Local & General

Chronicle (Levin), 23 June 1949, Page 4

Local & General

Escapee Gives Up. An escaped prisoner from Waij kune prison farm gave hiniself up ; at Palmerston North Police Station | yesterday afternoon after being at j large since last Monday. ' He was : Ronald Lewis Gunning. With an- ! other man, William Arthur Nathan, I he ma'de off from the -farm and it j is believed was cohcerned in the ! conversion of a car from Taupo. | Nathan is still at large. ! Preserving Records. I The General Assembly Library at I Wellington has adopted the use of a microfilm for preserving in com- | pact form records which might otherwise disintegrate over the years, and which,' in any case, wou d take un valuable storage space. A microfilm reader by means of which microfilmed -copies of documents can be viewed on a ground glass screen has been installed at the library. Telephone Cable Collapses. ' More than 500 teiephones in Auckland are out of order. The. cable conne'cting 'them to the exchange collapsed during Tuesday night, causing a fault on which two big gangs of cable joiners will be working . 24 hours daily until the break is found and repaired. Five suburban areas are affected. Temporary lines were connected for doctors and others specially needing teiephones. Sea Snake Caught. A sea snake about 2ft. 6in. in length was caught by a Hokianga Maori off the west coast and has been sent to the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The deputydirectof of the Museum, Mr. . A. W. B. Powell, said that the description he had been given showe'd the snake to be a yellow-bellied sea snake. The variety was venomous and dangerous in tropical waters. It was not altogether unusual' for the snakes to be found in New Zealand waters, but by the time they reached them they were usually spent and lifeless. Few survived in such comparative cold regions. Hardly a year passed when occurrences of these snakes in the north had been recorded. Travel To New Zealand. Although advice received in New Zealand from one shipping company in London last week suggested that first-class passages from Britain to the Dominion are easier to obtain now, the experience of Scots trying to emigrate suggests that the opposite is the case. Insteaid of the shipping position imprOving it is getting worse, a company in Glasgow is telling applicants for berths of any class. The would-be passengers are being told it's likely to be another two years at least before they can get away. It would seem that the question largely depends on which company ^,n intending traveller is booked 'with — or luck. Inereased Air Services. Britain is rapidly equipping her airlines with modern aircraft and operating inereased services. On the route between Sydney and the United Kingdom, which connects with Tasman Empire Airways Limited service, there are now eight Constellation services a fornight. B.O.A.C. have now introduced "a call at Batavia in the D'utch East Indies on their flights between Sydney and London. They are doing so once a week in each direction. The journey of 12,000 miles between Sydney and London now takes 87 hours and i-nf'er-mediate stops are made at Rome, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Singapore and Darwin. While the Constellation land planes have replaced the flying boats which formerly operated between Sydney and 'London, it is still possible to fly part of the way by Constellation and part" of the way by flying boat. B.O.A.C. -are operating flying boats between the United Kingdom, India and Singapore and the boats are proving very popular,