... RUSSIAN HERO'S GRAND NATIONAL--THE FIELD CROSSING BECHER'S BROOK, SECOND TIME ROUND, WITH FIFTEEN HORSES IN A FIELD OF FORTY-THREE WELL TOGETHER AT A CRUCIAL PART OF THE RACE The winner, Russian Hero (L. McMorrow up black and white check jacket), is seen taking the fence with the favourite, Cromwell, beside him. Leading the field (on right) is Royal Mount (P. Doyle up), which came in third. In ...

... 1,300 deputies from all parts of the Soviet Union packed the Andrews Hall in the Kremlin and strolled beneath the great chandeliers of the Geogievsky Hall when they met in Moscow recently to hear the Budget with its mighty alloca tions for the armed forces. Their meeting took place shortly after the replacement of Mr. Moloton by Mr. Vishinsky, and it was noted that Mr. Moloton and ...

... reed roof well laid will last for half-a-century without repair, and the life of a straw thatch is at least thirty years. Country folk know these qualities full well, also the warmth which thatch imparts in winter and the coolness in summer, and for these very solid reasons it is doubtful if the thatchers art will ever die out in this country. Mr. E. J. Pearce, who is seen engaged in thatching ...

... Fourteen members oj the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedi tion have returned to Australia ajio fourteen months on Heard Island in the sub-Antarctic 3,500 miles south west of Melbourne. The expedition established an A -class weather aw scientific research station on the pi fr viously uninhabited island, a station that has been able to provide both flying men and agriculturists i ...

... HT erence Rattigan's great success as a dramatist, has been mainly concerned with the lighter side of the theatre. His latest play, Adventure Story, is a serious attempt to reconstruct Alexander of Macedon's life from B.C. 336, when he began his great years of conquest, until his death fourteen years later. The play has ten scenes beginning at Delphi, where the young Alexander consults Pythia, ...

... THE GRAND NATIONAL FIELD TAKES THE FIRST FENCE IN GOOD STYLE AT THE START OF ITS JOURNEY OF NEARLY FOUR AND A HALF MILES Watched by a crowd four deep, most of the runners cleared the first obstacle in good style. Roimond, which came in second, can be seen, in the foreground on the right, with Russian Hero, the eventual winner, a length or two behind. Nearly all the runners crossed Becher's the ...

... THE English Sunday-- for what the words mean to the world at large-- is a legacy of the nineteenth century in particular. The comfort induced by heavy feeding lay at its foundations. Without those meals which reached down to the humblest cottage in the land, the gnawing void could but have stirred people from their proper station, in protest. To-day the case against the English Sunday ...

... AIR-LIFTED TO A NEW HOMELAND Jewish mothers and their children tended by a nurse of the Women's International Zionist Organisa tion as they flew from Aden to Israel in one of the craft of Alaskan Airlines, an American company now carrying out air-lift operations on behalf of the American Joint Distribution Com mittee. The Aden Jews, it may be remembered, suffered terribly in the pogrom of 1947 ...

... A SECOND NEW RUNWAY AT TEGEL AIRPORT, IN THE FRENCH SECTOR OF BERLIN, WILL FURTHER SPEED THE AIRLIFT Bulldozers of the United States Engineers engaged in levelling the ground for a landing-strip which will handle the huge C 97 aircraft which the Americans are going to employ for bringing supplies into the city. The C 97s have a capacity of twenty tons. This extension for the airlift will be ...

... HThe news that the Old Parish Church of St. Marylebone, now used as the parish's chapel, is in a serious state of decay is sad indeed, for it is a place of many remarkable associations. Sheridan was married at the old church in 1773 to Miss Linley, although he had previously gone through a form of marriage with her when escorting her to France, to avoid the persistent atten tions of Major ...

... BORN IN THE BOTTOM OF A BOAT TO A MOTHER WHICH HAD BEEN HOOKED FROM THE ENGLISH CHANNEL-- ONE OF A QUADRUPLET SET OF SPUR-DOG VIVIPAROUS SHARKS Mr. Gordon Baber, a fisherman of Brighton, who had landed the mother shark twelve miles off Shoreham, later took the four offspring to the Brighton Aquarium, where the pictures on this page were taken. It appears that after he had restarted fishing, ...

... CURZON STREET, Mayfair, makes, one think more in terms of luxury flats and social clubs than of big business. And yet in a single room of No. 30, transactions involving £31,000,000 were com pleted last year which in 1949 will probably hit £40,000,000. For this is the clearing house of I.A.T.A., the International Air Transport Association, to which almost all the leading international airlines ...