'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
By Amy Goodman* – Democracy Now!
New York–The winds of change are blowing across the globe. What triggers such change, and when it will strike, is something that no one can predict.
Map of global mobilisations.150 by Antonio Menendez
Last Jan. 18, a courageous young woman in Egypt took a dangerous step. Asmaa Mahfouz was 25 years old, part of the April 6 Youth Movement, with thousands of young people engaging online in debate on the future of their country.
By Badriya Khan
They are not many—just around 2,8 million, but they live on more than 1,564 km2, being the 19th largest and the most sparsely populated independent country on Earth. Nevertheless they have very little arable land. Their religion is Tibetan Buddhism and they have also had a great Empire, founded by Genghis Khan in 1206. They are the Mongols.
Image: Brücke-Osteuropa | Wikimedia Commons
For many years, Hollywood used to be nearly the only single part to show interest in them, producing more or less accurate films about their horses and a sort of a fearsome Genghis Khan. Now it is the turn of big business.
And all of a sudden they are now ‘news-able’ when the United Nations said about them on Oct. 21 this year that the recent economic growth in Mongolia “due to a boom in its mining sector” represents an opportunity to reduce poverty in the country, etc, etc. etc.
By Baher Kamal*
After weapons and drugs, human trafficking is the third most lucrative criminal business in the world – a 32-billion dollars global industry, which is estimated to be exploiting over 2.4 million people, two-thirds of them are women and children. Who dares to challenge such a huge business?
Thailand: Like slaves on an auction block waiting to be selected. Author: Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department** | Wikimedia Commons
Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, dared trying it more than a couple of years ago. She undertook a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe.
Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives.
Her shivery “The Price of Sex” is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who’ve been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 