December 1, 2018Dubai - Iran’s navy on Saturday launched a domestically made destroyer, which state media said has radar-evading stealth properties, as tensions rise with arch-enemy, the United States.
In a ceremony carried live on state television, the Sahand destroyer — which can sustain voyages lasting five months without resupply — joined Iran’s regular navy at a base in Bandar Abbas on the Gulf.
The Sahand has a flight deck for helicopters, torpedo launchers, anti-aircraft and anti-ship guns, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles and electronic warfare capabilities, state television reported....
...Iran launched its first locally made destroyer in 2010 as part of a program to revamp its navy equipment which dates from before the 1979 Islamic revolution and is mostly U.S.-made.
Iran has developed a large domestic arms industry in the face of international sanctions and embargoes that have barred it from importing many weapons.
Separately, a naval commander said Sahand may be among warships that Iran plans to send on a mission to Venezuela soon.
“Among our plans in the near future is to send two or three vessels with special helicopters to Venezuela in South America on a mission that could last five months,” Iran’s deputy navy commander, Rear-Admiral Touraj Hassani Moqaddam, told the semi-official news agency Mehr....
There is no such thing as playing fair anymore. Russia is intent on destroying the civilized world. Russia and Cuba has filed an alliance under the new President. Either hold the President of Cuba and Putin responsible for human rights violations AND MEAN IT or suffer the consequences.
The technology they use to permanently damage diplomats and who knows who else, generals and congress persons next, is indiscriminate in it's use. The technology harms all forms of life. I think it is microwave.
The USA has sound technology, but, rarely deploys it because of it's unknown consequences that may be permanent. But, there is no reason to not give the Chinese, Russians and Cubans a taste of their own medicine. That means the USA and Canada will deploy the technology within the USA and Canadian borders against diplomats that are supposed to be immune to such tactics.
Get real or visit the Hague and start dragging these people before the tribunals.
November 29, 2018
By Anna Mehler Paperny
Toronto - Canada’s government (click here) is reviewing its diplomatic presence in Cuba, officials said on Thursday, after another staff member developed the same mysterious health problems that first began affecting diplomats last year.
Canadian and U.S. diplomats in Havana first began complaining of dizziness, headaches and nausea in the spring of 2017. The United States reduced embassy staffing in Cuba from more than 50 to a maximum of 18, after more than two dozen personnel developed unusual illnesses.
Another Canadian diplomat showed symptoms over the summer, government officials said in a telephone briefing. Tests confirmed the person suffered from the same health issues that had affected a dozen other Canadian staff, spouses and their children, officials said....
Not that I am interested in victimizing doctors, but, this is ridiculous. Their country deploys technology to permanently injure diplomats while they cry "slavery" to the USA Courts. If the settlement is achieved from Brazil, the monies should be forwarded to the USA and Canadian treasuries to pay for the doctor bills of those effected by Cuban war technology.
The USA and Canada need to file sanctions against Cuba and then proceed to collect any monies available to pay for the permanent physical damage Cuba and Russia has caused to their diplomatic corps.
Russia doesn't want the USA and Canada in Cuba because it wants to build military bases there now that there is a new president.
November 29, 2018
By Andres Oppenheimer
The scandal surrounding the 15,000 Cuban doctors (click here) who have been working as virtual slaves in Brazil is growing: Some of them filed a lawsuit in Miami against the Washington-based Pan American Health Organization (PAHO.)
The lawsuit, filed Friday, claims that the regional health organization not only supervised the program, but pocketed $75 million of its funds. Meanwhile, the doctors were receiving less than 10 percent of their salaries.
Sam Dubbin, a Miami attorney representing at least four Cuban doctors who defected in Brazil, told me that the lawsuit alleges that PAHO, an agency of the U.N. World Health Organization, supervised and profited from an illegal scheme under which the Cuban doctors had to work in conditions that violate U.S. and international forced labor laws....
November 28, 2018
By Mac Margolis
When the Cuban government (click here) gave the word earlier this month to recall the more than 8,000 physicians it deployed in Brazil, the media, physicians and public health wonks were alarmed. What would become of the patients the expatriate doctors had been tending in parts of the country where public services were already precarious at best and the only folks in white were Pentecostal pastors.
That the exodus was triggered by yet another outburst by intemperate right-wing President-elect Jair Bolsonaro only aggravated the worries. Bolsonaro not only offended Cuba by accusing it of promoting slave labor — keeping some 70 percent of the contracted doctor’s fees while barring their families from joining them in Brazil — he also had no fallback plan for the services they rendered. Millions of poor patients would be left unassisted, it was said, so inviting a public health disaster. “This is a sad day for Brazilian health and foreign policy,” former health minister Alexandre Padilha lamented....
...As it happened, Cuba was taking bows with a tip of someone else’s beret. For decades, the governments of Fidel and Raul Castro could deliver medical services pro bono thanks largely to life-support from Havana’s erstwhile foreign sponsor, the Soviet Union....
There is plenty of money floating around between Russia and Cuba to pay for the doctor bills for all the diplomats and their families and pets for the rest of their lives, while curtailing the ability of Cuba to grow into a military threat to the USA.
...Cuba’s medical internationalism raked in some $9.6 billion on average annually from 2011 to 2016, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) estimated last year. According to Vidal, better than three-quarters of that bounty came from just two markets: Brazil and Venezuela....
...Dubbin cited several documents, including an audit of the Mais Medicos program by Brazil’s Supreme Accountability Office, a congressional agency similar to the General Accounting Office in the United States, as showing that over the past five years, Brazil paid about $1.5 billion to PAHO for the program. Of that money, PAHO paid $1.3 billion to Cuba, and kept $75 million for itself. Cuba, in turn, paid the Cuban doctors in Brazil about $125 million, Dubbin said....
