Thomson Reuters

“……The Caribbean island nation has a respected health service and generates major export earnings by sending more than 50,000 health workers to more than 60 countries.

But it came under criticism in Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro last year called the Cuban doctors “slave labor” and Cuba recalled its 8,300 medical workers stationed there.

Ramona Matos, a Cuban doctor, said she worked with medical missions in Bolivia and Brazil where Cuban security agents took away the doctors’ passports and other identification.

“We were undocumented,” she said at the State Department’s news conference. “If anything happened to us, we got hurt, we died … nobody would know our identity.”

Nearly all of the doctors’ earnings were sent back to Cuba where they were frozen in accounts that they could not access until they completed their missions, she said.

“We were basically being trafficked, and we were victims and exploited by the Cuban government,” she said……”

T. Reuters

NY Times

CNN

“…..Buyers raise their hands as the price rises, “500, 550, 600, 650 …” Within minutes it is all over and the men, utterly resigned to their fate, are being handed over to their new “masters.”….”

Thomas Reuters

“…..The Thomson Reuters Foundation survey asked experts in women’s issues in 19 megacities how well women are protected from sexual violence, and from harmful cultural practices, and whether they have access to good healthcare, finance and education……”

The worst:

• Cairo (#1)
• Karachi
• Kinshasa in Democratic Republic of the Congo
• New Delhi

The best: 

• London (#1)
• Tokyo
• Paris

“…..Delhi and Sao Paulo emerged as the worst cities when respondents were asked if women could live there without the risk of sexual violence, including rape, attacks or harassment…”

“….Authorities recorded four rapes every hour in India in 2015….”

The poll

Thomas Reuters

‘…..”For the longest time, traffickers have been using marriage with minors as an alibi to rape girls in the first instance, to break them, before selling them to pimps and brothel owners,” said Adrian Phillips, an advocate from Justice and Care, which fights trafficking…..Almost 20,000 women and children were victims of human trafficking in India in 2016, a rise of nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to government data…….’

NY Times

“…..the [ North Korea] government has sent tens of thousands of its impoverished citizens to cities and towns across the former Soviet Union to earn money for the state.

Human rights groups say this state-controlled traffic amounts to a slave trade, but so desperate are conditions in North Korea that laborers often pay bribes to get sent to Russia.

North Korean laborers helped build a new soccer stadium in St. Petersburg to be used in next year’s World Cup, a project on which at least one of them died. They are working on a luxury apartment complex in central Moscow, where two North Koreans were found dead last month in a squalid hostel near the construction site……A lengthy report on North Korean workers in Russia issued last year by the Data Base Center for North Korean Human Rights, a group in Seoul, said the Workers’ Party of Korea seizes 80 percent of the wages earned by forestry workers and at least 30 percent of the salaries paid to laborers working in construction. Further money is taken to cover living expenses, mandatory contributions to a so-called loyalty fund and other “donations.”……..”

NASA