Urge for Promoting Iranian-Islamic Dress Styles

Translated by Katayoon Dashti

Iran should reach a status that foreign companies take inspirations from Iranian-Islamic garments and brands, said Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for Artistic Affairs Hamid Shahabadi during the gathering of policymaking council of Second Dress Style Festival.
The meeting was held at Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’ conference hall with participation of commander of moral security department of Law Enforcement Force, Brigadier Mohammad-Masoud Zahedian, Director General of Tehran Technical and Vocational Training Organization Hamidreza Khanpour, as well as representatives from IRIB, Interior Ministry, Ministry of Industries, Mines, and Commerce, and National Garment Association, Mehr News Agency wrote.
Shahabadi said the designs which will be presented during the Second Dress Style Festival should not be only a show. Rather, the festival should consider the infrastructural measures, he added. He recalled that satisfactory efforts were conducted during last festival which was held in November 2012.
“We pursued dress style issues in two phases. The first phase which lasted five years led to compiling bylaw and articles of association. While, the second phase lasted two years.” Administrative Taskforce of National Dress Style Foundation and related councils have so far been launched, he added.
Also, Hojjatoleslam Seyf Jamali, a strategic consultant, said the dress style issue is very complicated and has various political, economic and social aspects.
Meanwhile, administrative manager of National Dress Style Foundation said that the secretariat of the upcoming festival has been launched. The coordination has been made with various provinces, Hamid Qobadi said, estimating that five provinces would hold Dress Style Festival simultaneously with Tehran.
The technical and vocational training institutes have been involved in the festival for the first time, he added.
Close to 105 dress models in accordance with Islamic dress code have so far been mass produced, he said, adding this is a good event.
Speaking at the same gathering, director general of Tehran Technical-Vocational Training Department Hamidreza Khanpour said, “We have over 3,000 educational standards nationwide, of which 150 standards pertain to dress.”
There are over 400 specialized workshops across the country, he said, adding close to 10,000 trainees are trained by Technical-Vocational Training Departments annually.
“We seek to take part in the festival through holding a seminar and extensive information dissemination. Our new approach is education, production, marketing, and sale”.
In related news, Brigadier Zahedian said, “We have seen numerous ups and downs in the past 34 years in dress style sector. But, no certain style was offered to people regarding their garment and appearance in public places.”
Those, who appear with improper dress in public, ask question about what should they wear, he said.
“Good works were done in November fair. We hope that we can promote our culture as an Islamic country”.
At end, Shahabadi said Iranian-Islamic models should be presented at global markets.

Asia Air Pollution Chocking People

Air pollution in Beijing has been described as “apocalyptic” this week with people choking their way through murky streets, short of breath and their eyes stinging from toxic air. But Beijing is just one of hundreds of cities, largely in Asia, where poisonous air is now the fastest growing cause of death in urban populations.
In the past few months there have been acute air pollution incidents reported in Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Pakistan. In Tehran, the desperate authorities had to close all public offices, schools, universities and banks twice in the last two months; In Nepal the army has had to give up its cars and in Kabul it has been reported that there are now more deaths as a result of air and water pollution than from conflict, Guardian reported.
Statistics are unreliable, with few cities able to monitor accurately either the source or the level of the cocktail of pollutants emitted by traffic, ships, industry, brick kilns and domestic heating. But go to the hospitals and doctors will tell you that up to 80 percent of people admitted come with respiratory or other chronic diseases linked to air pollution.
Perhaps because there are no drugs available to counter air pollution, it has never been taken as seriously by governments as other diseases like HIV/AIDS or malaria, even though the World Health Organization estimates more than 2 million people worldwide die every year from bad air and that it is now among the top 10 killers in the world. But governments may have to act as new research shows it to be rapidly worsening.
The biggest study done so far, published one month ago in the Lancet suggested that, worldwide, a record 3.2 million people died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000. The annual Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report ranked air pollution for the first time in the world’s top 10 list of killer diseases, with 1.2 million deaths a year in east Asia and China, and 712,000 in south Asia, including India.
But while Beijing got the headlines this week, there is mounting evidence that air pollution in India is as bad, if not worse, than in China. A study conducted by satellite imagery last year reported that Indian megacities were seeing double digit increases in air pollution. From 2002 to 2010, said the paper, Bangalore saw the second highest increase in air-pollution levels in the world at 34 percent, with Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur and Ahmedabad not far behind. Improvements in car and fuel technology have been made since 2000 but these are nullified by the sheer increase in car numbers. Nearly 18m cars are expected to be sold this year alone in India.
The blame is variously leveled on the geography of cities, the inversion of temperatures especially in cold months which trap pollutants, the vastly increasing number of cars, power plants, forest fires and the boom in building construction. However, the Lancet study found that it was specifically the type of air pollution caused by car and truck exhaust that was doing the most health damage.
There is increasing evidence too that the air pollution now plaguing cities is because the fuel being burned by millions of cars and motorbikes is heavily contaminated by dealers who mix petrol and diesel with kerosene, waste industrial solvents and other additives to produce cheaper fuel. The result is a cocktail of poisonous emissions, many of which are not picked up by government monitoring stations and which are not filtered out by catalytic converters.
The scale of illegal fuel adulteration is unknown, but academic studies suggest it is rampant in poor countries like Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan, all of which depend on importing fuel from outside. One study in Nepal found that at least half the motorbikes in use had engines damaged by contaminated fuel.
But rich countries should not think their air is clean. A report by the European environment agency found that almost one third of Europe’s city dwellers are exposed to PM10 particulate concentrations above EU legal limits and 90-95 percent to concentrations of smaller and even more deadly PM2.5 particulates. If nothing is done to improve it, the EU expects to see 200,000 premature deaths a year in Europe by 2020 due to particle emissions alone.

China Pioneer in Watershed Protection Investment

China is the leading nation in terms of global investment in protecting natural watersheds, an assessment has found. The report’s authors said water insecurity was probably “the single biggest risk to the country’s continued economic growth,” BBC reported.
Globally, $8.17 billion (£5.07 billion) was spent in 2011 on projects to protect areas that provided drinking water and supplies, the assessment reported.
The review was produced by US-based NGO Forest Trends’ Ecosystems Marketplace. “Healthy watershed systems do a range of services for us for free so we usually take it for granted,” explained Genevieve Bennett, Forest Trends research analyst and the report’s lead author. “But the reality is that we depend upon it--there is no substitute for clean water supplies and there is not enough money in the world to replace all of these functions with technology.”
The assessment, State of Watershed Payments 2012, looked at initiatives that funded individuals or local communities to preserve or revive natural features, such as wetlands, streams and forests that can store and filter freshwater supplies.
During 2011, investment in 205 projects exceeded $8 billion, accounting for more than 12 percent of the $66 billion investment made in watershed projects since 1973, it reported.
Turning on Tap
The findings showed that China was the main beneficiary, with more than half of the projects--accounting for 91 percent of the 2011 investment--being located within its national boundaries.
Bennett said the continued year-on-year growth in the level of investment was a “pleasant surprise against a backdrop of an economic downturn in many parts of the world”.
“We went into this research a little worried that the level of investment would have fallen off but we found that investment does continue to grow,” she told BBC News. “China has obviously turned on the investment tap full blast and that was another pleasant surprise.”
She added that the nation had experienced “incredible economic growth over the past 20 years” but the expense of a lot of natural resources.

LatAm Nations Deal On Transportation

Latin America’s big cities should cooperate with each other in order to overcome shared challenges in transport issues, such as sustainability and a more human-centered approach to urban development, experts said.
“Challenges in the cities are very similar. Car use was favored and the cities’ growth suffered from planning deficiencies, and now they have to make the public transport sector a priority,” Bernardo Baranda, Latin America regional director for the US Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told Independent European Daily
Express.
“Cooperation is an interesting approach, because a lot can be learned from what other cities are doing. Nowadays projects are being taken up to give priority to public transportation, improving quality and giving users alternatives so that they leave their cars at home,” he said.
On Tuesday Jan. 15, ITDP and eight other international organizations presented the 2013 Sustainable Transport Award to the Mexico City Federal District, the country’s capital, which was represented by the city’s heads of Transport and Highways and of Environment, Rufino León and Tania Müller, respectively. Nine million people live in the Federal District, and in the metropolitan area, which spills over into the adjacent state of Mexico. The total population is 20.4 million, putting Mexico City in third place among global megacities, after Tokyo and Delhi, according to the United Nations.
The other four finalists for the award were the cities of Rosario, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Bremen, Germany; and Kiev, Ukraine. They had been selected from among nine candidates in eight countries.
In 2012 the cities of San Francisco, California in the United States and Medellín, Colombia shared the award, while in 2011 the winner was Guangzhou, China and in 2010, Ahmedabad, India.

Organic Farming Movement Growing Worldwide

Despite the growing worldwide demand for organic food, clothing and other products, the area of land certified as organic still makes up just 0.9 percent of global agricultural land, with 37 million hectares being farmed organically.
Organic farming delivers a wide range of benefits, including reduced human exposure to toxic chemicals, improved resilience of landscapes and greater profit margins for farmers, IPS wrote.
The countries with the most certified organic producers in 2010 were India (400,551 farmers), Uganda (188,625), and Mexico (128,826). The region that added the most organic farmland between 2009 and 2010 was Europe.
Overall, the amount of organically farmed land worldwide dropped by 0.1 percent between 2009 and 2010, due largely to a decrease in organic land in India and China. Still, organic farmland has grown more than threefold since 1999.
The modern organic farming movement emerged in the 1950s and 1960s largely as a reaction to consumer concerns about the rising use of agrochemicals. The period after World War II and through the 1950s is commonly known as the “golden age of pesticides”.
But as the health and ecological impacts of agrochemicals began to be understood, governments started to regulate their use, and consumers began demanding organically certified foods.
Compared with conventional farming methods, organic farming is much healthier for a farm’s entire ecosystem: it boosts on-farm biodiversity, protects nearby waterways from chemical pollution and helps soil retain water and nutrients, improving resilience to drought and other harsh weather patterns. It also reduces human exposure to chemicals or toxic residues, which have been linked to a variety of illnesses.

EU Hints at Insecticide Ban

The European Commission hinted that it could ban several insecticides, some made by German chemicals giant Bayer, after scientists found disturbing evidence of harm to bees.
The EU’s food safety agency had reported “disturbing conclusions on three types of insecticides,” a spokesman for EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg said, Rawstory.com reported.
Following the findings, the Commission would be writing to manufacturers Bayer, Syngenta and Cruiser OSR to seek their response by Jan. 25, the spokesman said, adding that the topic would be taken up again on Jan. 31.
In due course, the “Commission and (EU) member states will take the necessary measures,” the spokesman said, without specifying.
Earlier, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said its scientists had “identified a number of risks posed to bees by three neonicotinoid insecticides.
“A number of recent studies have suggested that exposure to neonicotinoids at sub-lethal doses can have significant negative effects on bee health and bee colonies,” it said.
Neonicotinoids attack the central nervous system of insects, causing paralysis and death, it added. Bees and other pollinating insects are hugely important for food production, especially of fruit, and “their protection is essential,” EFSA said.

Healthcare Costly

US middle-income households spent 51 percent more on healthcare in 2010 than a decade earlier, researchers said.