NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3808, 21 June 1928, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Costers were originally sellers of costard apples. They were than called costard mongers. Street accidents to London children. in a year equal in number the total school population of Wigan. London lias three times as many motor-cars as the whole of Wales and 50 per cent, more than Scotland. An analysis of street accidents in Paris shows that (i per cent, are due to the carelessness of the victims. Canada buys only one-tenth and Australia one-third of the motor-, cars they need from British countries. Brighton is now twice as large as Bournemouth, and about 70 per cent, larger than either Southend or Blackpool. Scorpions are known to have starved for 308 days, and spiders have existed for seventeen months without food.

About one thousand people will be employed in making the new cable which is to be laid between Europe and America. American business girls who wish to look smart spend as much as £8 a year on cosmetics and other toilet aids,

Hundreds of thousands of gramophone needles are thrown away every year, as no eommrecial use can he found for them.

At an important police ceiftre in London more than 200 reserve officers are ready day or night for any sudden emergency. Shaped like a camera, and carrying a strip of Jilin, a newly-invented “talking book” will tel) its own story through a loud speaker. Britain is importing more and more eggs every year, the chief foreign sources of supply being Denmark, Poland and the Netherlands.

There are now, in addition to British fully qualified elementary scrool teachers, 34,000 uncertifiealed and 9000 supplementary teachers. New recruits in the City of London Police must he six feet in height, the standard having been recently raised to this, the old figure. Special crossword puzzles in which letters are “pegged” into squares on cardboard forms, are being made in Paris for the use of blind people. Writing with the fingernail as a pen is an old Persian art, a splendid specimen of which has been presented to the King by the King of Afghanistan. Built at Selcome, Devon, in 1811, the fifty-two ton kedge, Ceres, is believed to be Britain’s oldest seagoing ship. She still plies between Budc and Cardiff.

Sixteen submarine cables, linking up all parts of the world, are joined to the Azores, where the cable exchange is nick-named the “Charing Cross of tlie Atlantic.” In one northern town in England last year, it is stated, twenty boys, whose parents did not pay a fine, found themselves in prison for playing football in the streets. To increase the number of trained air-pilots in Canada the government of that Dominion offers a bonus of £2O casli to aeroplane clubs for eaeli certified pupil they turn out. Digging common briars from hedgerows, wrapping the roots in straw, and hawking- them from door to door as “rose-trees” is one of the newest, forms of fraud in Britain. Motor-boating is gaining in popularity in Britain owing to the crowded roads. A good river craft can be bought for £330, while a sea-cruising vessel to carry six will cost £BSO.

Every modern ocean liner is insured against “men-of-war, lire, pirates, rovers, thieves, jettisons, takings at sea, arrests, restraints and detainments oi* all- kings, prinees, and peoples.” After thirty years’ work a new catalogue of the heavens has been issued by the Lick Obsevvatoiy, California. It tabulates about half the stars which are visible to the naked eye. Hissing is not permitted in the British Parliament. The rule forbidding it—“ Whoever hisseth shall answer for it at the Bar as a breach oL order and contempt’ dates back to 1004. An eighty- six-year-olcl agricultural labourer, \V. Vince, of Ckattisham, Suffolk, lias petn employed on the same farm for seventy years, and has lived in the same cottage for sixty-two years. While London taxi-drivers _ will still have to pass a severe driving test as to their knowledge of inner London, they will not in future be expected to know as iauch abou the suburbs as in the past. Winter thunderstorms in Britain have been studied by Mr. Bower,, of Huddersfield, who states that they

move from west to east and occur chiefly about 4 p.m. inland and (i a.m. and !) p.m. on the coast. Private cinema shows are now enjoyed by many well-known people who own their owi projectors. Mr. Lloyd George lias a “picture show” nearly every Saturday night when slaying at Chart, his Surrey residence. Blasted out of solid rock, a new “strong room” covering an area of two and a-hnlf acres has been constructed 150 ft. below the Bank of France, in Paris. The task occupied 1250 men for three years, working night and day. To show how strong egg shells Tuny be made by the proper feeding of liens; a device lias been exhibited which delivers a 251 b. tap three times a minute on the end of ail egg for hours at a time without cracking the shell. A long steel cable, drawn at high speed and fed continually with wet sand, cuts through solid rock in a new type of quarry saw 1 . Tiny grains of sand, dragged across the rock face, serve as abrasives to groove it at a rate hitherto unknown. Among the strange “risks” which have been covered by insurance at Lloyd’s are a fiction writer against loss of imagination; a hairy man against baldness; an actress against the loss of her legs; and a timid man against a revolution.

Lifeboats round the British shores were launched on 202 occasions last year, and saved, or helped to save, 23 vessels. Altogether, the crew of the National Lifeboat Association have saved 01,168 lives since the foundation of the institution 104 years ago. Recent inventions for which patents have been claimed are a combined wash-stand, dressing table, and tea table; a table that also forms a bed; a hair-clasp for attaching a “switch” of hair; a tool for destroying dandelion roots—that bane of gardeners; and a solidified form of iodino.

A sum of 2/9 in stamps has been received by the railway authorities at Blackburn, England, in respect of payment avoided some years ago. The sender wrote that the matter had been on his mind ever since, and unless he made payment it would worry him to the end of his days'K