'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
The autumn sun lights the classroom in Ternopil, Western Ukraine, where children laugh as Mr. Possum asks 11-year-old Sasha to deliver a package to his nephew in another country. Sasha hesitates, while her classmates give her advice: some suggest that she should help a stranger, others believe it’s risky.
Liza and Her Friends Travelling the World is a board game developed by IOM to help children and young people become aware of human trafficking. Photo: Studii Rozvytku
It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.
Edward Curtin
The “Deep State” has been redefined as career bureaucrats doing their patriotic duty.
It was two years ago, early in the Trump administration, when The New Yorker and Salon, among many others, were asserting in no uncertain terms that there was no deep state in the United States, and so Trump had nothing to fear from that quarter since it was a figment of his paranoia.
Kit Knightly, writing in the Off-Guardian, brilliantly demolished this spurious propaganda at the time in a must read reminder of how tricksters play their games.
On 26 Oct, the New York Times headlined “Keep the Oil’: Trump Revives Charged Slogan for New Syria Troop Mission” and opened by saying that “in recent days, Mr. Trump has settled on Syria’s oil reserves as a new rationale for appearing to reverse course and deploy hundreds of additional troops to the war-ravaged country.”
– Central America is an impoverished region rife with gang violence and human trafficking – the third largest crime industry in the world – as a major source of migrants heading towards the United States.
An older woman panhandles on a street in San Salvador. Criminal trafficking groups take advantage of vulnerable people, such as the destitute, to force them to beg. But in Central America, 80 percent of the victims of trafficking are women and girls, for purposes of sexual exploitation. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
UN agencies on Friday [8 November 2019] highlighted the dire needs of thousands of unaccompanied and separated children who have arrived in Italy as refugees, lacking the proper support to transition through to adulthood. *
Between 2014 and 2018, around 60,000 of them arrived in Italy by sea, 90 per cent of whom were between the ages of 15 and 17, according to a new report issued by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
(Greenpeace International)* — It is not news that the Brazilian government has been failing to protect Indigenous lands and Indigenous rights. But due to ever-increasing invasion of their territories by land grabbers, loggers and even drug traffickers, the Indigenous Peoples from several groups in the North and Northeast regions of Brazil decided to take the matter into their own hands.
Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a leader of the Guajajara Indigenous group was ambushed and killed by illegal loggers who invaded his land in Brazil. © Midia Ninja | Photo posted here from Greenpeace International.
For the 28th consecutive year, the UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution calling for an end to the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States against Cuba. *
Over 8,200 migrants making the dangerous journey to Europe have been returned instead to Libya where they languish in detention centres..
Photo from IOM.
5 November 2919 (IOM)* — “My parents were both killed years ago. My brother can barely provide for his children. I am a man now, and I have to fight for my survival,” said 18-year old Abdessamad.
Libya remains entangled in a “cycle of violence, atrocities and impunity”, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told the UN Security Council on Wednesday [6 November 2019], nearly a decade since the Court began its work in the country *
