BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro – The Danube reached record high levels in Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria on Thursday, flooding fertile farmland as authorities in southeastern Europe considered ordering evacuations. More than 3,000 police, military and civilian workers monitored dams in Romania, with dozens of communities ready to evacuate after weeks of spring runoff combined with heavy rain. ‘We are going through an unprecedented situation,’ said Madalin Mihailovici, director of the Agency for Romanian Waters. ‘Romania has never had such water levels.’ Rivers were expected to rise higher in the coming days, and hundreds had already fled the western Romanian village of Gataia, which flooded after the Barzava River burst its banks, officials said. In Bulgaria, authorities declared a crisis in all 22 communities along the country’s 280-mile stretch of the Danube, which reached a record high level of 30.8 feet in the northwestern city of Vidin, prompting authorities to declare a state of emergency and to prepare the city of 50,000 for a possible evacuation. Women, children leave Dozens of women and children had already left for safer ground, Bulgarian national radio reported, and Mayor Ivan Tsenov ordered the evacuation of a hospital and an orphanage. […]
Alexis de Tocqueville once remarked that in a democracy, the greatest pacifists are the generals. In America, this has often been true but rarely obvious. Our time-honored and intense tradition of civilian supremacy means that senior officers, active or retired, rarely express misgivings or dissenting opinions in public — certainly not while a war is going on. And yet, since mid-March, we have witnessed a veritable ‘Revolt of the Generals,’ a situation having nothing to do with men on horseback but, potentially, a great deal to do with offering some perspective and restoring some sanity to this increasingly war-weary republic. Retired generals are speaking out against this war and the civilian leadership that thought it up and messed it up. Retired, yes. But all senior generals are (or at least consider themselves) members of a rather exclusive club, and when they speak out, it’s not impossible that they express the opinions of their active peers. The list is impressive. In a New York Times op-ed column, retired Major Gen. Paul Eaton, who helped revive the Iraqi army, described Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as ‘incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically’ and called for his resignation. Retired Lt. Gen. […]
When Rocky Anderson introduced Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery last week at the City Library and compared him to Rachel Carson, he may have had in mind the galvanizing power Carson’s Silent Spring had on the early environmental movement of the 1960s and the potential for Flannery’s new book, The Weather Makers, to have a similar power on the growing debate about climate change. But the comparison was far more apt than Anderson may have realized. Flannery made a point in his talk, one that even environmentalists don’t harp on much these days, that is straight out of Carson. He argued that more than a scientific or political issue, climate change is a moral issue, an ethical issue. In 1963, Carson described her times as the ‘Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy’ that assumes ‘nature exists for the convenience of man.’ She thought DDT an ‘evil’ (her word) for the indiscriminate loss of life it caused. To ignore its effects compromised what it meant to be human. ‘By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering,’ Carson asked, […]
KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA STRIP — The remains of an Israeli military hilltop outpost overlooking Gaza’s second-largest city have been cordoned off by razor wire and fortified with sandbags. The custodians of land that was part of the Israeli Gush Katif settlement block until disengagement last year are not Palestinian police but armed squatters from the Abu Reesh Brigades, a militia affiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party. And the militia’s frayed blue and magenta banner fluttering quietly in the breeze is their deed of ownership. ‘We just took this place,’ says Abu Harwun, a militia commander who uses a pseudonym. ‘Until now there is no authority in Gaza.’ Amid a yawning vacuum of power despite Hamas’s victory over Fatah in January’s election, Gaza’s mosaic of militias are expanding a network of improvised bases on empty land – much of it in the abandoned Jewish settlement – in the name of the Palestinian uprising against Israel. But as Mr. Abbas and the new Hamas-led Palestinian cabinet jockey for control of a government gripped by financial insolvency, the encampments are seen as yet another troubling sign that Gaza may be headed for a civil war. Highlighting the […]
For two days this week SR was mailed out with wild abandon by a glitch in the software program that runs the site. I want to apologize to every reader who has had to endure the arrival of copy after copy of SR. As one reader wrote me, ‘Too much of a good thing.’ SR’s webmaster, Greg Hoole, thinks he has found the flaw and fixed it, so I feel reasonably safe sending out a new edition (Many also wrote to ask why the day’s edition was not waiting for them in their mailbox), after suspending publication yesterday, lest people be bombarded, once again, with multiple copies. My apologies, once more, for any hassle and confusion this screw-up may have caused. — Stephan
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
