GENERAL NEWS.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17385, 23 April 1928, Page 14

GENERAL NEWS.

Red, white and black were the colours of scarves seen in Newcastle Police Court recently. So many persons in the court were wearing such scarves that the magistrate’s clerk questioned a defendant who was wearing one. Defendant said he had got the scarf as a Christmas box. “1 only got to know yesterday,” added the defendant, “ that the colours are those of the Grammar School, but I never went to that school.” “I understand,” said the clerk, “that the colours are those of the royalist movement jn Germany. They have manufactured so many of these scarves that they cannot get rid of them, and arc dumping them over here.”

Men who have recently returned from Stewart Island state that some of the beaches round Paterson Inlet are strewn with dead penguins of the small species known commonly as rock-hoppers. Old Neck, Popotiki and Ringa beaches arc some that are affected in this way. This wholesale destruction is attributed to the devastating effects of the escaped whale oil from the C. A. Larsen, which renders the watertight (he throats of the birds penetrable by the cold -water, thus freezing them to dealh. It is a common enough thing for such oil to destroy fish, but whether this is the case in the Inlet is not yet known as there has been little fishing carried on there during the fine weather. When the Larsen was situated near Bravo it is reported (hat all the mussels on the rocks were killed. It is exceedingly fortunate that the spread of the oil was confined practically to the Inlet, as some say the mutton bird industry would have suffered extensively had the complete cargo of the Larsen been lost and had it spread around the Island.