Saturday news

By tk
Saturday, May 24, 2003

*Insects leave trees bare in coastal swamps
-Hilton Head Island Packet Online, 5-24-02

*Second St. Simons pier still afloat
*Officials eye area's hurricane response
-Brunswick News, 5-23-03

*Security, business outlook worry seafarers
*Navy team rescues ailing fisherman
*Florida Times Union, 5-24-03

*Purchase of 8,465 pristine acres north of Faver-Dykes State Park creates a 16,000-acre preserve along the Intracoastal Waterway of undisturbed marshfront land
-St Augustine Record, 5-24-03

*Officials: Drunken boating can get you in over your head
*Research could help tame danger of rip currents
-Daytona News Journal, 5-24-04

*Despite beach campaign, many are colorblind to surf alerts
*Doctor missing in boat mishap
-Pensacola News Journal, 5-24-03

*Area ranked among nation’s holiday hot spots
-Northwest Florida Daily News, 5-23-03

*State: Seventy-five percent of spoil ended up in sound
-Hilton Head Island Packet Online, 5-23-03

The Battle for Malta. Six Vital Months - Spring and Summer 1942.

The tiny island of Malta, only 316 square kilometres, no bigger than the Isle of Wight off England's south coast, sits in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, with two smaller islands Gozo and Comino. During WW2, its strategic importance and retention played a vital role, being the key to the final Allied victory in North Africa.

One quote from the distinguished Australian War Correspondent Alan Moorhead will suffice to illustrate the agony this island endured for the Allied cause.

"The greatest of battles for supply fell upon Malta. This was now turned into a hell. Malta was a base for British submarines and aircraft preying on Axis lines of supply to Libya. In the spring of 1942, the Axis decided to obliterate that base and they wanted to starve it as well. Right through the spring they turned such blitz upon Malta as no other island or city had seen in the war. It was a siege of annihilation. One after another all the great sieges were eclipsed - England and Odessa, Sebastopol and Tobruk. Malta became the most bombed  place on earth."

Malta has a long and varied history, a Phoenician colony about 1,000 BC, then occupied by the Greeks in 746 BC, to be possessed by Cartage and Rome. Along came the Arabs in 870 AD, to be followed in 1,090 by the Normans taking control, and later to be a fuedal fiefdom of Sicily. The Roman Emperor CharlesV granted Malta to the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in 1530, they ruled into the 19th. century, making Valetta one of the Mediterranean's greatest strongholds.

Britain acquired the island in 1814, until it gained its independence on the 21st. of September in 1964, but remaining within the Commonwealth, to become a Republic ten