p. 382 | Foreign News Briefs

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 14, 1920

FromAustraliasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 24.

Foreign News Briefs

GERMAN colonists have now practically all left what was formerly German East Africa.

AN aerolith weighing nearly 4 cwt. recently fell in France between Cambon and Fraisse (Herault).

LORD ALLENBY has issued orders in Egypt under martial law that cultivators rooting up cereals to plant cotton shall be fined £100 per acre.

INDIAN Customs officials have seized 23,000 British and Turkish sovereigns which were being imported into India concealed in packages of dates.

SINCE the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, over a thousand Germans have entered Paris, according to the figures furnished by the Prefecture of Police.

KHARKOFF Soviet is reported to have handed over to the peasants 6,000,000 acres of land belonging to the sugar factories. The land, it is stated, has been let to the peasants, who are obliged to plant beetroot.

THE Port of London Sanitary Authority states that during the past five months nearly 11,000 rats were destroyed in warehouses, over 4,000 were killed in vessels during voyages, and upwards of 24,000 in vessels in the London Docks.

SINCE the Armistice, Switzerland has given 250 truckloads of food, linen, and medicaments, valued at 5,500,000 Swiss francs, to the starving peoples of Europe, and up to the end of 1919, 43,000 children had been brought to Switzerland for holidays.

NORTH SLESVIG has voted itself home to Denmark by an overwhelming majority. The latest total figures show that Denmark has obtained three times as many votes as Germany—75,023, against 25,176. The whole nation's joy was reflected in the cheers of a great crowd, of from ten to twenty thousand people, which filled the square before the Copenhagen Town Hall. By the terms of the Peace Treaty if a majority in the first plebiscite zone pronounces for Denmark, the Danish Government will at once take over the territory.

THE Vialti-Tescari system of electric ploughing, lately tested near Rome, is very simple, says Science Siftings. A powerful electric capstan or winding apparatus is set up at one corner of the field, and wire cables are stretched from it entirely round the field. At two corners these cables pass through two securely anchored pulleys, while at the far corners they are connected with two movable anchor-waggons. A duplex plough mounted on wheels is drawn backward and forward across the field by the cable, and as each furrow is finished the anchor-waggons advance sufficiently to bring the plough into position for the next furrow. With an equal number of shares on each side of the wheels, the plough is not required to turn. In the tests made, a single plough reached a depth of about 20 inches in difficult ground at a cost of about 26s. per acre.