clothes for Florence Nightingale’s : hospital at Scutari in the Crimean j War, and saw the Lady with the . Lam]i at work there. As a girl Airs Kerr travelled by rail from Bristol to York when the first trains were made up of roofless carriages, and the passengers took umbrellas with them as a protection from the rain while they were in the train. . The ex-Kaiser, with his consent, has been taxed by the Dutch authorities to the amount of 1,500,000 florins, or about 30,000,000 marks. This supposes a capital of about 600,000,000 marks (at the present rate of exchange £2,500,000). Los Angeles probably contains more pretty girls than any other city in the world, and the lure of the cinema is the cause. All of them came from near and far-off places with the idea of becoming Alary Pickfords. Fires in America, due to the defective insulation of electric cables, cost the country £3,000,000 per annum, and it is definitely proved that the majority of these fires are due to the gnawing propensities of the grey rat. Cholera is adding to Ihe general distress in the famine-stricken district of China, where from 25,000,000 to 30,000,000 people are facing death by starvation.