Islands

From The

Press

From the Samoa Times: A keen reader suggested over the weekend that we should write a letter to Mr Muldoon by our Prime Minister when he goes to Wellington next week. In the letter, he said, we should ask Mr Muldoon to call off the dogs set on over-stayers and deport all islanders for harbouring them. As a gesture of goodwill we should tell him that he can make use of Bryan Williams (All Black), Ali Akafasi, Monty Betham (boxers) and Mene Mene until New Zealand is banned from all sporting contacts with the world, then send them home. In addition we should also invite Mr Muldoon to enjoy a coconut here sometime which he may try with some caviar from our Russian-funded fisheries.

From the Arawa Bulletin, Bougainville: A young man’s hopes of a midnight feast were thwarted by the Police on Tuesday night. The man, , from Goilala in the Central Province was caught just as he was leaving the Arawa Country Club premises with two bottles of wine and a bunch of carrots.

How President Hammer Deßoburt of Nauru passed the time when visiting Marakei in the Gilberts as reported by the Atoll Pioneer: H.E. (the president) said he wished to leave behind something with which the people of Nauru could be remembered, so he took off his gold wrist watch and gold cigarette lighter and presented them to the President of the Island Council.

From an editorial in the Samoa News (Pago Pago): Samoa is now beginning to see the fruits of progress and all that comes with it. The riff-raff, dope peddlers and the drug addicts. Now we have them in the classrooms as students and teachers, what’s being done about it and how alarmed have the parents become to know their children are being instructed, not about “drug abuse” but drug use? At this point, nothing has been done or said by anyone. It’s been well known throughout the community that the grass pushers are pushing and many of the island’s leading citizens are using it .

A festival can be a worrying time for the police, says Fiji Police Commissioner Mr John Kelland as reported in The Fiji Times: The growth of the Hibiscus Festival in future years and to what extent it should be allowed to disrupt the normal life of the city of Suva would have to be considered, the Commissioner of Police told his news conference in Suva on Monday. “I do not want to be a spoilsport anything which helps charities must be good,” Mr Kelland said. But some people used the festival as an excuse for unusual behaviour, he said. During the week of this year’s festival the number of break-ins in Suva increased because police had to take off preventive patrols to help in the festival.

Suva’s Mayor, Cr L. G. Usher, hit back at Police Commissioner Kelland’s comments on the festival,

The Fiji Times reporting:

Cr Usher said it would be a sorry day for the country if

the size and variety of the festival or any other celebration had to be curtailed because of police opinion that too many people were enjoying themselves.

“It’s a fact of life on Niue’’, says the Tohi Tala Niue out for the first time on July 9 after an eight-week break due to the lack of materials “to run the

dilapidated printing machine’’:

. . The editorial staff will do their utmost to keep the above conditions (government instructions on publication) but as most of us realise, getting information from the government is practically an impossibility at the best of time, and a deadline to them is an alien word.

Beauties, other than the dancing kind, come out of the Cooks, the Cook Islands News reveals in an auctioneer’s report from New Zealand: Every time I offer the Rarotongan stringless beans I get a thrill. They are beautiful . . .

From the Island Trader of Rabaul: There’s a new telephone trick around. What you do is to go to one of those blue telephones, ring another blue telephone through the operator (they have an ordinary number), have your mate waiting on the other end and ask if he will accept the charges. The operator doesn t know that it s a public phone, so the charge goes to the renter of the phone. Very clever.

A warning about ‘those Reds’ as reported by the Samoa Times: . . . The diocesan (Roman Catholic) senate of priests met in Apia on Monday to unanimously approve a resolution urging the government to “exercise the greatest caution in entering into aid agreements with the governments of these two countries (Russia and China) which share an essential Marxist aim of propagating world-wide godlessness”.

From the Arawa Bulletin: A special meeting of the executives of the Bougainville District Mining and General Workers Union yesterday resolved that May 12 of each year be recognised as Labour Day and a public holiday in Papua New Guinea to commemorate the workers’ struggle against Bougainville Copper on that day last year when more than 1,000 employees of Bougainville copper went on a strike rampage destructing company properties and caus ing the mine a loss of several million kina.