Zeynure Hasan was at home in Istanbul in July 2021 when her husband finally called. It had been four days since she last heard from him as he got ready to board a flight to Casablanca. The silence had been torturous. But the news Idris now shared with her was even worse. He had been arrested and imprisoned on arrival in Morocco and told he was going to be deported to China. “You should call anyone who can help me, anyone who can rescue me,” he told her, before the…
Tag: Morocco
Chinese Traders and Moroccan Ports: How Russia Flouts Global Tech Bans
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, engineers at Convex, a Russian telecommunications company, needed to find American equipment to transmit data to the country’s feared intelligence service. But no gear was flowing in after Western nations imposed sweeping new trade limits on Russia. Convex’s employees soon found a solution. While Cisco, a U.S. tech provider, had halted sales to Russia on March 3, 2022, Convex’s engineers easily obtained the Cisco gear they needed through an obscure Russian e-commerce site called Nag, which had gotten around international trade restrictions by…
Brutal heat and heavy rain: a week of extreme weather
52.2C in China A remote township in the north-western region of Xinjiang set a Chinese record of 52.2C (125.9F) on Sunday – in a country that was battling -50C weather six months ago. Sanbao is in the Turpan Depression, an arid basin of sand dunes and dried-up lakes where 50.3C was recorded in 2015. Beijing topped its record for high-temperature days in a year on Tuesday, with 27 days above 35C. The temperature in its southern suburbs soared even higher on Wednesday to 36.3C. 53.3C in the US Temperatures at…