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The nation of Morocco, which recently established closer diplomatic and economic ties with Israel and began welcoming direct Israir and El Al flights in Marrakech in July in accordance with a pact the two nations signed last year as part of the Abraham Accords, looks poised to take the next big step in the strengthening of its ties with the West. Morocco World News reported on September 26 on the plans that Simon Morrish, the founder and CEO of Xlinks, has been developing to construct the longest power cable in the world, extending 3,800 kilometers underwater from wind and solar energy generators in the Guelmin Oued-Noun region roughly in the middle of Morocco to the U.K., where, Morrish claims, it will provide power to perhaps seven million homes.
The tiny Central Pacific island nation of Nauru, which has roughly 12,000 residents and no official capital, has long been a dumping ground for refugees seeking entry to Australia. Now, as the Guardian has reported in its edition of September 24, Australia has reached a deal with Nauru for the indefinite prolongation of the detention center, where conditions are reportedly ghastly and human rights abuses abound.
Some companies just can’t stay out of trouble. Evan Symon’s September 25 report in the California Globe details how the Shasta County District Attorney’s office has charged PG&E with 11 felonies, including four counts of manslaughter, in the aftermath of the catastrophe known as the Zogg Fire. PG&E only just emerged from bankruptcy resulting from having to pay $13.5 billion to the victims of a 2018 fire, and that is but one of the higher-profile legal troubles to have beset the utility in recent years.
Sometimes tales of heroism are absurdly inflated. At other times, the sacrifices of past generations can come to seem all the more awe-inspiring when you realize just how inadequate were the resources entrusted to them given the challenges they faced. Jon Diamond’s article in the October 2021 issue of World War II History magazine, “Two Battles at Singapore’s Bukit Timah,” situates the reader in a time in place, Singapore in the early months of 1942, when desperate British, Australian, Dutch, and Indian troops tried to block the lightning moves of the Japanese army down the Malay peninsula and into Singapore, which ultimately fell to the forces of the wily and ruthless Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita on February 15, 1942, but not without a fight.
