NEWS ITEMS.

Gisborne Times, Volume IX, Issue 710, 5 January 1903, Page 3

NEWS ITEMS.

England should ask herself in respect of Japan whether she is not fostering a fox who will devour her Asiatic fowls.—Journal des Debats, Paris. Notice that wages will be reduced on the Great Fingal mine (Wost Australia), from January 1, have been posted, also at Nannine and Ibbots. The Australian Workers’ Association on the Murchison intend to state a case for the Arbitration Court on the question of the reductions. On December 20, Adolph Pachrman, aged 18, met with a fatal acoident at Mannum, South Australia. He was riding a horse and leading two others when the horses bolted and collided with a tree. Pachrmann was thrown violently to the ground and dislocated his neck.

Captain Babot, for 25 years the Shaw-Savill and Albion ‘Company’s marine superintendent for the North Island, is retiring on a well-deserved pension as from the end of last year. Captain Evans, formerly commander of the Tainui, Matatua, and other steamers of the Shaw-Savill fleet, has been appointed to the vacancy. Mr Walter James Lucey, who met with a serious burning accident at the Cockle Crook sulphide works, New South Wales, succumbed to his injuries at the Wallsend Hospital. He had only a few months previously returned from South Africa, where ho bad served as a trooper for two years. Ho was the sole support of his widowed mother.

The Wairarapa correspondent of the New Zealand Times statos that a wellknown farmer in tho Martinborough district has just paid £5300 in cash for 500 steers and 300 cows. They are store cattle, and he intends to fatten them for six months, when, anticipating a keen demand for stock, he estimates a profit of £ISOO on his bargain. The master butchers of Wellington are agitating for an amendment of the Slaughtering and Inspection Act next session, so that the butcher may not have to bear so heavy a cost as he does now in the ease of an animal, which, after he has purchased it, is condemned as unfit for human consumption. It is claimed that when a butcher buys, sometimes at a high price, an animal, which is to all appearances sound, it is unfair that he should lose the price, and at the same time pay tho expenses of condemnation should the animal be condemned, less, of course, the third of the £B, which the Act fixes as the full value. The butchers claim that the vendor at least should bear a proportion of this loss, and in order that some relief may be obtained in this matter, butchers are endeavoring to secure united action on the part of all the butchers throughout the colony in an appeal to Parliament for an alteration of the existing law.