From the Evening News,1993: EXPLORERS Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dr Michael Stroud were celebrating today after breaking the record for the longest unsupported Polar march.

Exhausted and emaciated, lame from frostbite and with the equipment almost totally wrecked, the two men radioed to the expedition's base in Chile last night that they had reached the summit of the massive Beardmore glacier. In 88 days they had walked 1,257 miles - 12 miles further than the previous record, set in 1909.

25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

February 6, 1978

ORANGE sales have slumped in the Bolton area because of a poison scare. Traders are finding it difficult to sell oranges because customers fear they may be injected with mercury. The scare follows the discovery in London of a Jaffa orange with drops of mercury inside it. An Arab terrorist group has claimed responsibility for poisoning oranges from Israel.

GREATER Manchester Chief Constable Mr James Anderton has called for the age of criminal responsibility to be lowered. He said juveniles - aged under 17 - were responsible for 41 per cent of all detected crimes in his force last year. And 1,568 crimes, about four per cent of all detected crime, were committed by children under 10, the age of criminal responsibility.

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

February 6, 1953

BOLTON people are reading more than they used to read - they borrowed 164,483 more books from the town's libraries last year than in the year before.

Mr H. Hamer, Chief Librarian, says that "with over 42,000 volumes regularly in the homes of our citizens, the public library does occupy an important place in the everyday life of the community." There were generally about 1,700 more tickets in use on any one day than in the year ending October, 1951.

100 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

February 6, 1903

THE General Post Office authorities have been testing letter-stamping machines, driven by electricity, and now, a "Pall Mall" representative learns, there are about twenty in use.

The best of them will stamp from 20,000 to 30,000 letters per hour, the others 15,000 to 20,000; but the work is not so well done as it would be by a hand sorter, whose average speed is 2,500 an hour. But machines often place the stamp across the envelope, sometimes obscure the address, and make other irregularities.

None of the machines is an efficient stamper of letters of varying sizes and thickness; but when letters are all of one character, posted by some big commercial firm, the machines do their work rapidly and satisfactorily.