NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2963, 17 November 1925, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The world spent £672,000,000 for new motor vehicles in 1924.

Nearly 50,000 boys under 16 are at work in British coal mines.

Forests are being I ”sown by aeroplane in the northwest part of America.

At one gulp a pelican in St. James’ Park, London, swallowed a live pigeon. Leicester streets are paved with stones made of clinkers collected in domestic dustbins.

Sprotborough Hall, near Doncaster, built in the time of Charles 11., was sold lately for £SIOO. A collection of 16,000 moths has been presented to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg. The first message telegraphed for public purposes in England led to the arrest of a murderer.

Naples has just completed its automatic telephone exchange and abandoned the telephone girl. Among American film stars, Douglas Fairbanks paid the highest income-tax, £36,438, last year. Cigars costing £3 3s each and measuring over a foot in length are on sale in the West End of London.

A rider at the Wembley Stadium Circus was recently fined £2 for cruelty to a horse in making it dance.

In ten years time or so there will be about 130 separate automatic exchanges in the London telephone area.

, Seventy-five men and women | teachers from Britain have just | been to Canada to study the edu- | cational system. I Indigo is obtained from many fl species of tropical plants, the chief 1 source being Indigofera tinctoria, a plant of Bengal. “British goods are best,” the 1 well-known slogan used for canj celling postage stamps, is printed by ! an American machine. I The Indians of Brazil organise H great alligator hunts, at one of fj these as many as 500 of these scaly ■ monsters may be dispatched, i Wfhen a British judge is first ele- | vated to the bench he has to pro<j vide himself with seven different 5 sets of robes at a cost which may run into £4OO. The executioner at Copenhagen has lost his job. He has not had j a thing to do in twenty years to earn his money. Not one Dane has been sentenced to death. B Parsnips a yard long, onions weighing 31b., marrows weighing 201 b., and runner beans measuring 1 2ft. were among the remarkable i exhibits at a show in Birmingham. 1 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, | which has a surface of four inches I of asphalt on top of concrete, has | not needed repair for nearly six jj years, though it carries 28,000 tons I of traffic a day. | A tax of two shillings on every \ hearth “in all houses paying to \ church and poor,” was imposed by I the English Parliament in 1663 and f| abolished in 1689. It was always y unpopular. I About £6OOO has been received t- toward the £IO,OOO needed for a | memorial to Kingsley Fair-bridge, f who gave his life to rescuing chilI dren from London slums and set,l fling them in Australia.