'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
23 December 2015 – Looking back at the year 2015, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon summed it up in two words: “breakthrough and horror.”*
At a port in Greece, a young boy and his family join other refugees and migrants trying to board a bus that will transport them to the centre of Athens. UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis
26 December 2015
TWO WEEKS ago, Benedict Anderson died. Or, as we say in Hebrew, “went to his world”.
Uri Avnery
Anderson, an Irishman born in China, educated in England, fluent in several South Asian languages, had a large influence on my intellectual world.
I owe a lot to his most important book, “Imagined Communities”.
EACH OF us has a few books that formed and changed his or her world view.
In my early youth I read Oswald Spengler’s monumental “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” (The Decline of the West). It had a lasting effect on me.
Spengler, now nearly forgotten, believed that all the world’s history consists of a number of “cultures”, which resemble human beings: they are born, mature, grow old and die, within a time span of a thousand years.
**U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Netanyahu, Jerusalem, 23 July 2014 | U.S. Department of State | Wikimedia Commons: “This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.”
UNICEF’s humanitarian work began in the aftermath of World War II — and by the mid 1950’s millions of children were receiving aid. Seventy years later, refugee and migrants are entering Europe at levels not seen since World War II.
– The heavily criticized legal mechanism, known as ISDS, is an important tool for European companies to pressurize developing countries. This year Uganda joins the rank of developing nations asking themselves: “Why have we ever signed this?”
**Regional map of Uganda. | Author: User:(WT-shared) Burmesedays, UN Map of Uganda, UN Map of Tanzania | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. | Wikimedia Commons
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 