NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2898, 18 June 1925, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Ivins George’s famous vac-lit, the Britannia, is regarded as one of the fastest yachts afloat. She carries 9235 cubic feet of canvas when in full sail.

A London County Council report estimates a deficiency of £570,798 on the municipal tramways this year, due to decreased traffic and increased wages. Prince Roland Bonaparte, a famous French traveller and scientist, left legacies to all his stall’ ol servants sufficient to bring them annuities equal to their wages. Smoking will be permitted on the new airships to fly between England and India. The design for these aircraft includes lounges, diningrooms and smoking-rooms.

There are only 10 bridges over the Thames between the sea and Kingston. It is now suggested that, nine new ones should be built to relieve the congestion of traffic. The Leighton Buzzard Guardians have again refused the request of a widow that her relief should be reduced from 10s to os a week as she does not want to burden the rates. War pensions are now costing Britain about £40,000,000 less than in 1920-21. The re-marriage of widows and growing up ol children are two great causes of this reduc-

tion. Prisoners in Britain cost the State about £IOO each to maintain. It is said the men who have served long sentences in prison arc stouter when they leave prison than when they enter. Round the world in one ship 3< times, and a total voyaging of 3,000,000 miles, is the record of a veteran purser who has recently retired from the service of the White Star Line. Wallpaper which has hung for 200 years on the walls of a house in Gloucestershire is being carefully removed and used to fit up a Queen Anne room in the South Kensington Museum. Prizes are given every year by the Great Western Railway for the best suggestions from the stall for improving conditions of trinel. There are 4000 ideas received annually. To enable residents of Barkmside, a suburb of London, to post letters after the last collection at 8 p.m., a letter-box is attached to a trnmear which passes through after 9 o’clock. Eclipses as far hack as 1207 B.C. are recorded at Oxford University Observatory. In the same huge hook nre predictions concerning future eclipses as far ahead as the year A.D. 2103. Foxes will kill their own scent play ’possum, and escape at the lasi moment make a trap go off without being caught, and drift down rivers like a derelict sack, in their cunning fight for life. Accommodation under the British Ministry of Pensions for disabled soldiers, sailors, and airmen requiring in-patient treatment was reduced from 12,819 to 10,807 in the year ended last March. Sun baths in everyday life are made possible by the use of a new fabric, which looks and feels like silk, yet which allows the ultraviolet’rays of the sun to pass through it. It is these rays which are so beneficial to health. In resigning office as President of the Docks and Harbour Authorities’ Association. Lord Devenport said he thought it better to retire while active, and not wait “till people whispered that he was getting old and foolish.” Captain Huntress, well known in racing circles, has won £2OO by walking from Liverpool to London, more than 200 miles, in eight days and a-half. He wagered Mr. Shaw, of Manchester, £2OO to £4 that he could do the distance in ten days.