Russia Seeks Access to Bases in Eight Countries for Its Ships and Bombers

(CNSNews.com) – At a time of escalated tensions with the West over Ukraine, Russia says it is negotiating with eight governments around the world for access to military facilities, to enable it to extend its long-range naval and strategic bomber capabilities.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday the military was engaged in talks with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Algeria, Cyprus, the Seychelles, Vietnam and Singapore.

“We need bases for refueling near the equator, and in other places,” ITAR-Tass quoted him as saying.

Russia is not looking to establish bases in those locations, but to reach agreement to use facilities there when required.

The countries are all strategically located – in three leftist-ruled countries close to the U.S.; towards either end of the Mediterranean; in the Indian Ocean south of the Gulf of Aden; and near some of the world’s most important shipping lanes in the Malacca Strait and South China Sea.

Access to the new locations would extend the Russian military’s potential reach well beyond its existing extraterritorial bases, at the Syrian port of Tartus and in former Soviet states – Ukraine’s Sevastopol, Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and the occupied Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Shoigu said Russia was also beefing up its existing military presence in the post-Soviet region, doubling its troop numbers in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and deploying a regiment of troops to Belarus where it already has fighter aircraft stationed.

Via: CNS News
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AP: 'Venezuela's Health Care System in Collapse'; Will Rest of U.S. Press Report It?

The Associated Press has published a great but disturbing story. Given the frequent and deserved grief yours truly administers when the wire service lets its readers, listeners, viewers, and subscribing news organizations down, it seems only fair to acknowledge fine work when it does occur. The real question is, in the politically charged U.S. health care environment, whether the AP's subscribers and other media outlets aware of Frank Bajak's Wednesday morning report will acknowledge its existence, and adequately relay the horrors contained therein.

The story is about what's left of Venezuela's "free" healthcare system. It's in shambles. The headline reads like it might be "only" doctors who say so, but Bajak's content says otherwise. Readers here need to go to the full report, because the excerpts which follow of necessity convey only a small portion of how awful things are, including indications that the country is moving ever closer to becoming another Cuba:

DOCTORS SAY VENEZUELA'S HEALTH CARE IN COLLAPSE

... (Evelina) Gonzalez is on a list of 31 breast cancer patients waiting to have tumors removed at one of Venezuela's biggest medical facilities, Maracay's Central Hospital. But like legions of the sick across the country, she's been neglected by a health care system doctors say is collapsing after years of deterioration.

Doctors at the hospital sent home 300 cancer patients last month when supply shortages and overtaxed equipment made it impossible for them to perform non-emergency surgeries.

... "I feel like I've been abandoned," Gonzalez, 37, tells a bright-eyed hospital psychologist trying to boost her morale. Her right eye is swollen by glaucoma diagnosed two years ago but left untreated when she had trouble getting an appointment.

Doctors not allied with the government say many patients began dying from easily treatable illnesses when Venezuela's downward economic slide accelerated after Chavez's death from cancer in March. Doctors say it's impossible to know how many have died, and the government doesn't keep such numbers, just as it hasn't published health statistics since 2010.

Almost everything needed to mend and heal is in critically short supply ...

Last month, the government suspended organ donations and transplants ...

Via: Newsbusters

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Three-and-a-half More Years of Obama!

So the Syria "crisis" is reaching its culmination.  Syria's WMD's are likely to be placed under the control of its patron, Russia, perhaps even with the cooperation of other disinterested, responsible states such as Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela.  The world's only superpower, for its part, will loiter on the curb outside, asking hurried questions while the big boys come and go, stepping aside quickly to avoid being shoved into the gutter by their bodyguards. 

This situation is the sole handiwork of Mr.  Barack H.  Obama, successor in office to Washington, Lincoln, Truman, and Reagan.  Pondering the better part of a day, I can think of no previous episode to compare it with.  It has similarities to the isolationism of the 1920s, with the United States reduced to irrelevance on the global fringes, but that was a deliberate result of policy, while this... this product of ineptness coupled with ideology, is something you can scarcely put a name to. 

There are three-and-a-half years of agony lying ahead. It won't be pleasant, but there is a saving grace. Barack Obama and his childishness, incompetence, and fanatical fixation on dead political ideas constitute the apotheosis of a longer-term conundrum, that of a liberal/left that has infiltrated this country's institutions to a point that state power and interference with individual liberties increases steadily no matter who is in office.

Obama offers us a chance to reject all that decisively. I want every single train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in full.  I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have triggered to blossom in bleak completion.  I want to see all their trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to cinders. 

Via: American Thinker

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Chavez's socialist rule at risk as Venezuelans vote

(Reuters) - Hugo Chavez loyalists blew bugles in a wake up call for voters on Sunday as the Venezuelan leader faced the biggest electoral challenge yet to his socialist rule from a young rival tapping into discontent over crime and cronyism.

Henrique Capriles, a centrist state governor, edged toward the still-popular Chavez in final polls thanks to a vigorous campaign that united the opposition and made him its best chance of ending the president's 14-year tenure.

Chavez has used record oil revenue to support ideological allies around the world while preaching a fiercely anti-American line, so the election is being watched eagerly from the United States to Belarus and Iran.

Queues formed at some polling centers long before they opened, and despite a few delays voting was going smoothly.

"The battle has started!" the flamboyant former soldier wrote in an early morning rallying cry on Twitter. "Today we will write another chapter in history."

Chavez loyalists in poor neighborhoods, where he draws his most fervent following, blew bugles and trumpets in the predawn wake-up call. In the center of Caracas, some red-clad fans shouted "Long live Chavez!" from the back of trucks.

Chavez, 58, staged a remarkable comeback from cancer this year. But he could not match the energy of past campaigns - or the pace set by his 40-year-old basketball-loving opponent.

"Today we decide the future of our Venezuela," Capriles said on Twitter. "Today we are millions of Davids! God will be our guide," he added, referring to his depiction of the vote as the biblical underdog's battle against Goliath.

Capriles had prepared for the election by hiking a mountain trail on the edge of Caracas on Saturday, donning sports gear and mirrored sunglasses and posing for pictures with supporters.

Via: Reuters

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