By Dr César Chelala When Diego Maradona was asked in 1998 who would win that year’s football World Cup being played in France, he said: “Countries organise the World Cup to win it,” thus suggesting that France would be the winner. And it was. The same thing could be said for this year’s World Cup in Brazil. For most people, Brazil is …
By Dr Cesar Chelala The decision by US District Court Judge Gladys Kessler determining that the US military can force-feed a Syrian detainee at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a well intentioned but wrong decision. It allows the US government to continue a criminal practice that has been widely condemned by medical professionals and …
Dr Cesar Chelala As the Middle East peace talks face another standstill, Israel’s Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, is quick to blame the Palestinian side. And most of the Western press dutifully parrots Mr Netanyahu’s lies. Palestinians have been guilty of stalling the peace talks, too, but for different reasons. The main weakness of Palestinian …
By Dr. Cesar Chelala As Middle East peace efforts go through another round of failure, information published by Newsweek magazine indicates that Israel has been conducting spying activities in the US. Although the main targets are industrial and technical secrets, they have a connection to national security that makes these activities by a US ally highly reprehensible. This is not the first …
By Dr Cesar Chelala I met Gabriel García Márquez and Fidel Castro at the Convention Palace in Havana during a medical meeting I attended in Cuba in the early eighties. I also had the honour of being extensively quoted in one of his articles, “Con las Malvinas o sin ellas,” (With or Without the Malvinas). …
By Dr. César Chelala As fear increases in the west about Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions, the Russian president has to confront at home his most powerful enemy: vodka. Russians’ love for vodka has a long history in the country. Legend holds that vodka arrived in Moscow in the 14th century, brought by Genovese merchants to Prince Dmitry Ivanovich. …
By Dr Cesar Chelala “Aleppo was a large and terrifying town,” wrote the American writer Frederic Prokosch in his famed novel “The Asiatics”. This has been never truer than now, as I read about the barrel bomb attacks that have killed dozens of civilians just in a few days. I look at an October 2013 photograph of a …
By Dr Cesar Chelala For Iranian eight-year-old Mahan Rahimi life had become a torment. Because he was going bald due to an unknown illness, he was the target of unceasing bullying from his companions at school. He had become one of the millions of children and adolescents who suffer the daily consequences of bullying throughout the …
By Dr Cesar Chelala As the number of deaths continues unabated in Iraq –the worst since 2008—so do calls for the prosecution of those that led both the United States and Great Britain into war, former US president George W. Bush and former prime minister Tony Blair. In December alone there were 44 deaths in just one day, over 766 …
By Dr. Cesar Chelala Those who don’t believe in miracles should go to Cairo today. Blocks-long gas lines have disappeared, there are no more power cuts, and police are no longer absent from the streets. It is a scene eerily reminiscent of the weeks before Chilean president Salvador Allende was ousted from power. Although the …
By Dr. César Chelala NEW YORK: Russia has one of the world’s most serious epidemics of injection drug-use, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS. It is estimated that Russia has two million injecting drug users (IDUs), 60-70 percent of whom have HIV-related illnesses. In the past decade, the number of HIV-infected people has …
