NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3903, 5 February 1929, Page 4

NEWS AND NOTES.

The drainage system of Wellington involves albout 90 miles of main sewerage. The Government Tourist Department decided to close the Milford Track for the seas'on on April 16. The world’s population in 1926 has been found by the League of Nations'to be 1,930,000,000. No "feweu than 131 men are now employed by the Grey County Council bn Government and Highway Board works. The refresher courses for Canterbury teachers, to have been held .this week, have been abandoned because of the poor response from the teachers. , “At a moderate estimate we have at least 16,00 motor vdhicles on the city streets,” said Mr. G. R. Hogan, chief traffic inspector of Auckland. Four bankruptcies occurred •* ifr Wellington last; month, whiph is the same number as was recorded for January of 1928. Two bankruptcies were recorded at Palmerston during January. There are 10,725 residents in the Hutt and 10,190 in Petone. Shortly before 8 o’clock on Wednesday morning, a waterspout was seen by two Seaview residents to -fall into the sea a "short distance from the shore ( reports the Ashburton Guardian). It descended in the shape of a letter’S. To m’ost people a couch yields rest;, to some romance. To a Gore who recently bought one second hand it has yielded something more tangibly valuable. A process o ! f recovering necessitated the removal of the hack of the couch, and on being thus dismantled a gold wristlet watch was found embedded in the cavity. The owner is conjuring up in imagination the scene surrounding the loss of the fair one’s timepiece, and wondering just what was happening to “that little hand” which was so oblivious to loss that the watch was not missed from its fond encircling. The watch stopped at 11.15.

War has been declared on the whale with a vengeance; there is the greatest boom known in modern times in the whaling industry, and if the “monarch of the seas” is not exterminated within a few years, it will not be the. fault of the whalers (writes a correspondent in an exchange). Netv Norwegian companies are being floated, into which much British capital is being put. Gone are the old sailors with their whale-boats and harpoons. The whale hasn’t a sporting chance these days; great 12,000-ton liners are being (fitted out as depot ships, and power-driven] chasers, equipped with guns, firing bomb-harpoons, make the death of the great sea mammal a certainty as soon as one is sighted. 'Some time ago there was much public agitation against this whole-sale slaughtering, hut it seems to have died away. Meanwhile the slaughter goes on, and unless the slayers are checked the whale will soon he as extinct as the dooo.