~ a ii CAIRO e HAVANA e TOKYO e — BUENOS AIRES & The Laotian liberated areas, which have been created unuer | the leadership of the Neo-Lao Haksat Party, constitute two-thirds | of the territory of Laos with 50 percent of the population. There is | 9 intimate relationship between the army and the people. Photo 4) ‘"0ws women of a national minority group wishing soldiers good | luck in their struggle to win their country’s independence. —2E Ground the worl i CHEDDI JAGAN, former British Guiana premier, has wel- 4 “Med the decision to grant the colony independence in May 1966. ut he says jubilation must be tempered by the fact that while | ‘Statements are being: made about freedom, “our country continues / ‘© be ruled under a State of Emergency, and several Guyanese | ate detained without charge or trial.” . . . Legal .contraception 8S become a big issue in the French presidential campaign. Left- s}: Wing candidate Francois Mitterand says he will abolish the 45- . q yStt-old ban on contraception if elected. Opponents of the 1920 _8W say that it is increasing abortion—now between 800,000 and n| °he million annually. : " Oe * * * f RIGHT WING coup against President Hector Garcia-Godoy’s #) Provisional government in the Dominican Republic failed when its faders were arrested . . . Daily Worker in Britain is going from * four to a six-pager next spring, but reminds its readers and ‘| “Upporters that a major circulation effort will be needed to sustain | the larger paper. “Improvements in the paper will not by them- ‘elves result in the extra sales needed,” the DW editor pointed out. He * * x aan SOVIET trade union newspaper Trud advised readers not to 4) .'P waiters but to say “Thank you” to the man who has handed , %U your overcoat . . : Girls. at an underwear factory near eee MY ent on strike last week because, they said, a new door on the | adies’ room was transparent. Management claimed the plastic ¢ fs installed because the girls wete spending too much time * * * ( . SUDAN’S Communist Party has declared it will defy any | £0vernment move to dissolve it, after the approval of a Suppres- } Son Bill by the Constituent Assembly. The party will continue to Y ®perate and fight the ban in the courts . . . The newspaper which | Ported the Great Fire of London in 1666, Wolfe's victory in | : 9 and the victory and death of Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805, “lebrates its 300th anniversary this month. For the first 10 weeks *r its life the London Gazette was published in two editions—one q “ Oxford where the Court had gone to escape the Great Plague, | “Md one in London. * * * A MOUSE ran up the pants leg of a car driver in Rovigo, — Paly, making him swerve and crash into a restaurant. . . A man Who wanted a seat on a packed train in Cairo shouted ‘‘Fire!” and Panicking passengers jumped out of the windows. Two of them ‘Nded in the path of another train and Dease killed. * * of BULGARIA is on a hotel-building spree to meet the eins 4 growing tourist trade. The Grand Pliska opened in Sofia t uis ponth, 16 storeys and 440 beds. Nearby a 22-story hotel with 720 es ds will go up soon. Several other big hotels are also under con- a tction .. . Under a protocol signed in Moscow the USSR will _jasist Cuba in geological-survey work in the years 1965-70. epee ie equipment and necessary materials will be sent to Cuba, an © USSR will grant long-term credits to finance the wor k. BERLIN @ ROME e WASHINGTON e A visit to Siberia: Prospects Some films, said Pavel Silin- sky, show the conquest of Si- beria as a romantic adventure. But, and he stressed this point, “there isn’t much sing- ing and dancing involved. The conquest of Siberia is a severe struggle with a severe nature.” Silinsky is chairman of the Irkutsk region’s planning com- mission. Middle-aged and mild- mannered, he had been effi- ciently, yet informally and en- tertainingly, filling us with facts and figures. : His remarks about the: severeness of Siberia’s nature opened up a discussion about what’s being done about the climate and that icy enemy— permafrost. I’ve read, and I’m sure you have too, various forecasts about Siberia’s future, ranging to prophecies of artificial suns that would completely trans- form the climate and make of Siberia a sunny paradise. Is there any basis for such pre- dictions? First of all, on the perma- frost which covers so much territory in Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union (one estimate puts it at 47 percent of the total land area), Silin- sky assured us this problem is being gradually overcome. In the near future, he said, Soviet builders will be able to erect any kind of building on perma- frost. There seems good reason to believe this. Soviet engineers have done much _ pioneering work in. building on perma- frost. Take .the Arctic town of Norilsk, for instance, on the 69th parallel. It has a large population and a combined mining and_ metallurgical works. ; Or the new diamond town of Aikhal, scheduled for “com- pletion in 1968. Its various buildings will be connected by enclosed galleries, warmed and air-conditioned the year round. . As will the experimental town of Udachnaya, further north be- yond the Arctic circle. But such advances have not, been without their difficulties —and failures in early years. The main problem with per- mafrost, apart from digging into its hardened depths for foundations, seems to be to prevent it from thawing (al- though some scientists say this is an over-simplification). But building methods seem so far based on the non-thaw- ing concept. If the permafrost thaws it can cause .a settling and buckling of buildings erec- ted on it. All buildings are a source of heat. Thus, ground storeys must be raised well above the surface of the earth to enable a cool cellar, well aired, to pre- vent thawing of the perma- frost. : In addition the foundation must be anchored deeply enough in the permafrost to “prevent the surface layer of non-permafrost ground (never less than three feet) from pul- ling at the foundation when this ‘‘active” layer freezes and thaws. Practise has also shown the need for reinforced con- crete foundations. The entire foundation, from its bottom depth in the per- mafrost to the ground floor of the structure in question, may be as much as 20 feet high. But since the load such foun- dations have to. carry is often comparatively small, it has been found best to mount these on reinforced: concrete piles. : To bore the holes for these, - steam jets were first used. But these required a great deal of apparatus, would not go through rock and could pos- sibly result in too much thawed ground. . Subsequently the holes were drilled with cable-tool drilling rigs. The piles are inserted into fluid ground in the holes which soon freezes without interfer- ing with the permafrost. The drilling method is used also for construction of heat furnaces which must rest .on rock — sometimes at a depth of 50 feet. Pipelines for hot water and sewerage are laid in two-deck reinforced concrete tunnels in- sulated to keep the heat in. At the same time the lower deck is ventilated to let cold _air in and through the upper deck where it is discharged , into the atmosphere. Other techniques, such as “the use of electricity to thaw ground. where ‘large pits must be excavated, are also used.: One scientist with a different approach to permafrost is P.F. Shvetsov, corresponding mem- ber of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In a recent article he argues that permafrost is not so much caused by the rigors of climate as by a heat-and-water ex- change product. The movement of ground water takes place in conditions of incessantly . changing temperatures, affect- ing the permafrost layer. Only thus, he states, is it possible to explain the origin of peculiar oases in the north which have nothing in common with the tundra landscape, The root of the trouble in building on permafrost, he con- tinues, is not so much in pre- venting the thawing of the per- mafrost. Rather, the problem is that permafrost is not “per- ma” and often recedes through heat and water exchange. Shvetsov appeals to glaciolo- gists to devise precise methods for calculating geological pro- cesses at work in permafrost. For this, he says, a knowledge of pure mathematics is neces- sary: As to changing the climate, Silinsky said no thought was being given to artificial suns at this moment. But he did foresee much that could be done to improve things. With peaceful cooperation, he said, and using the atom, it would be possible to make a gate in the Himalayas to let warm air from India into Si- beria and cold air from Siberia into India. Another idea he put forward was the use of nuclear reactors in Lake Baikal to raise tem- peratures. Some scientists go further. Boris Mavritsky, an expert on geology and mineralogy, was quoted in a recent article in reference to a vast under- ground “hot ocean’ in Siberia —larger than the Mediterra- nean- Sea. Implicitly, he fore- Saw great climate changes. This “ocean” was discovered while drilling for oil and lies somewhere around a mile be- neath the surface. The water is in the porous rock and satur- ates the sand. The town of Tyumen has grown up around one of these drillings and is now a health resort giving treatment from the hot underground waters. The author of the article speculates that in the not-too- distant future, “Tropical parks may appear where blizzards Tage and trees crack from the frost at present,” with luxur- ious gardens and orchards pre- served all the year. , In his article, however, Shvetsov states at the opening that should the glum tundra be decorated with landscapes of the type found on the Black Sea coast, “the radiation bal- ance would change at once. This means that vast areas... would be swallowed up by the ocean.” He says permafrost should be taken care of carefully. So, somewhere along the line, it would seem you can take your choice as to future climate changes. As to perma- frost the debate seems more narrowed to.a search fer great- er detail. But one thing is sure. Neither climate nor permafrost has stopped the advance of Soviet Siberia so far. And my guess is that they never will.- : December 10, 1965—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 5 |