Word: mediterranean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...half erased the image of Charles de Gaulle, temperamental Free French leader of World War II. Last week the world's memory was sharply refreshed. In a move that caught his allies flatfooted, De Gaulle denounced a longstanding agreement that obligated France to put one-third of its Mediterranean fleet under NATO command in time...
...Gaulle's action was calculated to inflict a minimum of real pain but a maximum of bureaucratic annoyance upon his allies. The actual force involved-some 30,000 tons of naval shipping, including a single aircraft carrier-was militarily insignificant, plays little part in NATO's Mediterranean war plans, which turns around the U.S. Sixth Fleet and its powerful nuclear punch. For public consumption, virtually every Western foreign office took a stiff-upper-lip attitude. So did NATO's General Lauris Norstad (whom De Gaulle dismisses as a military johnny-come-lately...
Peace on Cyprus had one important side effect. Sixty Greek officers and men who last June had walked out in a huff from NATO's Southeastern European Command headquarters at Izmir, Turkey, quietly returned to their job. Friendly allies once again in the Eastern Mediterranean, the British, Turks and Greeks scheduled joint naval maneuvers in April...
...coordinate the explorations of his skindiving friends, Gargallo has organized the Mediterranean Institute of Underwater Archaeology. In his apartment off Rome's Piazza, di Spagna, he has a map of Italy and Sicily with colored pins indicating the site of 20 to 30 ruins known to his skindivers. There is a big underwater city near Venice. Another, off Mondragone, north of Naples, runs along the bottom for nearly three miles...
Most of these drowned cities are unexplored and unaccounted for. No one knows how their ruins got so deep underwater; the general level of the Mediterranean has risen only a fraction of an inch since glacial times. Gargallo hopes that his underwater ruins may hold the answer to some Etruscan mysteries. "Water," he says, "is destructive, but it can also preserve. Mud gives protection from time, weather and greedy hands. If the sea bottom is undisturbed, some relics last almost indefinitely...