NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3596, 8 February 1927, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Sir Walter Scott at college was known as “the Greek blockhead.”

China has the largest coal area in the world —300,000 square miles. Britain spends approximately £8,000,000 a year on apples from abroad.

Between 1750 and 1830, 4700 miles of British canals were constructed .

In one year a single oyster can produce as many as 1,000,000 new ones.

Wlandsworth, London’s largest borough, has 37 persons to each of its 9199 acres.

America was so named by the Spaniards about the year 1504, after an Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. On an income of £200,000 the British Super-Tax payable, in addition to Income Tax, amounts to £57,256 ss. Only one perpetual British pension is now being paid by the State. This is an annual sum of £SOOO to the holder of the Nelson earldom.

An electric clock made by boys under 15 years of age, has been placed in the hall of a Camden Town school.

Britain’s national - drink bill, which was £7 5s per head of the population in 1924, dropped by 1/to £7 4s in 1925. •

With a personnel of 36,500 and 1200 machines, the Royal Air Force costs the British nation £21,000,000 a year. The cost of living reached its highest point in Britain in November, 1920, when it rose to 176 per cent, above pre-war level.

Road accidents in Britain which ended fatally during 1925 numbered nearly 4000; in each of these one or more persons were killed. Two miles long, the great Sennar dam on the Nile, which was' begun in 1913 and opened last year, is the greatest in the world.

Police or detective films have been prohibited in the cinemas of Loanda —Portuguese West Africa —on account of supposed bad influence on natives.

Hot springs that exist in great numbers under the city of Budapest, Hungary, are being used for the first time, experimentally, to heat the city’s buildings.