NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2360, 26 November 1921, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

With the Lapland thermometers at 80 degrees, bathing parties are said to be popular among the sweltering Eskimos. The reindeer and other animals are suffering intensely.

Although blind from childhood, Mr Tom Bullock, of Doffcocker, near Bolton, is,-an expert gardener, and frequently acts as judge at flower shows.

An inquest at Mendlesham, Suflok, was held by the roadside, no building being available. The coroner sat first under a hedge, and then in the side-car of a motor cycle. As the result of an all-night rat hunt, at the London Zoological Gardens, GO rats of large size were destroyed. Some of them measured 20in. from the nose to the tip of the tail.

An official return recently issued shows that the staffs of British Government departments have been recently reduced by 2,709. The largest cut —2,240 —is in the Ministry of Labour.

An English girl has built up a large connection in the United States as a. “unspoiler of spoilt children.” She declares her chief difficulty is “re-educating” foolish, doting mothers. An American scientific expedition is going to the Belgian Congo to cinematograph gorillas in their natural haunts. A sculptor will take eapts of their forms for use in making statues of gorillas. The town of Camino, in California, was plunged into total darkness all night, when an owl measuring 4ft. from tip to tip of its wings, flew against the electric power line and was eloctrocuted.

Increased cost of living is held responsible for a decline in the number of students attending the universities of Prance. In Paris the numbers fell from 18,000 in 1013 to 11,214 last year.

The steamship Tekoa, of 10,000 tons, which was launched on the Humber at Hull recently, struck a lightship and caused it to turn turtle. The Tekoa has been built for the Hew Zealand meat trade.

The city.walls of a Chinese town, Yenchang, are lighted up every night by great llares of oil to keep oil robbers. This remote city of JShensi is in the midst of an oilbearing region too inaccessible to be developed. The Britten Bill, recently before the American Congress, would make it unlawful, after ten years, to sell, charge, or collect on other than a metric basis. Manufacturers opposed thig propaganda so strongly that they secured their exemption under the present Bill, but its passage would doubtless be the opening wedge for a general adoption of * metric weights and measures.