'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
Speaking in Geneva ahead of the World Environment Day on Monday 5 June, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, John H. Knox, said “We should all be alarmed at the accelerating loss of biodiversity on which healthy ecosystems depend.”
03/06/2017
A FEW days ago, a not so well-known Palestinian woman received an unusual honor. An article of hers was published on top of the first page of the most respected newspaper on earth: New York Times.
Uri Avnery
The editors defined the writer, Diana Buttu, as: “a lawyer and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization”.
I knew Diana Buttu when she first appeared on the Palestinian scene, in 2000, at the beginning of the second intifada. She was born in Canada, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who tried hard to assimilate in their new homeland, and received a good Canadian education.
When the struggle in the occupied territories intensified, she returned to her parents’ homeland.
The Palestinian participants of the negotiations with Israel, which started after the Oslo agreement, were impressed by the young lawyer who spoke excellent English – something rare – and asked her to join the national endeavor.
Migrants with tired faces laden with the hardships of the hazardous journey from Central America to the United States rest in a shelter in Mexico, which many reach after being cheated by “coyotes” out of everything they had. Credit: Ximena Natera/ Pie de Página
Although Mexico is still the main source of migrants to the United States, a rise in the flow of migrants from Central America and South America has been seen in the last few decades, and more recently from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa.
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 3 June, 2017 – As ‘mental health’ issues gain more attention, sympathetic and otherwise, in a wide variety of contexts and countries around the world, the opportunity for inaccurate perceptions of what causes these issues, and how to treat them, are likewise expanded.
Robert J. Burrowes
So if you or someone you know is supposed to have a ‘mental illness’ such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), I would like to give you the opportunity to consider an explanation and a way forward that you are unlikely to have come across.
My first suggestion is that you ignore any label that you have been given. These labels are an inaccurate and unhelpful way of labeling the appropriate, diverse and complex emotional responses that a normal human being will have to emotionally disturbing events.
It is inaccurate because words such as these imply a ‘disorder’ that a normal individual should not have in response to emotionally challenging events in their life and it is unhelpful because the term suggests that many different individuals are having the same (dysfunctional) response.
