ecopolis

This year, World Water Day coincides with the International Year of Sanitation, challenging us to spur action on a crisis affecting more than one out of three people on the planet.

Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally. That adds up to an unconscionable 1.5 million young lives cut short by a cause we know well how to prevent.

Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll. Those who survive face diminished chances of living a healthy and productive existence. Children, especially girls, are forced to stay out of school, while hygiene-related diseases keep adults from engaging in productive work.

Leaders who adopted the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 envisioned halving the proportion of people living without access to basic sanitation by the year 2015 — but we are nowhere near on pace to achieve that Goal. Experts predict that, by 2015, 2.1 billion people will still lack basic sanitation. At the present rate, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach the target until 2076.

While there have been advances, progress is hampered by population growth, widespread poverty, insufficient investments to address the problem and the biggest culprit: a lack of political will.

With the right resolve, there are many steps that members of the international community can take. World Water Day offers a chance to spotlight these issues, but this year, let us go beyond raising awareness — let us press for action to make a measurable difference in people’s lives.

One of the word’s most famous and talented jazz pianists, Oscar Peterson, has died at the age of 82. He died due to kidney failure on December 23rd. In his career he recorded more than 200 albums and worked with the biggest names in jazz, from Dizzy Gillespie to Count Basie.

Peterson was born on August 15, 1925, the fourth of five children of a Canadian Pacific Railway porter who played piano. The family lived in Little Burgundy, a black enclave in Montreal, where Peterson’s elder sister, Daisy, gave her siblings their first piano lessons.

Musicians Teddy Wilson and Nat “King” Cole were among early influences. When Peterson was a teenager his father played him a recording of Art Tatum — the lightning-fast pianist to whom Peterson would later be compared — which intimidated him so much he stayed away from the piano for a month.

At 14, he began performing for radio and played in a school band that included trumpeter Maynard Ferguson.

His career on the rise, Peterson asked his father if he could drop out of school. The elder Peterson said he would not “let him leave high school to be a jazz piano player. You have to be the best, there is no second best.”

In 1953, Peterson formed the Oscar Peterson Trio, joining up with bassist Ray Brown, and then guitarist Herb Ellis. They became one of the hardest-working trios in jazz, touring the U.S. under Ganz’s management.

In the video an unusual trio, Oscar Peterson on piano, Ray Brown & Niels Pedersen both on double bass, perform “You Look Good To Me” at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1977.

In Africa’s rural areas, many poor families rely on their land to survive. But with such barren earth to farm and unreliable rains, they struggle to harvest enough food to stay healthy.

Through a FARM-Africa goat project, you can transform life for a poor community providing poor families with goats and training in how to care for them. Also give one member of the group Toggenburgs to breed with local goats, so the hardier offspring produce lots of nutritious milk. This can be drunk or sold to help pay for medicine and schoolbooks. Plus, the goats’ manure is a great fertiliser for the family’s crops.

Please buy from FARM-Africa Living PRESENTS
Chicken
Goat
Beehive
Camel

or from Growing PRESENTS
http://www.farmafricapresents.org.uk/buy/item/5

It is also possible to choose from an amazing range of quirky and memorable gifts which represent just some of the ways that your donation can be used to make a difference to the lives of poor African farmers.

See how it works here and how we use your donations here.

British artist Damien Hirst and Irish musician Bono U2 will host a Project RED auction of contemporary art donated by several artists such as Anish Kapoor, Matthew Barney, Georg Baselitz, Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn.

The Red Auction is expected to raise more than $40 million to support HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria programs in Africa.

More than 100 “red” pieces of art will be auctioned at Sotheby’s auction house in New York on 14th February 2008 – Saint Valentine’s Day – the traditional holiday on which lovers express their love for each other or donating to charity.

Love at first sight! — The pieces will be exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in New York from February 4. to Feb. 13. Proceeds will go to the United Nations Foundation to support Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria programs.

“For a relatively small amount of effort on each artist’s part, we can actually save many lives,” Hirst said.

Bono called the auction a “real moment in art history”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds “Do you love me?”

The Dalai Lama opened a 10-day visit to Italy on Thursday with few official meetings on his schedule. “No audience is planned”. Nobody received an official, written statement of a meeting. So Pope Benedict did not meet Dalai Lama. Neither Italian President or the Italian Foreign Minister.

Beijing’s communist government responded early in November by saying such a meeting would “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” and urged the Pontiff to take action showing he “is sincere in improving relations” .

The Dalai Lama’s recent meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President George W. Bush drew strong rebukes from Beijing, which claims he wants to split Tibet from China. The Dalai Lama insists he only seeks autonomy for Tibet, which China has occupied since 1951.

Among his activities in Milan are a ceremony for Nobel Peace Prize winners hosted by the Milan mayor. Meanwhile he met Giuseppe Piero Grillo, better known as Beppe Grillo (born July 21, 1948), an Italian comedian and blogger. His performances as much his posts are characterized by an realistic level of political satire.
On 26 July 2007 Grillo was permitted to speak to the members of the European Parliament in Brussels, where he drew attention to the dangerous, negative state of current Italian politics. He also promoted the so called V-Day (8 September 2007).

The V-Day, which was supported in more than 170 Italian cities as well as abroad, was organised by Grillo to persuade Italians to sign a petition calling for the introduction of a Bill of Popular Initiative to remove members of the Italian Parliament who have criminal convictions of any kind from their office. And gradually expands public awareness over the general situation.

Religious and political leader of the Tibetan people Dalai Lama’s is due in Rome next week. His favorite verse comes from eighth century Buddhist saint Shantideva

For as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.

Track

This is a video made in 1938 showing the Great yoga teacher demonstrating asana and pranyama. He was the teacher of BKS Iyengar and Sri K. Pattahbi Jois, founder the Astanga style of yoga. The film is so old that any claim to copyright has expired

The myth of Garibaldi and the bicentenary of his birth

In the bicentenary of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Genoa is commemorating Italy’s famous hero with a series of exhibitions and other initiatives.
For this unique occasion, the Palazzo Ducale, the Gallery of Modern Art (Nervi), the Wolfsoniana, the Museum of the Risorgimento and the Accademia Ligustica will be exhibiting a spectacular assembly of works, ranging from great nineteenth-century historical and genre paintings to Michelangelesque paintings in a symbolist vein, and from sculptures to propaganda iconography to reconstruct the myth of Garibaldi and the appeal of his epic story.

The works on display give an idea of the themes and images that ran through political culture in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and demonstrate how firmly the myth of Garibaldi was rooted in the common people.

From Lega to Guttuso, Palazzo Ducale, Appartamento del Doge

Bringing together works by various generations of artists who were alive and active during the second half of the nineteenth century – included are artists who belonged to the Macchiaioli movement from Tuscany, Lombard Romantics and also Verists from
Naples and Sicily – the exhibition aims to illustrate the Garibaldi myth in its various manifestations, looking back over the development of historical painting and so-called genre painting in relation to the popular epos of Garibaldi. The exhibition is divided
into twelve sections; it opens with the crucial period Garibaldi spent in Rome between 1848 and 1849, his flight to Venice and the death of Anita, going on to look at his later legendary exploits, and ending with his period of solitude on Caprera and his final
victorious expedition in aid of the French Republic.

From Rodin to D’Annunzio: a Monument to the Thousand at Quarto, Galleria d’Arte Moderna

Works by Italian and European artists who were active in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the first world war (including masters such as Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle, Ivan Mestrovic, Franz von Stück, Gaetano Previati and Leonardo Bistolfi) bear witness to the return to a Michelangelesque classicism that is interpreted in a symbolist vein which points towards the tastes of the younger generations.
The exhibition gives an idea of how, in the context of European symbolism, the characteristics and artistic legacy of Michelangelo were adopted to celebrate the myth of Garibaldi. The visitor to the exhibition is offered a compelling reconstruction of this
symbolism in the form of its leading figures. In particular, it gave inspiration to the sculptor Eugenio Baroni (Taranto 1880 – Genoa 1935) in his design for the monument celebrating Giuseppe Garibaldi and the departure of the Thousand from the rocks
of Quarto.
In addition to Baroni’s work, the exhibition also shows paintings, sculptures and graphic works by famous figures active in the figurative field at the turn of the century such as Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Adolfo De Carolis, Antonio Rizzi, Angelo Zanelli,
Adolfo Wildt, Hans Stolte Lerche, Libero Andreotti, Galileo Chini, Mario Rutelli, Domenico Rambelli, Plinio Nomellini, Hendrik Christian Andersen, EdoardoDe Albertis, Pietro Dodero, Giovanni Prini, and G.B. Salvatore Bassano.

Posters and Propaganda, Wolfsoniana

The exhibition puts on display a significant collection of posters, postcards, graphic material and memorabilia from public and private collections. More than twenty posters, some particularly large in size, illustrate how both the various themes surrounding Garibaldi and the man himself have been used for media and propaganda purposes: from Risorgimento hero to icon of early fascist
movimentism, from romantic and national-popular hero to point of reference for the Democratic Popular Front at the 1948 elections. Among the authors of the posters the following should be mentioned: Mario Borgoni, Leonetto
Cappiello, Aurelio Craffonara, Plinio Nomellini and Filippo Romoli.

Garibaldi’s Genoa, Museo del Risorgimento

Paintings, relics, scarves, flags, arms, original writings and newspapers serve here to show the role that Genoa played in the origin and development of the myth of Garibaldi both in the city itself and in the world at large. They once again reflect how
word of his exploits spread, as they captivated the interest of journalists of the day, for whom Garibaldi embodied a mythical image from the unrest in Uruguay onwards.
Genoa is the city Garibaldi left from and came back to after his journeys overseas, the place where he made preparations for the departure of the Thousand in 1860; and it is also the city which constructed and consolidated his image as a man who
was driven by a great passion for freedom, who had the capacity to involve and sway people and who was able to fight for strong ideals. Rounding out the image of the myth of Garibaldi are works from private and public collections (including those of Francesco Paolo Tronca and of the Spadolini Foundation).

The preparatory sketch for the equestrian statue of Garibaldi will be positioned so that the visitor examining it will at the same time also be able to look out on to the statue itself, which since 1893 has dominated the most prestigious square in the city. Archive material and vedute – paintings and engravings – illustrate the genesis of the monument and the evolution of the surrounding setting from the Piazza di San Domenico of medieval times to today’s Largo Pertini.

“Garibaldi. Il mito”
17 nov 2007 – 2 mar 2008

Palazzo Ducale
Genova

Considering that the use of the death penalty undermines human dignity, and convinced that a moratorium on the use of the death penalty contributes to the enhancement and progressive development of human rights, that there is no conclusive evidence of the death penalty’s deterrent value and that any miscarriage or failure of justice in the death penalty’s implementation is irreversible and irreparable, UN general assembly committee has passed a draft resolution calling for an end to the death penalty.

Moratorium on the use of the death penalty

Human rights questions, including alternative approaches for improving the effective enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms welcome the decisions taken by Albania, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Turkey, Tuvalu, Ukraine, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,Uruguay, Vanuatu and Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) to apply a moratorium on executions, followed in many cases by the abolition of the death penalty and calls upon all States that still maintain the death penalty to respect international standards that provide safeguards guaranteeing the protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty, in particular the minimum standards, as set out in the annex to Economic and Social Council resolution 1984/50 of 25 May 1984.

“This historic resolution is a major step torwards worldwide abolition of the death penalty,” said Irene Khan, Secretary-General of Amnesty International.

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General Assembly committee backs global moratorium against death penalty

Another point of view: Shaykh Muhammad S Adly regarding women being on camera in al-islam on youtubeislam.