Questões Militares

Flooding hits parts of Midwest, with evacuations in Michigan

    People living along two mid-Michigan lakes and parts of a river were evacuated Tuesday following several days of heavy rain that produced flooding and put pressure on dams in the area.

    Two Midland-area schools were opened for evacuees and more than 50 roads have been closed. The evacuations in Michigan followed days of heavy rains in parts of the Midwest that also brought flooding to Chicago and other parts of Illinois, as well as Ohio and other states.

“We were laying in bed when I heard sirens,” Jon St. Croix told the Midland Daily News. “A fire truck was driving around, broadcasting that (we needed) to evacuate. It’s a scary thing — you’re sleeping and awake to sirens.”

    St. Croix, 62, his wife and a next-door neighbor were among more than a dozen people sheltering in one of the schools. Their home was not flooded, but St. Croix said he had seen flooding in the area.

    Volunteers at the schools said about 120 vehicles were in the parking lots and about 30 people had been staying on cots inside, according to WNEM-TV.

www.nbcnews.com

Woman wins Picasso painting worth €1m in raffle

    An Italian woman has won a painting by Pablo Picasso, worth about €1m (£900,000; $1.1m), in a raffle after being given the ticket as a gift.

    The winning ticket was pulled out during a live draw at Christie’s auction house in Paris.

    The event, which was fundraising for Care charity, had been postponed twice - first to sell more tickets, and then because of coronavirus restrictions.

    The prize painting, Nature Morte, is a still life from 1921.

     It is a relatively small artwork - measuring 9in by 18in (23cm by 46cm) - which shows a glass of absinthe and a newspaper on a table.

    In total €5.1m was raised for the charity by selling 51,000 raffle tickets at €100 each. About 29% of the tickets were sold in France, followed by the US and Switzerland.

    Organisers said that €4.2m of proceeds will go towards clean water projects in schools and villages in Madagascar, Morocco and Cameroon.

    David Nahmad, the billionaire collector from Monaco who supplied the Picasso painting, will be given €900,000. He also donated €100,000 to Care, organisers said.

    “Picasso would have loved an operation like this, because he was someone with a lot of interest in humanitarian and social causes,” sale organiser Peri Cochin told Reuters news agency.

Adapted from www.bbc.com

Gregory “Greg” Heffley is an American middle school student and also the main protagonist of the book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Greg is lazy, petty, slightly narcissistic, sociopathic, egotistical, eccentric, egocentric, usually backstabbing, and sometimes even selfish and dishonest, and apparently lacks talent. He hardly has any skills aside from video games and possibly singing. However, despite all this, Greg has had his kind and caring moments, but not that often.

Adapted from https://diary-of-a-wimpy-kid.fandom.com/wiki/Greg_Heffley

Mandela

    Nelson Mandela has achieved many things, but his greatest influence may be for something he didn’t do: run for a second term as South Africa’s leader. As the first President of a post-apartheid South Africa, he was, like George Washington, aware that everything he did would be a model for those who would follow. He once said, “I don’t want to be an octogenarian President.”

    What he really meant was that no man - not even one unfairly imprisoned for 27 years - should be above the law or the people. Mandela will remain perhaps the only figure on the world stage who has been an unambiguous moral giant. He could be considered a hero precisely because he always admitted his errors and then tried to rise above them. And never stop learning. He had to catch up on almost three decades of social change, and one of the things he had to learn about was AIDS. At first, this man didn’t have the most enlightened view. But within a year-long before other, younger South African leaders - he understood that AIDS was an enormous tragedy for his country and his continent, and he saw it as another moral challenge in a life of facing up to them. That’s a moral leadership.

Adapted from Grad Two