ITEMS OF INTEREST October 4, 1913 Issue

Items of Interest

Following the interstate commerce commission's scathing denouncement of the New Haven road for the recent North Haven Wreck, in which it was held that man failures, beginning with its high officials and ending with its trainmen, were responsible for the loss of lives, sentiment in Congress has begun to crystallize in a movement to take up the whole subject of legislation for train safety at the December session. An effort will be made to empower the commission to deal with such questions as steel cars and modern safety equipment.

Attorney-General McReynolds, in the matter of the Southern Pacific railroad and its oil wells in California, has decided that the government shall institute a suit against the railroad company. The attorney-general will apply also for an injunction to prohibit the company from operating the one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of petroleum lands from which the Southern Pacific, through the Kern Trading and Oil Company, has been pumping oil night and day at the rate of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth a month.

A lobby regulation bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives. It requires the registration with the clerk of the House or Senate of every "legislative agent" seeking to influence law-making, and limits the compensation that may be paid to such agents to fifty dollars a day and twenty-five hundred dollars a year. The names of lobbyists kept by the House and Senate clerks are to be erased with each session of Congress, making it necessary for renewal of such registration with a new Congress.

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