New York, Aug. 14.
London may well be asking if there is nothing but politics in the American news. In like manner New York, up to the time of the rising of Parliament, was wondering if England was doing nothing else but debate the Spanish bombings.
The fact is that America has been getting some Little change in its steady news diet in the form of Japanese beetles.
Popillia japonica, the little brown and green pest, is no newcomer to the Eastern States. The first beetle got across in 1916 in a shipment of azaleas to a small town in southern New Jersey. It was a matter of several years before the gardeners and the horticulturists awakened to his depredations, with result that he has kept something more than one step ahead of his exterminators, and now infests some 9,000 square miles, mostly in New Jersey and -Pennsylvania But it remained for the beetle to invade Broadway before he became a matter of prime news importance for the public at large.
The beetles are in Times Square, where there's no greenery, only as-halt. They are in the gardens of Radio City. They are eating away a garden on the ninth floor of a skyscraper, "fifty of them on every flower." In the city's botanical garden they are being trapped at the rate of 20,000 a day, and yet there seems no end to them. In Pennsylmania certain cities are paying a bounty of ten cents a pint to youngsters for trapping the pest. a statement revealing that he had cabled to Mr. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, expressing the "deep satisfaction" with which he and his cabinet colleagues had learned of the proposed meeting between the Prime Minister, and Herr Adolf Hitler.
The statement says that the whole of the Canadian people will warmly approve the far-seeing and truly noble action on the part of Mr. Chamberlain, It adds that the world will hope that this conference will create an atmosphere in which at last a solution may speedily be found to the problems which threatened peace—Reuter.
Glowing Tribute from S. Africa Capetown, Sept. 15.
Mr. Neville Chamberlain's persistent courage and will not to accept defeat in solving the problem has electrified South Africa.
The "news of Mr. Chamberlain's Proposed journey to Germany was broadcast to theatre audiences in the cities and to more solitary listeners on the veldt, Mr. Chamberlain's action is the subject of glowing tributes in lobby circles, and also among prominent persons in the Union.—Reuter.
Canberra, Sept. 15. Mr. Joseph A. Lyons, Premier of "The Times" Reports, Aide Hit, Major Pratt Escapes London, Sept. 15.
Shots were fired at an aeroplane in which Major Sutton Pratt, one of British observers in Czechoslovakia, was flying back from Eger to Prague, according to a message to "The Times" from its special correspondent in Prague.
One of the shots hit Major Sutton Pratt's attache but he himself was not hurt, Ne confirmation of this report has so far been obtained from official quarters.—Trans-Ocean.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.