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The Emporia Gazette from Emporia, Kansas • Page 2

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Emporia, Kansas
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Page 4 A T' fHJB William Allen White, 1895 1944 William Lindsay White, 1944 1973 THE GAZETTE, EMPORIA, KANSAS Glen Albert Bradshaw, Foreman Everett Ray Call, Managing Editor James Vernon Niridcr, City Editor Elizabeth Thomas Robinson, Advertising Manager Carol Martin Shirley, Circulation Manager Paul David Walker, Assistant Publisher have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to Philippiani 4:11 It's About Time Haldeman and Mitchell are going to jail in a couple of weeks? Good. Seeing these two high-dollnr outlaws tossed in the slammer might have some purgative effect on the country. And they can serve as thu acid test for the rehabilitation theories of penal optimists. If they can be cleansed of the traits that made them a menace to their fellow man, and taught some useful skills, they can be set free and returned to society as Hmmmm. Should Richard Nixon be going with them? No.

Had fie been indicted on some criminal charge, (ought the case, lost, and, although the final step is all hut inconceivable, been sent to prison, he still might have contrived to go with his head held high, professing his innocence. But by accepting the pardon he admitted his guilt. The innocent are not pardoned, but absolved. Haldeman and Mitchell, should they choose and all evidence to the contrary, can still claim innocence. Nixon cnnuot.

He is right where he belongs, serving ns a horrible example, stewing in his private St. Helena. J.N. Feeding the OSHA Monster IGNS of the times: The mall brought 72-page catalog called "Safety Supplies to Assist in Meeting OSHA Regulations." The supply company undoubtedly existed belore and is not a spinolf industry hatched by the government but its business and its catalog perhaps have grown since the creation of che Occupational Safety and Health Administration, relatively new Federal beastie that tears into its victims with a ferocity that belies its tender years. Browsing through the catalog reveals nil kinds of wonderful things to have.

My shopping list acquired its first items on the very first page, under Danger Signs. The best one, in black- lettering on a white background ot 30-gauge aluminum, prob.ibly is "Do Nor Clean or Repair Machinery While in Motion." The same kind ot thinking went into the construction of that sentence as went into the formulation of OSHA. Muddled. Cotne to think of it, it would be pointless to put up this particular sign in the midst of a bunch ot news people, as they are loath to break into motion in the first place, let alone attempt to clean or repair anything. A better choice, as a sarcastic touch, might be the sign that says "Men Working, Don't Start." Moving on along through the cntnlog, we come to Cigarette Can.

It is described as "handy container for cigarette, cigar butts, and matches promotes safety and prevents costly fires made of heavy gal- steel body diameter is 1114" body height is 14" and total height is 32" spout O.D. is I well-balanced, seli-stnnding and easy to empty weight 9 pounds." And it only costs $21, which has to be a bargain for a butt can. OSHA should love iliis one tor its design. Rising from the squat- bottomed container is verticle steel pipe, conduit lor the butts, which appears idenl for someone to fall and impale himsell upon. The intention here is not re- nlly to make fun of this particular company's products.

It undoubtedly is reputable outfit with conscientious intentions. But there is something galling about a 72-page catalog of supplies to help meet OSHA regulations. J.N. The Wailing Place Enjoys Trip Editor of The Sir: Traveling on the Amtrak train on an extended trip to Niagara's Horseshoe Fall, Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., was relaxing and enjoyable. Kansas looks beautiful in comparison to most of the states we passed through.

Mostot them arc suffering prolonged drought and crop damage. In the Boston area, old is beautiful. The home of the cousin we visited was built in 1760. It is a lovely colonial cottage well preserved. Many of the 200- year-old homes bear a dace plaque on them to indicate age.

Old warehouses along the waterfront are being renovated and rurned into luxury apartments. The well-known row houses of Boston are monuments to mnn's early craftsmanship. A brief stop at the Wellesley Hills junk yard was a pleasant surprise. There was no smoke or odor. A paved circular drive wns lined with large bins tor placing cans, glass, papers, plastic and garbage.

It was an impressive lesson in recycling. There were so many acts of kindnesses shown by fellow travelers and help extended that any fear of big cities was laid lo rest. We had a fine trip. Respectfully, Elise Anderson Reading OME ISRAELI orange trees wither when their roots become entangled in Roman ruins. In a region where ancient history complicates agriculture, political problems, too, have long, tangled roots.

No one knows this better than Menahem Begin, Israel's next prime minister. His has been an insistent voice proclaiming Israel's right to Juden and Snmaria the "West Bank" seized by Jordan in 1948, annexed by Jordan in 1950, and conquered by Israel in response to Jordan's aggression 10 years ago this week. He does not speak of annexing it: "You do not annex your own country." He calls it "liberated Israel" and promises a new settlement at Etlon Moreh. "And Abraham passed unto the plain of Eilon Moreh. And the Lord appeared unto Abraham and said, 'Unto thy seed will I give this land.

(Genesis 12) Of course, Old Testament reports ot what God said to Abraham will not do as a basis for Begin's policy. That basis would break Israel's traditional link between territorial concerns and intensely practical security concerns, which are a function of changing military technology and diplomacy. Besides (as has been said ot Gladstone), worse than a politician with the Truth up his sleeve is a politician who says God put it there. Legal Mane Fortunately, Begin knows that a politician's best friend is one who defends him against the charge of not having meant whnt he had said, without convicting him ol not saying whnt he means. So Begin has sent such a friend to Washington with this veiled message: A nation can only relinquish right it has established.

The insistence that Judcn and Samaria are rightfully Israel's does not mean that their status is not negotiable. But Arabs must negotiate directly with Israel and pay the price of full peace. Begin's election changes the agenda, but not necessarily the outcome of negotiations. It can he argued trom events between 1917 and 1948 (between the Bnlfour Declaration and Israel's war ol independence) that Judca and Samaria nre, some sense, "rightfully" Israel's. Tracing the pedigree of states that exist where the Ottoman Empire existed 60 years ago is a lawyer's delight.

But the Middle East is not a law seminar. And it is not in Israel's interest to make any legal nicety the criterion of legitimate sovereignty over territory. The world's sense of Israel's legitimacy rests on a particular understanding of Zionism, an understanding that Begin can jeopardize with reckless talk. Zionism began as a movement of salvation to enable people to save itself by becoming a nation, concentrated and sovereign. But Arabs always have argued that Zionism is a movement of fanatical expansionism.

The leftist intelligensia in the West is receptive to this interpretation. And Western publics are, I think, eager for an excuse to regard Israel as Western publics regarded Jews for centuries as an un.issimil.iblc nuisance. In 1948, Israel founded itself 's Claim Upon Conscience By George F. Will without much help from Western nations. What help it received reflected, primarily, a momentary twinge of conscience Western nations about complicity (no softer word describes their sins of commission and omission) in the Holocaust.

Today, the West is addicted co Arab oil. And, diplomatically, Western nations are constant only in pursuit of convenience. Western publics are impatient with commitments that can't be justified on narrow calculations of self-interest. Israel's existence depends on its tenuous hold on the imagination of the West, and especially of the American people. That hold depends on Israel appearing familiar part of the Western family.

So Israel must not begin to appear bizarre. Israel cannot seem to be hearing mysterious voices and obeying strange impulses. It must express its claims co legitimacy in the West's shared vocabulary of liberal democratic politics. Its aspirations must be incelligible to the secular people who could not care less what God promised Abraham. Israel's right to exist securely rests, insecurely, on the fact that Israel is right: right as a response to centuries of injustices against Jews, right.as an embattled enclave of worthy values an inhospitable region.

Thus Israel has a claim upon che conscience, not the calculations, of other peoples. Begin must walk, and calk, softly because merely being right is a weak reed on which to rest a nation. Italian Deadlock OME The comparative of Roman midmorning was shattered last week by the sound of marching feet, of many voices raised song. All along the Via del Corso, the narrow screct'chat'joins Piazza Venezin and Piazza'del Pop- the shutters flew open and nnxious faces peered out. Was a ncwmanifcs- tazionc, a demonstration sure to be violent like the half-dozen others which have terrified the country, killed three policemen, two students nnd wounded a score? Since May, they have been forbidden, and a demonstration on May 12, called by the tiny Radical party to demonstrate lor the right to demonstrate, had been put down with mum force and left in its wake a slain student named Georgina Mnsi, age 19.

Jumpy Romans looked down in consternation nt the red horde advancing among the shops nnd hotels. The invaders wore tall red hats, red shirts, carried red banners. Was it Hold it. That flag being worn as a cape by one of the marchers wasn't it the Union Jack? Yes. And the red flag proclaimed the Liverpool Football Team, which, with some 36,000 fans cow, had come co Rome, not to frighten the natives out of their wits but to play a German team for the world soccer championship.

Sloshing On The sigh of relief emitted in the Via del Corso would have filled the sails of one of Caesar's galleons, the rest of the day By Mary McGrory and the night, the town enjoyed the Liverpudlians, who were behaving in the uninhibited fashion of the Englishman abroad roistering through the streets chugging wine and into the fountains. By the cime the game was won, as the Communist newspaper noted, the English were too far gone, in drink and joy, Co do any violence. Violence is on people's minds in Italy these days. Street crime is on the rise. Kidnaping is a growth industry.

But even more alarming co Italians is a new phenomenon, the violent demonstration. They are not, as Minister of Interior Francesco Cossiga points out, like the American antiwar demonstrations. "These are against the state, against government itself," he says. The political consequences are still being assessed. The two worse riocs occurred at universities in cicies under Communist control, Bologna and Rome, and the Communists could not cope.

When the secretary-general of the Communist-dominaced union, Luciano Lama, wenc co the campus of the University of Rome last February on a pacification mission and was hooted off the platform, some Communists began co have grave doubts about the comfiromcsso slorico, which so far has meant that Communists, who have no power, have to share heat for Christian-Democrat crises. The students nre noc exactly rebels without cause. Their universities, thanks co an open adm- ission policy sponsored by the Communists, are an overcrowded joke. The University of Rome, which was builc for 12,000, has 150,000 students on the rolls. Upon graduation, chcy lace joblessness Italy's labor market, which is equally, and chronically, overcrowded.

Ban Deried The Italians went about containing the savage protests in a typical way. Cossiga issued an edict forbidding all parades and demonstrations during the month of May. But Italy being the country of exceptions, the first tiling that happened was that the Communists and the Socialists were allowed to hold their tradicional May Day parade. It was peaceful because, as everyone said, the unions had che experience to resist infiltration by tirovocutorc, chose gunmen of inyscerious origin who, under the the cover of mass confusion, shoot policemen and other conspicuous targets. The radicals' leader, Marco Panella, complained, with some jusice, chat small parcies should have cquai righcs.

In defiance of the ban, he called his followers to the Piazza Navona on May 12. Cossiga deployed an enormous force of carabtnien, troops and armed plain-clothesmen who fell on the demonstrators with tear gas. Gcorginn Masi wns killed a considerable distance away by a still-unknown assailant. While the subsequent uproar wns ac it height, the aiilonomie, who are no-party, ultra-left protesters, announced that they would take to the field May 19. The students ot the University of Rome proposed to join them, and Romans, began to agonize over whether to keep their children home from school.

Cossiga put out a hard-line statement. The demonstrations would noc be colcratcd. Thereupon, the students retreated to che campus, the autononilc had second thoughts and, on May 19, nothing happened. Cossiga credits che show of force of May 12. But for what it's worth, the Christian-Democrats seem to have benefited marginally from the crisis.

For the firsc cimc in a decade, Italians are madder ac other parties than they are at the party which is nominally, at least, charge of Italy, but doesn't have the votes to make the reforms which might prevent future riots. It's deadlock, Italian style. (Copyright, 1977, TIic Washington Scnr Syndicncc, inc.) Tuesday, 7, 1977 You Should Read i 'The Spreading Desert By Farouk El-Baz IN THE Western Desert of Egypt "the free interplay of sand and wind has been allowed to continue for a vase period of time, and here, if anywhere, it should be possible in the future to discover the laws of sand movement, and growth of dunes." So wrote R.A. Bagnold in The Geographical Journal of 1933. Bagnold was correct.

To this day, geologists have been following his lead to gain a better understanding of the awesome and occasionally mysterious desert environment. This understanding becomes increasingly significant when we realize that dry, barren and sometimes sandy deserts constitute a fifth of the landmasses of the Earth. Moreover, desert regions arc steadily growing. Tunisia, for instance, has lost something like half its arable land. The Western Desert occupies 265,000 square more than two-thirds the area of Egypt.

It lies west of the Nile, River, its flat surface crossed by parallel belts of linear sand dunes. The largest concentration of these known as the Great Sand Sea, which covers nearly 45,000 square miles. The flat terrain is also broken by depressions that enclose several oases. My trip to the Western Desert was inspired by Apollo- Soyuz observations. The American astronauts of this 1975 joint venture between the United States and the Soviet Union studied and photographed parts of the desert.

The photographs showed zones of color that did not correspond to boundaries of mapped geological formations. After studying the photographs, I traveled to the Western Desert in the company of five geologists from Ain Shams University in Cairo. We wanted to unravel the origin of the differing color zones and study patterns of sand movement and resulting landforms, many of which are analogous to windblown features on Mars. Still Not Understood AS A geologist, I must acknowledge that in comparison to other types of terrain, little is known about deserts. One reason for this may be that the founders of the earth sciences in che 18th and 19th centuries were Europeans, and Europe is the only continent without deserts.

Another possible reason is that deserts are vast, usually remote and inaccessible areas where harsh conditions prevail. Consider the Sahara. It stretches across the entire width of North Africa and encompasses more than 3.5 million square miles. This is nearly one-third of the continent, and almost as 1 large as the entire United States including Hawaii and Alaska. This is a lot of territory to study.

Contrary to popular belief; it'is not all covered by soft sand. Only about one-seventh is made up of sand dunes. The rest is barren rock and sun-scorched rubble. ravelers of times past are credited with much of our scanty knowledge of the desert and its ways. No one traveled longer in- the wastelands of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula than the 14th-century Arab geographer Ibn Batuta.

Starting in 1325, he spent 20 years meticulously recording his observations. After his time, little progress was made until 1788, when Sir Joseph Banks established the African Association for promoting the discovery of Africa. For nearly a century, the exploration of tin's continent captured the imagination of Westerners, much as spaceflight intrigued the world in the 1960's, Now spaceflight has opened another chapter in African discovery. The broad coverage of orbital photographs makes it possible for scientists to study features chat cannot be recognized from an airplane- Deserts are clear of clouds and excessive' 'making it easy to photograph their features from above. they display a magnificcnc array of yellow and red colors, thc'use of color film enhances desert study.

These color changes are scientifically meaningful. For example, geologists working in the Simpson Desert of Australia found that desert sand becomes redder with time; a thin film of iron oxide forming an inner coating of the sand grains is increasingly exposed as distance from their source increase's. The most important field objective was to study the meaning of color zones chat showed clearly from space. In one photograph taken just west of the Nile Delta, we noticed three distinct zones that nearly paralleled the Mediterranean coastline. To study these zones, our two-car party started near the Pyramids of Giza.

From there we followed the desert road north from Cairo to Alexandria and then west along che Mediterranean coast. Frequent scops were made to study the terrain and sample it. Our excitement increased as we tallied the findings. Utilizing the photographs, we were able to classify soil types, establish prevailing wind directions, and confirm the direction of shifting sands. Patchy Appearance WE REALIZED that the darkest and southernmost zone owed its color to long exposure to the atmosphere.

The zone may best be described as a desert pavement, with numerous pebbles coated with a dark varnish. This desert varnish results from the deposition from moist soil of a thin, often shiny, film of iron and manganese oxides on rock and pebble surface. In places the desert surface appears wavy. The varnished pebbles litter the high ground, whereas finer sands fill the basins to give the area a patchy, dark and light, appearance. Areas between pebbles serve as storage areas for sand during seasons of calm winds.

When the winds increase, sand is lifted to fuel sandstorms. The lighter zone to the north displays brighter yellow and yellow-red colors. It is covered primarily by a sand sheet that varies greatly in thickness from place to place. As the winds move the sand, ic piles up in back of a bush, hill or other topographic rise. Desert plants appear here and there within this sandy zone, singly or in groups.

These are nor like the majestic saguaro cactus of the Arizona deserts, but are scrawny little stands of brush. Each clump of vegetation appears to he clutching the elusive sand grains out of fear of being swept away by the constantly howling' winds. These bushes soften the bleakness of the landscape, adding some color to the yellow sands. Desert plants also actas windbrcakers. In the far reaches of the Western Desert near Siwa Oasis, a native shrub appears to have learned how to tame che desert.

The plant, related to the mesquite, has roots that penetrate deep into the soil. As sand piles up around it to near submersion, its roots remain firmly planted while branches grow higher and higher, triumphantly emerging. Repetition of chis cycle results in a tcn-foot-high sand hill, capped with this rugged plant. The zone closest to the Mediterranean displays a mottled, carchy-yellow color in the Apollo-Soyuz photograph's. Its soil contains many clay particles in addition to calcium carbonate grains resulting from the breakup of limestone.

Some of the clays are greenish; others arc reddish. These clays increase the fertility of because they hold the moisture longer than sand, thus allowing plants to establish roots. Some of the richest fig farms are in this zone west of Alexandria. Fig trees get all the water they need from winter rains near the Mediterranean coast. Our field investigations proved that this arable zone extends ail along the coast of the Mediterranean west of the Nile Delta.

Ic averages about ten miles in width, and in places it exceeds 20 miles. To my knowledge, this is the fust time that space photographs have been used to point out and.outline the extent of arable land where soil is reclaimable from the desert. The picture is not all rosy, however. The space photographs also reveal two patterns of shifting sands: longitudinal dunes and thin blankets. Both present dangers to fertile soil on the banks of the Nile farther cast and south.

SMITHSONIAN.

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About The Emporia Gazette Archive

Pages Available:
209,387
Years Available:
1890-1977