Word: ashes
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William Espinosa does his best to consign the President's plan to the ash heap with Buckley-esque logic and equally obtuse prose. His argument that Johnson's plan represents a thinly veiled desire to extend the control of the President over Congress may be valid. But paranoid statements like "the Executive searches with lupine voracity for problem areas that it may entrench itself in yet another sphere of life" are absurd...
...many years, archaeologists believed that a sudden earthquake had devastated the island, or that it had been systematically conquered and destroyed by invaders from Greece. In 1939, Greek Archaeologist Spyridon Marinates suggested that the Minoan civilization had actually been destroyed around 1500 B.C. by falling ash and poisonous fumes from a volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now called Santorin), 75 miles to the north. But the volcanic theory did not quite square with all the available facts; some of the pottery found on Crete, for example, had apparently been fashioned as late as 1450 B.C., 50 years after...
...western part of the little island to sink and generated tsunamis (seismic sea waves) between 100 and 165 feet high. "Within 20 minutes, these waves hit the Cretan coast with terrifying fury," says Marinates, "destroying everything they could reach." The waves were accompanied by a rain of volcanic ash that buried nearly everything left standing and by fumes that poisoned the population. In the wake of the catastrophic eruption, most of the surviving Minoans fled Crete, sailing to other Mediterranean islands, mainland Greece and even Asia Minor...
...some to have affected the Exodus and caused the ten plagues of Egypt 450 miles to the southeast. Professor Anghelos Galanopoulos, head of the Athens observatory's seismological institute, believes that the three days of darkness that oppressed Biblical Egypt may well have been caused by volcanic ash. The fallout of ash was probably heavy enough to ruin crops and cause famine by making the land uncultivatable...
Most books written on topics in the headlines suffer from poor research. The author has to slap together his book before the news stories line the ash-cans. But Lacouture's book is far more than a piece d'occasion. Because he has been in and out of Vietnam as a soldier and reporter for twenty years, he had had a lot of time to formulate his conclusions...