GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2355, 15 November 1921, Page 1

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Babies taken motoring in America are now lulled to sleep in a special basket swung from a rail inside the car. This device is now being manufactured in large quantities. A waterspout lias totally destroyed two Spanish villages in the province of Cuenca, and many lives have been lost. Fifty-four houses completely collapsed. More than 150 families are homeless. A layer of hailstones eleven inches deep has seriously damaged the Aragonese countryside. A gram of radium, sealed in eleven vials of glass and lead and steel, and costing nearly £20,000, arrived in Philadelphia from Colorado and was deposited by its escort of seven v men in safety vaults. The vice-president of the Radium company of Colorado, which sold the radium to the city, brought it in person in a. battered suitcase.

A race lasting fifteen days at sea, between two French barques named I lie Edmond Rostand and the Marcella I do Turenne, both from Geelong, Australia, to Queenstown has just ended. During the voyage neither vessel sighted the other. • The Edmond Rostand left Geelong one day before her rival and reached her destination one hour before her. An oflieial identity card may he shortly instituted into France. One serif ion of the press extols (he police' for entertaining the idea; another section clamours against the impudenl infringement of Ihe rights of the citizens. The identity card, as the Prefect of Police would like to institute it, would carry (he hearer’s photograph, a minute diseription of his anatomy, and four finger-print is a sore point with that portion of the press hostile to its introduction. Mrs. George Beach, of Lee, Massachusetts, has a drawing-room the wallpaper of which has not been removed for 1(H) years. She has .just received an offer from a collector to lake off the paper and pay her £SO. The wallpaper is evidently handpainted. It is rather faded but the figures are still quite plain. Hundreds of visitors view Ibis ancient wallpaper every year. There has been some question if the paper can be removed without destroying it, but the prosper!ive buyer has offered to pay his money and take the risk.

A young clerk entered a lift in a certain London office. “Top.” he said to the lift attendant. “Anything else?” asked the attendant. The clerk: “No.” The attendant reminded the young clerk that he had not said“ Please,” and ordered him out of the lift. He refused to go. The attendant threw him out of the lift and in the struggle that followed the clerk was kicked down a (light of stairs. The attendant was lined twenty shillings at the Guildhall as a sequel. “You must not give lessons in politeness by committing assaults,” was the magistrate’s warning. “The man i,s nothing but skin and, bones, and was starving last night, for when I gave him food he ate it, ravenously,” said a, policeman at Marylebonc Police Court, when James Sawden appeared on a charge of begging. Sawden stated that he had tramped more than four hundred miles in different parts of the country in vain search of work. He slept one night beside a thrashing machine in hopes of obtaining employement in the morning, but it was of no use. He had been without food for two days when arrested.

Ouangawak, the Eskimo who figured in a triangular tragedy of the north, is dead. Reports received from the North-West Mounted Police tell of Ouangawak’s escape over the frozen wastes north-west of Hudson’s Bay, and now his dogs were found dead. Ouangawak perished with them. Ouangawak killed two brothers of his tribe and appropriated the wife of one of them, and the North-West Police, after great difficulty, arrested him and brought him to Ottawa, where lie aroused great curiosity, as he was the only Eskimo ever imprisoned there. There was difficulty in bringingdown Eskimo witnesses, and Ouangawak was sent back to Chesterfield, an inlet of Hudson’s Bay, for trial by a special court. He managed to make his escape from Chesterfield, only to meet his death in one of the loneliest parts of the world.