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drones

Tuesday October 18, 2022

October 18, 2022 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday October 18, 2022

Drones Embody an Iran-Russia Alliance Built on Hostility to the U.S.

September 22, 2022

The Iranian-made drones that Russia sent on Monday to divebomb Ukraine’s capital delivered the most emphatic proof yet that Tehran has become a rare, increasingly close ally to the Kremlin, offering both weapons and international support that Russia sorely lacks.

There is no deep love between Russia, newly a pariah for attacking another country, and Iran, for decades one of the most strategically isolated nations in the world. But the two authoritarian governments, both chafing under Western sanctions, share a view of the United States as their great enemy and a threat to their grip on power.

“This is a partnership of convenience between two embattled dictatorships,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Both countries are deep in crisis, struggling economically and politically. Iran is attempting to quell street protests that pose the most serious challenge in years to the government, while Russia is trying to manage rising dissension over a faltering war effort and an unpopular draft.

The emergence of a Moscow-Tehran alliance has multiple international implications, potentially dimming prospects for a new agreement to rein in Iran’s nuclear program and raising the pressure on Israel, Iran’s sworn enemy, to take Ukraine’s side in the war.

The Ayatollah, by Graeme MacKay, c1980

The relationship between Russia and Iran has been developing for years. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia deployed his air force to Syria starting in 2015 to prevent the collapse of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime ally of Tehran. Russia and Iran worked in lock step militarily, with Russian warplanes providing cover for Iranian militiamen and Iranian proxy forces fighting on the ground.

Syria was one example of the effort by both to find ways to sap American strength and prestige wherever they could in the world, and Ukraine provides a similar opportunity on an even larger, more visible scale.

After its 1979 revolution, Iran formulated foreign policy around the slogan “Neither East nor West,” equally wary of the Soviet Union and the United States. Now, the Islamic Republic is choosing sides, analysts said, and images of Iran’s exploding drones accurately hitting their targets advertise it as a regional power to be taken seriously.

In Tehran, the spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry denied on Monday that his country was selling weapons to Russia, even as social media outlets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which developed the lumbering yet lethal drones, boasted about them.

“There is no doubt that the drones used by Russia’s military are Iranian,” said a post on Sepah Cyberi, a Telegram channel affiliated with the Guards, while the country’s cyberarmy chief, Ali Akbar Raefipour, gloated on Twitter that Iran’s Shahed drone was now “the most talked about weapon in the world.”

Iran does not want to highlight the weapons sales because Ukraine is generally more popular than Russia among ordinary Iranians, and the Islamic Republic casts itself as a defender of underdogs in world affairs, said Mahmoud Shoori, deputy director of the Institute of Iran and Eurasia Studies in Tehran and an expert on Iran-Russia relations.

But at the same time, “Iran also wants to show the world that it has a military superpower as an ally and it has the capacity to sell weapons to such a power,” he said in a telephone interview. “It shows the West’s policies of maximum pressure to isolate Iran have not worked.” (The New York Times) 

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

https://mackaycartoons.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022-1018-INT.mp4
Posted in: International Tagged: 2022-34, cleric, drones, ebrahim raisi, invasion, Iran, kamikaze, nternational, procreate, Russia, Ukraine, women

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

December 3, 2013 by Graeme MacKay

Tuesday, December 3, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Amazon PrimeAir drone deliveries coming soon, CEO Jeff Bezos says

Amazon.com Inc. is testing drones that it hopes will soon deliver packages to customers, company CEO Jeff Bezos says.

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Bezos said the small, unmanned aircraft could deliver packages that weigh up to 2.3 kilograms to homes or about 86 per cent of the items the company currently delivers. The drones could fly within 16 kilometres of the company’s distribution centres, covering a significant portion of the population in urban areas.

The aim would be half-hour delivery. The company hopes to deploy the drones within five years.

A video from the Seattle-based company showed a drone labelled “Amazon PrimeAir” taking a package from a distribution centre to a customer’s front yard.

“In urban areas, you could actually cover very significant portions of the population,” Bezos said. “It won’t work for everything — we’re not going to deliver kayaks or table saws this way. These are electric motors, so this is all electric. It’s very green. It’s better than driving trucks around.”

The drones would be autonomous, flying to programmed GPS co-ordinates.

“The hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say — look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighbourhood.”
Bezos said the drones couldn’t be put in place until 2015 because it would take that long to work out regulations with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. He said he optimistically hopes the drones could be delivering packages in four or five years.

“It will work and it will happen and it’s going to be a lot of fun,” he said.
The FAA currently forbids the use of commercial drones. That is expected to change in 2015 when its Drones Act, which was passed last year, will require commercial jets and drones to share the same air space. (Source: CBC News)

Posted in: Canada Tagged: business, commerce, cyber monday, delivery, drones, e-commerce, Editorial Cartoon, sales

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This website contains satirical commentaries of current events going back several decades. Some readers may not share this sense of humour nor the opinions expressed by the artist. To understand editorial cartoons it is important to understand their effectiveness as a counterweight to power. It is presumed readers approach satire with a broad minded foundation and healthy knowledge of objective facts of the subjects depicted.

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