Obituary: Sir John Hermon
The longest-serving chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during Northern Ireland's Troubles, Sir John Hermon, who has died aged 79, led the force through the 1980s - a decade of unrelenting terrorist violence. His time in the UK's toughest policing post was dominated by controversies over the supergrass system of informers, "shoot to kill" operations and the fury of loyalists denouncing the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.Protestations by Hermon that he was an impartial upholder of law and order did not prevent republicans and civil rights campaigners from portraying him as the embodiment of the establishment, selectively bending security rules. Unionist leaders turned on him following the Hillsborough Accord as they attempted to suborn the police service.But Hermon was a forthright defender of his officers, having been steeped in the constabulary's embattled culture since his earliest professional life. In the ranks, he was known simply as "Jack" or "JC".Born in Larne, County Antrim, and educated locally, Hermon trained and worked as an accountant for four years until he joined the RUC in 1950. In 1963 he became the first RUC officer to attend what is now the Police Staff College, Bramshill in Hampshire. On his return, promotion was rapid. He was appointed district inspector and, in 1967, deputy commandant of the RUC training station in Enniskillen.By 1976, he had risen to deputy chief constable. Attachment to Scotland Yard in 1979 was a further sign of approval and he became chief constable the following year. His era opened with a sharp escalation in the level of IRA violence as H-Block hunger strikes further polarised the divided province.Hermon had little love for politicians, whom he blamed for tearing society apart. That distrust dated back to a critical incident in 1964 when the Rev Ian Paisley inflamed opinion over the presence of an Irish tricolour flag in republican west Belfast. The ensuing riot embittered relations between the police and nationalist community.Perceived by critics as an abrasive disciplinarian, Hermon fell out at times with both the Northern Ireland police authority and the Police Federation, which passed a motion of no confidence in him after he upbraided them for discussing revival of the disbanded B Specials. He was knighted in 1982.His reform of the RUC, which transformed it into a more independent force, shorn of its worst sectarian sympathies, enabled it to resist the onslaught of loyalist violence against officers and their homes in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. That resilience protected the developing political process.But it was the row over police "shoot-to-kill" operations in County Armagh during 1982 and the subsequent inquiry by the deputy chief constable of Manchester, John Stalker, that overshadowed his period in office. The two senior policemen clashed repeatedly. Stalker later claimed that during their first meeting Hermon sketched out Stalker's family tree on the back of a cigarette packet, highlighting the Irish Catholic ancestry on his mother's side - some of whom Stalker himself did not know.The Stalker Affair, which fuelled allegations of official cover-ups and conspiracies, degenerated into a vendetta between the chief constable and the media. Despite efforts to dissuade him, Hermon privately pursued three legal actions to clear his name.In 1984, Stalker had been appointed to investigate the shooting by police of six men - five of them republican suspects. He had striven to obtain access to a secret MI5 tape recording of one of the shootings. But he was abruptly removed from the inquiry and suspended for supposedly consorting with criminals - only to be reinstated three months later.Hermon was said to have tossed Stalker's report across the room in fury when he read the document. Stalker later revealed that, for five months, Hermon had refused to allow him to send a report, recommending the prosecution of a number of officers, to the director of public prosecutions.But he did not believe Hermon had been entirely responsible for the obstructions. "I think the architects of my removal were on this side of the water," he told a court in 1995.Hermon's well-publicised views on the work of the murdered Belfast lawyer Patrick Finucane, shot dead by loyalists in 1989, added to his unpopularity with the civil rights lobby. The chief constable later insisted: "Pat Finucane was associated with the IRA and he used his position as a lawyer to act as a contact between suspects in custody and republicans on the outside."Hermon was ahead of his time in calling for the police to renounce their powers to adjudicate on parades during the annual marching season. In 1986, following violence in Portadown, he reported: "Unless parading organisations face the reality that population changes can result in areas once receptive becoming hostile, then the public order tasks of the RUC will become increasingly difficult."According to his autobiography, Holding the Line 1997, he left his bomb-proof office in east Belfast disillusioned. The appointment of his successor, Sir Hugh Annesley, commended as a team player, was seen as a reproach to his style of leadership.On retirement in June 1989, he became a consultant to Securicor. His first wife, Jean, had died from cancer, but he subsequently married Sylvia Paisley, a law lecturer at Queen's University. They had met after she wrote a paper criticising his refusal to allow women officers to carry firearms.In 2001, she was persuaded to stand as the Ulster Unionist Party candidate for North Down. She held the seat again in 2005, becoming the sole UUP representative at Westminster. Lady Hermon declined, however, to lead the party because her husband was suffering from Alzheimer's disease: she felt she could not "let him down in his hour of need". She survives her husband, as do two sons from their marriage, and a son and a daughter from Hermon's first marriage.Northern IrelandPoliceNorthern Irish politicsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
2008-11-08 02:21:40Natural Beauty Tip: Applying Your Makeup Correctly Can Make You Look Younger
Best Syndication News There are many different types of cosmetics out there that women...
2008-11-08 02:16:32Ask Hadley: Hadley Freeman on retro cool T-shirts and fashion storylines
I've recently noticed a lot of young women wearing T-shirts for bands that broke up before they were born. What's that aboutMalcolm Store, by emailBut don't you get it, Malcolm Where once listening to old bands...
2008-10-26 20:48:19Kids, curries, Kerala: the perfect recipe
It would be dark soon, we could tell, because the sun had dipped behind the far ridge of the absurdly picturesque valley, but there didn't seem to be any urgency to return to our bungalow. The tea country of the Western Ghats in southern India, the knuckle of mountains separating lush Kerala from the plains of Tamil Nadu, is tranquil to the point of caricature and the only danger lay in the eyes of our seven-year-old, Esme, who feared we might encounter more tea pickers. Earlier, walking up from the bungalow which had once belonged to the English manager of the vast Tallayar estate, the last of these to finish work had descended past us. Three women, Tamils wearing saris, had pinched Esme's cheeks so hard her smile had morphed into a grimace. Now the tea pickers had all reached their homes further down the valley, from where later in the dark we would hear Tamil film music drifting up. Instead, we were stopped by the recently installed manager of the estate, having first been alerted to his presence by the growl of his gleaming Enfield motorbike. Elephants, he said, roamed these hillsides; and yes, they could be very dangerous and yes, we'd best hurry back to the bungalow.Packing for this two-week adventure, we had not counted being savaged by wild pachyderms among the possible dangers. Instead, there had been questions about what would Sam and Esme eat and what sort of malaria pills should we take, or would they be simply overwhelmed by the country itself. Before Zoe and I met we had both travelled around India. The three weeks I'd spent in the south with a gang of teenage mates, rucksacks filled with filthy washing on our backs, had left me with the potentially foolhardy idea of wanting to instil the fascination I'd felt with this part of the world in two under-10s whose weltanschauung had hitherto been bound by Ryanair's flight routes.Kerala's history is intertwined with that of travellers seduced by its spectacular beauty. In Cochin, to which we flew via Sri Lanka, there is still - just about - one of the oldest Jewish diaspora communities in the world as well as India's oldest European church, St Francis, where the explorer Vasco da Gama was originally buried. Our own journey had seen Zoe pick up a bug on the flight, and the family's entrance into the country had been heralded by a fellow passenger announcing to the stewardesses, 'she is vomiting', with the sort of hard, percussive 'v' and elongated vowel sound that also announces India. So much for the children's welfare.But this was a holiday at which we were chucking the savings, and whereas last time it had been trains and buses, now we were met by our own car and driver, the heroic Rajesh, with whom we weaved calmly north for an hour-and-a-half to what we could see, in the warm light of morning, were the Athirapally Falls. This is a popular spot for local tourists, and the view from our adjoining bedrooms at our eco-friendly hotel of the Chalakudy River crashing down 80 feet was spectacular. The falls had also attracted a film crew shooting a Malayalam movie in the forest when Sam, Esme and I sweated past later in the heat, with a chorus line of extras and a troop of monkeys waiting in the shade. For the children, it immediately felt very different from the school playground on a Friday afternoon, and later, on a drive deeper into the forest, we saw deer and a giant red squirrel, but no elephants here either, despite the promised chance of a sighting.The deal had been that we would split the trip between wildlife, beach and culture and next morning, with Zoe recovered, we drove back to Cochin. The route was initially through lush countryside, with Rajesh pointing out the banana trees, tapioca, rubber trees and much more, as if this were a botany lesson. This is a fertile land for religion, too, and beside the temples and mosques, there were huge churches with gaudy paint jobs to enable them compete with their Hindu counterparts. Imposing mansions also studded the roadside, evidence of Kerala's growing prosperity.Long the most literate state in India, it is benefiting from workers at every level, from construction workers to medics, sending money home from newfound jobs in the Gulf. Tourism plays its part, too, and in Cochin the sort of boutique hotel that simply didn't exist in India twenty years ago - backpacker's budget or not -was awaiting us. Before dinner in the courtyard of the chic Malabar House, there was the inevitable visit to the city's famous Chinese fishing nets and then to a kathakali show. Genuine performances of this ancient form of dance-drama apparently last through the night, but even though this show was thankfully truncated and the protagonists looked spectacular in their lurid make-up, there was still the question of why the children should be subjected to it when I had suffered a similar show that had bored me close to tears 20 years ago. But it proved a surprise hit thanks to the woman who explained the action to the audience and could have passed for Les Dawson in drag; coincidentally, she also shared his comic timing.The cultural trail was leading us to Madurai across the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu, but to break the nine-hour drive we stopped for the night in tea country, 45 minutes on from the town of Munnar. En route, the children were entertained by the scenery but also by a CD of the Just William stories we'd brought with us to play on the car stereo; it turned out that the sound of Martin Jarvis recounting the adventures of William, Ginger, Douglas et al proved the most apposite soundtrack to our arrival at the Tallayar Estate bungalow - a perfect throwback to the Raj. Delphiniums and forget-me-nots prettified the garden and the strawberries were just coming into season; later, the cook asked the children to identify the veg patch cauliflower they fancied for dinner. We were the only guests, treated to vast bedrooms and chipped ceramic baths, and the cook and housekeeper were there at 4am to see us off.The early start wasn't in the itinerary however relentless it seemed, but the stoic Rajesh had been alarmed by news of a hartal - a strike - called to protest against rising fuel prices in Kerala. So we wound through the mountains as dawn crept up - privilege to the most spectacular views - in order to make the state border before angry picket lines could stop us; Rajesh was genuinely relieved when we made it down into the plains without incident. The ancient city of Madurai with its rubbish-strewn streets served as a sharp contrast to the more genteel charms of Cochin. But to visit its stellar attraction, the Meenakshi temple, we took rickshaws from the hotel and the children loved the mayhem of our race there. If ever any journey made a mockery of the demand that they put their seat belts on when in the car back home, this was it. The vast temple complex, with its 12 gopurams, beats an Anglican church hands down when it comes to child-friendliness, too: we could pad around barefoot, play hide and seek among the sculptures, visit the temple shops - and gain a keen sense of a religion practised in near-unbroken form for millennia. Sam said later that the temple was - and here he adopted the sort of formulation that would see Rajev tell us that from Madurai to our next destination it was 'near ... and also far' - both 'boring and ... interesting'. Serious praise.In Madurai we also visited a tailor, who kitted out both children in Indian clothes, which seemed like a further measure of their acclimatisation. The food, too, was proving a breeze - the idea of a curry provoked few fears, with biscuits and bananas coming to the rescue if there really wasn't anything they fancied. Only a ritual of our own cast a pall; advice on whether it was really necessary to take precautions against malaria in southern India was mixed, which meant that the children were bullied into wolfing down their bitter pills every evening before dinner. This, Esme maintains, was, cheek-pinchers included, 'the absolute worst thing about India'.From Madurai it was a scramble back to the coast, but the journey was broken by two nights at the Periyar Wildlife park, the biggest in south India. The first time I had visited here, if memory serves, there were few buildings and little in the way of hotels and it was in the adjacent town of Thekkady that my friends and I had been approached by a wiry fellow asking, 'sirs, would you be interested in seeing marijuana growing', followed by his sales pitch. Now it was shop owners inviting us in to look at artefacts from around the country - pashminas from Kashmir and such like. The advantage of Periyar remains that it is easy to visit - a vast artificial lake dominates the park and every hour three or four boats with Indian honeymooners and Western tourists sputter off across the water.But first we hired a guide to take us walking into the jungle, which meant more monkeys and a raccoon, as well as tiger scratch marks but no tigers and no elephants. Easy to imagine they were scared off by the occasional moan from a child still sweltering in the becalming, relative coolness of the thick interior. But it was still fantastically like The Jungle Book. Later, the boat ride proved restive, apart from the sudden frenzied gesticulation necessary when anyone thought they had spotted a big beast on the shore. Sadly, they were only deer.Never mind, because next day, finally there were elephants, tame ones that we rode around a patch of jungle in Thekkady. The Madurai rickshaw race was recreated at ambling pace - the danger now in the possibility of Zoe panicking and falling off. This was, Esme later said, 'the best thing we did in India'.From there, we bumped down towards the sea, entering the part of Kerala famous for its luscious backwaters, where the distinction between land and water threatens to disappear. First we stopped for two nights at an absurdly luxurious hotel called Privacy on the shores of the vast Lake Vembanad and then hit a beach resort.This stretch of the frenzied journey served as a reward for everyone - lazing by the swimming pool, cycling through country lanes, being buffeted by the warm waves of the Arabian Sea, drifting through backwaters in a modified canoe. By this stage, for the adults, there was little of the sense of adventure that had characterised our earlier trips to India, though we continued to marvel at recent developments in the country that made our lives easier now - such as functioning cash points. But every day brought something new to Sam and Esme.The only shame was that we had to part company with Rajesh who, like everyone we met, could not have been nicer to the children. Sam gashed his foot in the pool at Privacy but by then Zoe and I were beyond worrying. The junior contingent started moaning, but only that we absolutely had to return to Kerala at the earliest possible opportunity.EssentialsCaspar Llewellyn Smith travelled with Transindus 020 8566 2729; transindus.com. A 16-day family trip staying at the Rainforests, Malabar House, Tallayar Estate, Taj Garden Retreat, Spice Village, Privacy and Marari Beach, costs from £2,298 per adult, and £2,048 per child under 12, including flights, sightseeing tours, all transport, and breakfasts. A shorter, nine-day escorted group tour 'Kerala in Style' costs from £1,629 per adult, £1,498 per child. Caspar and family flew with Sri Lankan Airlines 020 8538 2000; srilankan.lk.IndiaSri LankaFamily holidaysguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
2008-10-26 20:43:19Aida Edemariam learns how to swing
Every fortnight for the past five months, I have found myself standing in a living room in south London, quacking like an angry duck, meowing like a cat, whining like a dog, baaing like a sheep, and nagging like a witch. I've pretended I'm Carmen Miranda, a Smurf and a bored robot. I've wailed like a baby while pointing my chin up at the ceiling and holding my tongue between thumb and forefinger. I've beaten my chest and made creaking-door sounds. When Laura Zakian asks me, "Have we done 'going up sniffy mother-in-law, going down twang'" the answer is yes.I met Zakian a year ago when, somewhat ill-advisedly, I auditioned for a jazz-singing course. I liked her because she was bossy and forthright. Turns out she's also a pretty good teacher. She had to be: my voice is not exactly a jazz voice. I'm a soprano, for starters, and a mixture of requiems, evensong and a term singing choral music in French and German at university has produced a voice that's high, clear and polite. My Miss Otis Regrets came out as if I'd suddenly become a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. "It's terribly smart," said Zakian, amused. Part of jazz's impact comes from the sense of being directly spoken to, though that, as Zakian puts it, "doesn't mean speaking it", but rather using elements more associated with your speaking voice. It turns out I had no "speech quality" at all. Any idea that I could make the transition from choirgirl to jazz singer in six weeks was dispelled in that first lesson. We would have to start from scratch, entirely retooling my vocal chords. There are, say laryngologists, two modes for the voice. The first is thick-fold, or chest voice: the voice that most of us speak in, where the vocal chords are relaxed and thick, producing a richer sound, up to what is called the first passagio, the note at which they start to stretch and thin. For women, this is usually at the D flat above middle C. The second mode is called, unsurprisingly, thin-fold. "That's fine if you're doing classical singing," says Zakian. But in pop and jazz, the idea is to get a more mixed sound over the passagio, blending it so that there is no break, while staying in speech quality. Because I'm used to the upper register, I simply don't have the vocal musculature required to take thick-fold higher. My vocal chords just flop, making a sound like a teenage boy's voice cracking. It feels like an elastic band twanging in my throat. Singing takes all of you. That's what makes it so joyful - and so exasperating. The lessons prove incredibly physical, all about pelvic floors, hormonal cycles, tongues, spines and breath. You can sound different depending on how you stand, or how you tilt your head. And the voice is a barometer of psychological weather: tension is obvious; happiness lifts a voice; depression can take it away altogether. Self-consciousness strangles it, so you have to be vulnerable, relaxed - but in control. It's a tricky balance. As for training the voice, I quickly learned that musical comprehension happens on various levels: intellectual, which is straightforward enough; and physical, which is a whole other thing, achieved through practice and a kind of unconscious coaxing. Will a delicate muscle to work and the chances are it will promptly disobey. Hence my introduction to what Zakian calls "the department of funny noises", designed to improve flexibility and strength, and develop speech quality. It's like doing press-ups: we're training muscles, even if we can't see or feel them much. In our first lesson, Zakian said I "might see a difference in three months - your voice won't change if you don't practise on a daily basis". Daily practice combined with a full-time job is a bit of a pipe dream for me, though. Some weeks I manage three hour-long sessions, others none at all. It feels frustrating and pointless. But then one day my voice just feels different, as though all the gubbins in my throat have suddenly got the point.Another absolute fundamental in jazz, of course, is swing. While it is possible to say, as Zakian does, that "the underlying feel is one of triplets with the first two crotchets tied and the third accented a little to give you swing quavers", the fact is that there is a kind of alchemy involved, an unconscious understanding you only really get from listening to jazz all your life. Though she doesn't spell it out, I am not, it is fair to say, her most apt pupil. I didn't grow up listening to jazz and never thought about rhythm much, even in 10 years of piano lessons; trying to understand how someone might "push the quavers a lot, or sit back on them" defeats me. The fact that a professional jazz singer is expected to name a groove for the band, who will then launch into, say, a cut-time funk version of Love For Sale, I find incomprehensible. But it's also true that when I stop listening so hard, and over-thinking, and beating myself up because I've counted wrong, and just feel, things go a lot better. And singing songs like Shiny Stockings, by Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Foster, make you swing despite yourself.I am a great deal happier with phrasing and melodic improvisation. Zakian's favourite jazz singer is Carmen McRae, because of the way she privileges delivering the story. "The words are the most important thing," says Zakian, "because you're a singer, and therefore a songsmith, and therefore a wordsmith. Even if you haven't written them yourself, you're interpreting the meaning of them." The composer is paramount in most classical singing: you can interpret mood and feeling, but you have to follow, accurately, both the melody and the tempo written on the page. In jazz, what's on the page is the starting point. It's a performer's art, and the performance changes every time. Which sounds brilliant - licence to do whatever you like - but, of course, it's not quite that simple. You have to learn a language, of what works and what doesn't, and then you have to make it second nature. "It's like any language," says Zakian. "You choose which words to use, but you're not going to go through a sentence saying, 'Well, I've used a preposition and a verb followed by a conjunction, so now I'll use a noun.' You have to have the vocabulary in your head."And so we learn octave displacement, in which you sing a note at the octave below or above the one written a favourite Ella Fitzgerald trick; passing notes, in which you touch on notes between two written notes "typically jazz - they give a bit more rhythmic agitation"; and melisma, in which you take a syllable and bend it through various notes before proceeding you have to be careful with this, or it can go a bit Mariah Carey. We try inverting the melodic line, a bit of anticipation, a bit of delay, a bit of silence, a bit of a lick a short melodic motif. For a little inspiration, I go to see Claire Martin and Anita Wardell at Ronnie Scott's, and the amazing Christine Tobin at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho, appreciating their nifty ways with chromatics. We try a bit of that, too, climbing up through semi-tones to see where I end up. Doing too much of it makes me sound like a drunk warbling in a shower, but used sparingly, it makes for lovely light and shade.Finally, it's time to put it all together, in a rendition of Rodgers and Hart's My Funny Valentine, which seems straightforward enough - except that putting it all together, and making it sound natural and easy, is a bit like rubbing your stomach, patting your head, tap-dancing, doing yoga and having an intimate conversation, all at the same time. At least I don't have to think too much about swing. My Funny Valentine has been performed in many ways, from Sinatra's croon, to Fitzgerald's lush version with violins, to Sarah Vaughan's exploration of most of her four octaves, but no one really messes much with the tempo.Everything else about it is hard enough, though. I've discovered a pleasingly resonant sound in my bottom register I can now sing a low G, too, but this makes tackling the higher phrases without flipping into an operatic vibrato far more difficult. I've been practising in the key Ella sings it in, G minor, but Zakian moves me up to an A minor, which denies me some nice low notes, but makes it all sound much more integrated. Once I get over my attachment to how the song "ought" to be and make my first forays into improvisation, playing with the melodic line turns out to be a lot of fun. We decide on a Chet Baker approach, slow and fragile, then throw in octave displacements, and an inversion or two. I try a bit of chromaticism, sliding into "unphotographable" like a snowball descending a hillside - and encountering a tree. I'm inordinately pleased, if a bit baffled, when Zakian says: "That's nice! Because you're getting the major 7 against the minor 7. That's really nice!" But every time you think you're getting somewhere, something pops up to remind you just how far you have to go. Singing with a pianist, for example. Zakian explains: "Because you can sing anything you like, within reason, melodically and rhythmically, if the pianist plays the melodic line for you, that's going to constrain you." So the pianist Chris Lee improvises away, while I have to rely "on being able to hear the chord changes, being able to feel where the beat is". It's like being sent out into a busy street blindfolded. But you just have to calm down, breathe, and listen, listen, listen. The first time I get it - when I start in the right place and end in the right place, nothing more - it feels amazing. Then, when I manage to sing with the piano, and improvise, and mostly stay in speech quality, well, it might not seem so to anyone else, but it feels to me as if I'm beginning to make music.Laura Zakian's album About Love is out on December 1.Jazzguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
2008-10-26 20:41:19A Report from the Field: Gauging the Impact of Taliban Suicide Bombing
06/01/2007 - By Brian Glyn Williams from Terrorism Monitor, May 24 - In the aftermath of the toppling of the Taliban, Kabul, which has tremendous significance as a symbol of authority for those who aspire to rule Afghanistan...
2008-10-26 12:25:25How to Shower, Men vs Women
It works. I swear.Shared by : JayVideoOn: Thursday, September 20, 2007Views: 182874Tags:  girl  works  soap  women  wet  shower  swear  Men
2008-10-24 11:00:45Saudi Arabia's First Female CFO
Al Kuwaiz, 44, is a rising star in country where only 6 percent of women work.
2008-10-19 03:00:00Smarter screening methods could halve bowel cancer
INT15International/Health/ScienceSmarter screening methods could halve bowel cancerSydney, Oct 15 IANS Modifying the approach to genetic screening for cancers could halve deaths caused by a form of bowel cancer that is inherited, according to a new study. John Hopper - an Australia Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council -said current cancer genetic screening programmes are highly focussed on breast cancer and typically based on family history alone. But studies in Britain and Australia have now shown that most of the women who have been tested had a low chance of carrying a faulty gene which causes cancer, according to a press release of Melbourne University. Instead, he says, genetic screening should focus more on testing the tumours of young people who develop cancers to determine if they are caused by an inherited genetic fault which might be shared by other family members. "If we redirect the emphasis of our genetic screening programmes to focus more on people who already have cancer we can make a really big difference," he said. "We can work with patients to help prevent them developing new cancers, or at least detect them at an early stage, and we can arm their families with the knowledge to help save lives." Hopper said that in the case of bowel cancer, deaths caused by an inherited form of the disease could effectively be halved if the tumours of early-onset cancer sufferers were routinely tested for signs of an inherited genetic cause. "We now have evidence from studies carried out in Australia and elsewhere that show how to do this in the most cost-effective manner," he said. "Relatives of the patient could, if they wished, then also be tested for the same genetic fault. "Those who were found to be carriers could then receive regular bowel screenings to detect early signs of any cancers and greatly reduce their chance of dying from the disease."--Indo-Asian News Service St/jg343 Words15101031
2008-10-15 01:00:00Biodiversity losses are irreparable: world environment body
NAT83National/EnvironmentBiodiversity losses are irreparable: world environment bodyLondon, Oct 14 IANS The International Union for Conservation of Nature's IUCN World Conservation Congress, which concluded in Barcelona Tuesday, has underlined that the cost of biodiversity losses are not only greater than those of the current financial problems in the global markets, but in many cases, they are irreparable, said a statement. "We have made substantial decisions here in Barcelona. We're showing how saving nature must be an integral part of the solution for any world crisis," said Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN director general."The clear message coming out of this meeting is that biodiversity underpins the well-being of human societies and their economies. But conservation can only succeed if we attack the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, and action is taken at the same time to reduce the impacts of that loss," Marton-Lefèvre added. Bio-fuels were a major focus as members of the world's oldest conservation organisation called on the governments to regulate and manage bio-fuels to limit their potential impacts on people and nature. A call was also made to develop guidelines and improve standards used when considering bio-fuels projects."The tide is turning in our favour, we have the scientific knowledge and we have the governmental willpower to put the solutions in place," said IUCN's new president Ashok Khosla. "IUCN's new programme means we can face the future with confidence."The IUCN programme 2009-12 provides the framework for planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating the conservation work undertaken by the commissions and the secretariat for members. "We will use IUCN's knowledge and networks to influence decision-makers to secure a future for nature and better integrate biodiversity concerns into policies and practices of climate change, energy, development, human security, markets and trade," said Marton-Lefèvre.After a debate on the issue of IUCN's involvement with the private sector, the global environmental body's members agreed to support carefully thought out engagement with business. The rights of vulnerable and indigenous communities received high priority as IUCN's members called on governments to take into account human rights implications, in all conservation-related activities. The congress saw the beginning of an ethical framework to guide conservation activities, where poverty reduction, rights-based approaches and "Do No Harm" principles can be applied to help redefine our relation with nature. The global body also sent a clear message to the UN's Climate Change Summit that will take place in Poland in December. IUCN is demanding more specific goals in line with the Bali Plan of Action - calling for a 50 to 85 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 and keeping rises in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius - and actions on biodiversity, ecosystem services and livelihoods protection.Over 8,000 specialists from the conservation community, governments, NGOs, academia, private sector, women and indigenous groups gathered in Barcelona for the 10-day conference to discuss the most pressing issues. --Indo-Asian News Servicejk/rd/dg518 Words14102038
2008-10-14 13:03:16
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