Not so long ago, after having narrowly avoided the Maltese islands, a huge tempest hit the Libyan coast and inflicted enormous damage there, while hundreds of people lost their lives. Powerful tempests battered the Adriatic coastline in recent years. At the start of the Rolex sailing competiton this year, the tempest which affected boats in the run between Malta and Sicily was described by participants as the most violent and dangerous in their experience.
In the past fortnight, the tempest that swept over the Valencia region in Spain again caused many deaths and huge damages.
It is true that the Mediterranean has always been known as a sea racked by very powerful storms. This problem continued to be highlighted in works ranging from Homer's epics to the Acts of the Aposltles to the stories about the British navy written by Victorian novelists. However it would seem that the scale on which storms develop has been taking a more powerful and swift turn due to the phenomenon of global climate warming.
What would happen to the Maltese islands if they get hit with a storm as powerful as that which landed in Valencia? We need to give serious thought to an occurrence that might not be so remote as we used to believe.
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PLANS
Whether man can plan his/her own future is a question that got different replies according to when it was being considered, according to whether people believed they could predict or guide the future, and according to the methods that were to be used for planning purposes.
When the Soviet Union was still operative, their technology of planning was conditioned by the central management of an economy that was controlled hundred per cent by the state. In the countries run by a parliamentary democracy where the economy was in private hands, some argued that planning made no sense for under the "free" market in a liberal economy, economic and social development would be determined by the interactions between buyers and sellers. Others considered that planning could and needed to be done even in a liberal economy, albeit in a different mode to how the Soviets did it.
The first perspective won the argument. However more recently, the compass in this area of policy making has again been shifting.
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WHAT WILL CHANGE?
Now that the tension over the US presidential election campaign has run its course, the new tension that will be developing concerns what's going to come next and what will be changing.
After such a campaign as this has been, it is difficult to imagine that changes of certain signficance will not occur. But it is likely that in the interventions Americans will be making outside their borders, change will be minimal. No matter who got to be US president, it practically always happened that concretely there was little change in the methods hands on, by which America defended its interests abroad. This happened even when the contestants for the presidency had positions that diverged much more than those of this year's, even if then they would present their claims in much more prudent language than what we were treated to in past months.