She Races the Stork to Freedom

It would have been a taxing feat even for the most fit, but an undaunted Camelia Popescu Sorina put aside her condition--9 months pregnant--in choosing to flee her native Romania. She rode down the Danube River on an inner tube and then hiked six more miles to escape into Yugoslavia. As it turned out, she made it with only hours to spare. Shortly after she reached Yugoslavia, Sorina boarded a bus for Belgrade, at which point she went into labor, the magazine Ilustrovana Politika reported. The 30-year-old teacher was taken to a hospital in Negotin, where she gave birth to a girl. Sorina’s husband, Alexander, earlier had escaped Romania via Hungary to Austria, where he is living in a refugee camp. A friend who fled with him was shot to death by soldiers as he tried to swim the Danube. The couple now want either to go to Canada or to settle in Austria, the magazine said.

--Among the privileges of being vice president are horseback rides in a national park, but it’s a practice that has one former park historian up in arms. Dan Quayle and his three children--Tucker, 15, Benjamin, 12, and Corinne, 10--are regular visitors to Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia, where they choose their mounts from a string of nine horses not available to the general public. That’s got former park staffer John Hennessey, now with the New York state Division of Parks, steamed--mostly, he says, because he has seen other services at the park cut back over the years. “You have money going into maintaining these government horses . . . while anyone can see the woeful condition of the rest of the operation. What type of message does that send to the public?” Hennessey asked. Ed Raus, who heads the battlefield’s interpretive staff, said: “This is the worst year in the three years I’ve been here. We don’t have the staff to operate the programs we once did.”

--The Twain shall meet, after all, in Elmira, N. Y., this weekend, as about 150 scholars and experts on the writer Mark Twain get together to jaw about one of his darker works, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Marianne Curling, curator of the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, Conn., said that while “A Connecticut Yankee” was not Twain’s most successful work, today it is among his most relevant. “It talks about the impact of technology in society,” she said. “People either thought electricity would cure the ills of society or destroy it. It’s very much like people regard nuclear power today.” The novel chronicles the journey back in time of Hank Morgan, a New England mechanic, to 6th-Century England.