Fears raised as 'one third' of China's Great Wall disappears

(CNN)It was originally built to defend an empire, but now parts of the Great Wall of China are crumbling so badly they need someone to leap to their defense.

About 2,000 kilometers, or 30%, of the ancient fortification built in the Ming Dynasty era has disappeared due to natural erosion and human damage, according to the Beijing Times.

And the situation could worsen, experts are warning, as not enough is being done to preserve what remains.

"It's a great pity to witness the Great Wall in such devastated situation," Mei Jingtian, a volunteer who has worked for three decades to safeguard the structure and has founded of the Great Wall Protection Association, tells CNN.

About 8,000 kilometers of the structure dates from the Ming period between the 14th and 17th centuries and is considered by some to be the original Great Wall.

Wild Great Wall

Of this, 2,000 kilometers is made up of naturally occurring earthworks -- and so only 6,000 kilometers of actual Ming dynasty wall was ever built.

Stretches built in other eras make up an overall length estimated at up to 21,000 kilometers.

Many visitors to China associate the Great Wall with an extensively restored stretch of Ming era wall at Badaling near Beijing, but this is far from typical of most of the structure.

According to a 2014 survey done by the Great Wall of China Society, only about 8.2% of the Great Wall is in good condition, with 74.1% classified as poorly preserved.

"The Great Wall is a vast heritage site -- over 20,000 kilometers -- hence increasing the difficulty in preservation and restoration," Dong Yaohui, deputy director of the Great Wall of China Society, tells CNN.

"Reliance on a very small amount of manpower by the local heritage departments is not enough to guard and protect the site."

A recent surge in interest from tourists in visiting unexploited sections, known as the "Wild Great Wall," has accelerated its deterioration, according to the report.

Graffiti and theft have also taken their toll.

"Local residents in some sections sell bricks that have historic engravings on them," says Dong.

Stiffer penalties

Dong says to effectively cover the most endangered stretches of the wall, local governments should provide subsidies and education to encourage local residents and farmers to get involved in its protection.

Increased penalties for causing damage are also needed, he adds.

"For example, several weeks ago, part of the Great Wall in Ningxia was bulldozed by local government departments for agricultural development. The people responsible received only a verbal warning but no severe punishment."

Mei adds that local people should also be recruited to ensure tourists respect the structure.

"Such activities should be carried on for future generations," he adds.

Anna Hsieh also contributed to this report.

India
India yoga: PM Narendra Modi leads thousands in celebration









Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprised participants by joining in with the yoga exercises

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has led thousands in a mass yoga programme in the capital, Delhi, on the first ever International Yoga Day.

Mr Modi did stretches, bends and breathing exercises with 35,000 school children, bureaucrats and soldiers.

Security was tight in the city with thousands of police and paramilitary deployed for Sunday morning's event.

Millions of others are expected to do yoga at similar events planned in hundreds of Indian cities and towns.

Mr Modi, a yoga enthusiast who says he practises the ancient Indian art daily, lobbied the United Nations to declare 21 June International Yoga Day.

Thousands of colourful mats were laid out on Rajpath - King's Avenue - where the main event was held.

Officials had earlier said the prime minister will attend the event and address the gathering, but not do yoga.

But Mr Modi surprised participants by joining in with the exercises.
On glacier and at sea

Authorities said 35,000 people attended the 35-minute yoga session on Rajpath, aimed at setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest yoga class at a single venue.

Guinness officials said they would announce the results in a few hours.
Participants arrived early in the morning for the session on Rajpath in Delhi
Indian army soldiers are also taking part in the yoga day celebrations

Yoga was also being performed on the Siachen glacier and the high seas, the defence ministry said.

The day is also being celebrated around the world and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj says "tens of millions" will do yoga on Sunday.
Yoga enthusiasts have been practising for months before the event

Ms Swaraj herself will be in New York where she will attend the celebrations with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. In Times Square, 30,000 people are expected to do yoga.

But the day, being billed as one to promote "harmony and peace", has hit a controversial note with some Muslim organisations saying yoga is essentially a Hindu religious practice and is against Islam.

Many others say Mr Modi's Hindu nationalist government has an agenda in promoting the ancient Indian discipline.

However, the authorities deny the charge - they say participation in the yoga day is not mandatory and reports that Muslims are opposed to yoga are exaggerated.
International Yoga Day in numbers:

35,000 officials, soldiers and students attend the main event on Rajpath in Delhi, including PM Narendra Modi
300m rupees ($4.67m; £2.97m): Cost of Delhi event
650 of India's 676 districts participating
Of the 193 UN member countries, celebrations will be held in 192 countries - the exception is Yemen, because of the conflict there
Events being held in 251 cities in six continents
30,000 people to perform yoga in Times Square in New York

The military strategy behind IS conquests

By Bill Law Middle East analyst

• 16 June 2015
• From the section Middle East

Islamic State pursues a doctrine of holding on to territory and expanding 

 

A year on from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's declaration of a caliphate, Islamic State (IS) remains a powerful battlefield force, despite thousands of air strikes launched against it by the United States and its allies.

The stated aim of the aerial campaign was, in the words of US President Barack Obama, to "degrade and ultimately destroy" the Islamic State. However, if anything IS has shown surprising resilience and emerged more battle-hardened.
An analysis of their military strategy helps to explain why. At its core is the concept of "Remaining and Expanding", enunciated in the group's propaganda magazine Dabiq in November 2014.
Putting theory into practice, IS has remained in its putative capital Raqqa in Syria and in Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. And just last month it expanded, seizing Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Anbar province, and the strategic Syrian town of Palmyra.

Three rings

The ultimate aim of Islamic State is global domination.
Toward that end it has divided the world into what the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank, notes are "three geographic rings: the Interior Ring in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria), the Near Abroad in the wider Middle East and North Africa, and the Far Abroad in Europe, Asia and the United States."

Each ring has three military strategies attached to it - conventional warfare, guerrilla warfare, and terror attacks.
All three have been used to good effect in the Interior Ring.
In the Near Abroad, the impact of conventional and guerrilla war by IS affiliates is being felt, with numerous attacks on the military and police in Egypt's Sinai and the seizure of several towns in Libya, including the former Gaddafi stronghold of Sirte.
Meanwhile, so-called "lone wolves" have brought terror tactics to the Far Abroad, with IS taking credit for attacks in Australia, the US and Canada.

'Belt Strategy'

In Iraq and Syria, tactics such as the use of Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDS), essentially suicide bombs on wheels, many of them US-built Humvees captured from fleeing Iraqi forces, have proved highly successful battlefield weapons.
Added to this are the droves of individual suicide bombers deployed both when attacking and when under attack.

Islamic State has used seized Humvees packed with explosives to carry out suicide bombings

Smaller urban areas are overrun using a "pinch manoeuvre" with VBIEDS attacking from two sides, followed by jihadists wearing suicide vests and then by a wave of lightly armed and highly mobile vehicles and foot soldiers.
Larger cities are taken by a combination of infiltration, particularly into disenfranchised Sunni communities in Iraq and through what the ISW study calls the Belt Strategy: "A way to organise a battle plan around a principle city using dispersed units, informal tactics and freedom of manoeuvre to compromise the main defences of a conventional enemy."
In this strategy first towns and villages surrounding large urban centres are taken, closing roads, and creating a belt of encirclement. The belt is tightened as IS draws closer and begins to take control of the suburbs.

Diversion tactics

IS uses the huge desert regions of both Syria and Iraq to its advantage, withdrawing into them and emerging from them almost at will, aided by a high degree of mobility and an organisational efficiency that keeps its soldiers in the field well supplied with both ammunition and water.
And although the allied air attacks have disrupted large scale desert movement of troops and vehicles, IS has responded by breaking its forces into smaller, less detectable units.

A relatively small number of IS fighters have stopped Iraqi forces retaking Baiji oil refinery

The deserts are also useful in drawing overstretched government soldiers into committing large numbers of troops in what amounts to a feint by IS.
Thus, a relatively small number of jihadists can occupy a much larger force while their fellow fighters are attacking a strategic town, army base or other key installation such as a dam or oil refinery.
Against that backdrop, the defence of the Syrian town of Kobane and the retaking of Tikrit in Iraq remain modest battlefield achievements.
For as the world is only now beginning to acknowledge, IS is a formidable, highly motivated and disciplined fighting force. More than that it is an organisation with a well thought out, systematically structured and well proven battlefield strategy.
Compare that to President Obama's recent admission that, after one year of war "we do not yet have a strategy to defeat ISIS [Islamic State]" and the full weight of the challenge ahead becomes ominous indeed.
Bill Law is a Middle East analyst and a specialist in Gulf affairs. Follow him @BillLaw49

Inlay Lake inscribed as Myanmar’s first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve

By 

Mizzima

On Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Wild ducks take flight from the surface of Inlay Lake, Nyaungshwe Township, Taunggyi, Shan Sate, Myanmar, 08 December 2014. EPA/NYEIN CHAN NAING

Inlay Lake has been inscribed as the first Biosphere Reserve of Myanmar at the 27th Session of the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) International Coordinating Council (ICC) meetings at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 9 June according to a media report on the UNESCO website on 10 June.

Inlay Lake has now joined the World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) under the UNESCO MAB Programme, established in 1971 to safeguard natural and managed ecosystems, and promote innovative approaches to economic development that are socially and culturally appropriate, and environmentally sustainable.

The WNBR, counting over 631 biosphere reserves in 119 countries all over the world, is one of the main international tools to develop and implement sustainable development approaches in a wide variety of contexts. It includes a wide range of locations such as Cambodia’s lake Tonle Sap, the Mare aux Hippopotames in Burkina Faso, the wetlands of Pantanal in Brazil and the Canary Island of Fuerteventura (Spain).

UNESCO has been providing technical support to the Government of Myanmar, working in close collaboration with the Ministry of Environmental Conservation and Forestry (MoECAF) Myanmar and UNDP, with generous support from the Government of Norway, to designate Inlay lake region as the first biosphere reserve of Myanmar. Senior officials from MoECAF represented Myanmar at the 27th Session of the MAB ICC meetings in Paris, where a total of 26 proposals, submitted by 19 countries, for the inscription of new Reserves are being discussed.

The nomination of Inlay Lake region has received wide support and endorsement from the Union Government, Shan State Government, local communities at Inlay Lake, non-governmental organizations, University representatives, Youth groups, and the private sector who have all contributed to the nomination efforts.

The Inlay Lake biosphere reserve is situated in Taunggyi District, Southern Shan State in Myanmar and covers a total area of 489,721 hectares. The wetland ecosystem of this freshwater lake is home to 267 species of birds, out of which 82 are wetland birds, 43 species of freshwater fishes, otters, and turtles. Diverse flora and fauna species are recorded and the lake is reported to be the nesting place for the globally endangered Sarus crane (Grus antigone).

In addition to its ecological importance, Inlay Lake is also unique for the way the local inhabitants have adapted their lifestyle to their environment. Farmers from one of the dominant ethnic groups in the region, the Inthas, practice floating island agriculture, locally called ‘Yechan”. Inlay Lake and its watershed provides several ecosystem services on which local people depend, including clean air, clean water, a cooler climate, fish stocks and other resources.

As Biosphere Reserves are experimental sites which aim to reconcile biodiversity and sustainable resource utilization, by promoting local solutions to global challenges, the designation of Inlay Lake region as the first Biosphere Reserve of Myanmar will further encourage and enhance environmental conservation initiatives to safeguard biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods development in the region.

- See more at: http://www.mizzima.com/development-news/inlay-lake-inscribed-myanmar%E2%80%99s-first-unesco-biosphere-reserve#sthash.TQ40NgMJ.dpuf

How two men survived a prison where 12,000 were killed

By Kirstie Brewer Phnom Penh

• 11 June 2015

Tuol Sleng is Cambodia's most notorious prison - in the 1970s, at least 12,000 people were tortured there and murdered. Only a handful of prisoners survived but now, 40 years after Pol Pot took control of the country, two of them return to the cells every day to remind people what happened.

Chum Mey had never heard of the CIA before, but after 10 days of torture he was ready to confess to being a secret agent for the US.
We are in Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh, in the very cell where he was held. Almost four decades on, Chum Mey still has nightmares and yet he returns to this place every day.
"If those guards hadn't tortured a false confession out of me, they would have been executed - I can't say I would have behaved any differently [in their position]," he says.
Tuol Sleng, codenamed S-21, was converted from a school to an interrogation centre on the orders of Pol Pot when his Khmer Rouge movement took control of Cambodia in April 1975.

 

Pol Pot, who was born Saloth Sar

At least 12,000 people who were held here were killed. Just 15 prisoners survived.
Eighty-three-year-old Chum Mey is one of the few still alive today. Bou Meng, 74, is another. One a mechanic, the other an artist, their practical skills were useful to the Khmer Rouge and their impending death sentences were put on hold.
For the past three years, the pair has taken up a sort of day-residence at S-21, which is now preserved as a genocide museum - this is how they have chosen to spend their retirement.
They are also allowed to sell their memoirs - at $10 a copy, they make a modest living this way.
There is something ambassadorial about their presence. They are celebrity survivors, modern-day reminders of Cambodia's dark past.
"The important thing is to document what happened here," says Bou Meng. He sits at a stall in the prison courtyard, decorated with a large banner that reads: SURVIVOR. "I want people around the world to go home and tell their friends and family about the genocide of the Khmer people."

 

Bou Meng shows how he was restrained © Kirstie Brewer

© Kirstie Brewer

Buy their books and you'll be presented with a business card and encouraged to sit down with them for a photograph. They recognise the potency of photographs. The museum houses row upon row of headshots taken of prisoners when they first arrived.
I accompany them both separately on a walk around the museum. Like living artefacts, they shuffle in and out of the cells, nodding their thanks to visitors and studying the photographs on the walls.
"So young," says Chum Mey, gently tracing his finger along a row of teenage boys and girls.
They say they are haunted by the faces that look back at them and that these faces compel them to return every day and tell their stories.

Chum Mey had been working as a mechanic for the Khmer Rouge, when suddenly he was arrested on 28 October 1978 and taken straight to S-21. He still doesn't know why.
"I was blindfolded and my hands were tied behind my back - I pleaded with my captors to let my family know where I was," he recalls.
"Angkar [the ruling body of the Khmer Rouge] will smash you all," a voice hissed in his ear.
Upon arrival, after being measured and photographed, prisoners were stripped and shackled to the floor of a cell barely big enough to sit down in.
"After that I cried because I felt so hopeless and confused," says Chum Mey. In the 12 days that followed, he was taken from his cell three times a day and tortured in one of the prison's interrogation rooms.

 

One of the rooms where prisoners were tortured

Two guards took turns beating him with a stick covered in twisted wire. Eventually they decided to pull out his big toenail. He looks down at his feet and explains in unflinching detail how the guard tugged and twisted the nail until it came out.
"I could tolerate the pain of being beaten and even having my toenail pulled out, but it was the electric shocks I was terrified of," he says, tapping the side of his head.
These were administered by electrodes placed inside the ears. Chum Mey is deaf in one ear as a result and says he hears the sound of rushing water when he moves his head.
"It felt like my eyes were on fire and my head was a machine - after that I started telling them whatever they wanted to hear. I didn't know what was right or wrong any more."

He sits down at the desk where his confession was typed up by his two interrogators. In front of the desk is a bed frame and heavy iron shackles. There is dried blood on the ceiling. A photograph on the wall shows an emaciated man lying on the bed with his throat cut.
Most of the people who ended up in these cells were Khmer Rouge cadres and their families, accused of collaborating with foreign governments or spying for the CIA or KGB.
"The regime was a breeding ground of paranoia," explains a museum guide. "Soldiers would grow to know too much and then they themselves could be subject to torture and death."
Chum Mey's fellow survivor, Bou Meng, was originally a Khmer Rouge supporter - an artist by trade, he had painted some early propaganda posters.
He and his wife were arrested on 16 August 1977. "They screamed in my wife's face that Angkar had never arrested the wrong person," he recalls.
The first thing Bou Meng does when we sit down in the prison courtyard is show me an illustration he has drawn of his wife.
"Ma Yoeun," he says with tears in his eyes, gesturing for me to repeat his late wife's name. In the picture she is screaming, stooped over a mass grave, and her throat has been cut.
Most S-21 inmates were eventually trucked by night to Choeung Ek - one of the sites that became known as the Killing Fields. A team of teenage executioners would be waiting - they were told ahead of time how big a grave to dig.

Ma Yoeun was a midwife but only Bou Meng was deemed worth saving. "Why couldn't they keep her alive too?" he asks. "She only ever looked after people."
The couple had been separated on arrival at S-21. Bou Meng was photographed and taken to a large holding cell filled with emaciated prisoners.
Like Chum Mey, he was relentlessly questioned and beaten - he shows me the scars on his back. He too is deaf in one ear as a result of regular torture.
Prisoners were given two ladles of watery porridge a day. Chum Mey was so hungry he would eat the rats that scurried into his cell.
A small ammunition box served as a toilet. "If any waste spilled out we had to lick it from the floor," he says.
Bou Meng still remembers the oppressive stench in the air. "At first I thought it was something like dead fish or mice because I had never smelt rotting human flesh before."
After several months of interrogation, Bou Meng also relented and gave a false confession, admitting to being part of a CIA network, and naming other "collaborators".
Painting portraits "saved my life," he says. When the prison chief, known as Duch, found out that he was an artist, he told him to reproduce a black and white photograph of Pol Pot. Duch warned him that if it wasn't lifelike he'd be killed.

 

Comrade Duch during his trial at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal

Bou Meng took three months to finish the painting - it was 1.5m wide and 1.8m high.
Pleased with his work, Duch later requested large portraits of Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, as well as several more of Pol Pot. Bou Meng was also told to draw the Vietnamese communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, stranded on a rooftop in the middle of a big storm.
"I don't know why Duch needed these paintings, and I didn't dare to ask," he says.
Duch kept Chum Mey alive because he could fix typewriters - crucial for taking down confessions. He also fixed sewing machines, used to make thousands of black Khmer Rouge uniforms.
In 2009, both men testified at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal against Duch - a former Maths teacher who became the architect of the torture and execution methods at S-21. Like their return to S-21, it has helped bring them some solace.
S-21 was a microcosm of what took place across Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. An estimated 90% of artists, intellectuals and teachers were killed in an effort to return the country to "Year Zero" - Pol Pot's vision of a classless, agrarian society.
By the time Pol Pot fell from power, about two million people - a quarter of the population - had been murdered, starved or struck down by disease.
Bou Meng's two young children were among those who died from disease during the Pol Pot years and it was only during the 2009 war crimes tribunal that he learned his wife had probably ended up in a mass grave.
He returned to the prison in the 1980s to look for Ma Yoeun's photo as well as his own.

 
 Visitors can see the skulls of some of the victims at the museum

 

Bou Meng with the photo of his wife, taken at S-21 © Kirstie Brewer

He shows me a copy of the photo taken of his wife when she first arrived here - he never found his own. "I see her here, in front of us right now," he says, staring into the middle distance. He would like to be able to visit her grave and say prayers over her bones.
Testifying at Duch's trial, he was given a chance to ask one question, so he asked Duch where his wife was killed. A tearful Duch was unable to say.
Chum Mey never found his photo either, only a copy of his confession and a list of prisoners. Next to his name was a note: "Keep for a while."
His wife also remained alive until 7 January 1979, when Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Penh, signalling the end of the Khmer Rouge's grip on the country. The events caused panic at S-21 and the guards took their prisoners and fled into the suburbs to await orders. Here Chum Mey was reunited with his wife and newborn son.
But only he survived the fighting between the Khmer Rouge and opposition forces.
He had already lost his three-year-old son to fever during the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975. His two daughters disappeared while he was in S-21.
Bou Meng and Chum Mey both remarried and have new families. Chum Mey's grandchildren are playing in the prison courtyard as we talk.
"Visiting every day brings me closer to the victims in those photographs," he says. "I feel their presence here and our responsibility to tell the world what happened."

Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge

 

Pol Pot leading a group of his men in the 70s

1968 Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge launches an insurgency aiming to return Cambodia to "Year Zero" and build an agrarian socialist utopia.
1973 - 1974 Khmer Rouge controls most of Cambodia - city-dwellers are forcibly moved to the countryside.
April 1975 Khmer Rouge captures the capital, Phnom Penh.
1976 The regime divides citizens into three categories, which determine their food rations. Urban residents, land owners, former army officers, bureaucrats and merchants fall into the category and face execution, starvation and hard labour. All religion is banned.
January 1979 Vietnamese armed forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation capture Phnom Penh. Pol Pot flees.
15 April 1998 Pol Pot dies in Cambodia on the day it is announced that he will face an international tribunal. He is swiftly cremated, prompting suspicions of suicide.
2009 Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, is the first Khmer Rouge leader to face the UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He is sentenced to 35 years in jail, later extended to life.
2014 - Two more Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Kheiu Samphan, are sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.

Inlay Lake inscribed as Myanmar’s first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve

By 

Mizzima

On Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Wild ducks take flight from the surface of Inlay Lake, Nyaungshwe Township, Taunggyi, Shan Sate, Myanmar, 08 December 2014. EPA/NYEIN CHAN NAING

Inlay Lake has been inscribed as the first Biosphere Reserve of Myanmar at the 27th Session of the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) International Coordinating Council (ICC) meetings at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 9 June according to a media report on the UNESCO website on 10 June.

Inlay Lake has now joined the World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) under the UNESCO MAB Programme, established in 1971 to safeguard natural and managed ecosystems, and promote innovative approaches to economic development that are socially and culturally appropriate, and environmentally sustainable.

The WNBR, counting over 631 biosphere reserves in 119 countries all over the world, is one of the main international tools to develop and implement sustainable development approaches in a wide variety of contexts. It includes a wide range of locations such as Cambodia’s lake Tonle Sap, the Mare aux Hippopotames in Burkina Faso, the wetlands of Pantanal in Brazil and the Canary Island of Fuerteventura (Spain).

UNESCO has been providing technical support to the Government of Myanmar, working in close collaboration with the Ministry of Environmental Conservation and Forestry (MoECAF) Myanmar and UNDP, with generous support from the Government of Norway, to designate Inlay lake region as the first biosphere reserve of Myanmar. Senior officials from MoECAF represented Myanmar at the 27th Session of the MAB ICC meetings in Paris, where a total of 26 proposals, submitted by 19 countries, for the inscription of new Reserves are being discussed.

The nomination of Inlay Lake region has received wide support and endorsement from the Union Government, Shan State Government, local communities at Inlay Lake, non-governmental organizations, University representatives, Youth groups, and the private sector who have all contributed to the nomination efforts.

The Inlay Lake biosphere reserve is situated in Taunggyi District, Southern Shan State in Myanmar and covers a total area of 489,721 hectares. The wetland ecosystem of this freshwater lake is home to 267 species of birds, out of which 82 are wetland birds, 43 species of freshwater fishes, otters, and turtles. Diverse flora and fauna species are recorded and the lake is reported to be the nesting place for the globally endangered Sarus crane (Grus antigone).

In addition to its ecological importance, Inlay Lake is also unique for the way the local inhabitants have adapted their lifestyle to their environment. Farmers from one of the dominant ethnic groups in the region, the Inthas, practice floating island agriculture, locally called ‘Yechan”. Inlay Lake and its watershed provides several ecosystem services on which local people depend, including clean air, clean water, a cooler climate, fish stocks and other resources.

As Biosphere Reserves are experimental sites which aim to reconcile biodiversity and sustainable resource utilization, by promoting local solutions to global challenges, the designation of Inlay Lake region as the first Biosphere Reserve of Myanmar will further encourage and enhance environmental conservation initiatives to safeguard biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods development in the region.

2,000-Year-Old Seed Sprouts, Sapling Is Thriving

By John Roach, National Geographic

PUBLISHED November 22, 2005

A sapling germinated earlier this year from a 2,000-year-old date palm seed is thriving, according to Israeli researchers who are cultivating the historic plant.

"It's 80 centimeters [3 feet] high with nine leaves, and it looks great," said Sarah Sallon, director of the Hadassah Medical Organization's Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center (NMRC) in Jerusalem.

Sallon's program is dedicated to the study of complementary and alternative medicines. The center is also interested in conserving the heritage of Middle Eastern plants that have been used for thousands of years.

Sallon wants to see if the ancient tree, nicknamed Methuselah after the oldest person named in the Old Testament of the Bible, has any unique medicinal properties no longer found in today's date palm varieties.

"Dates were famous in antiquity for medicinal value," she said. "They were widely used for different kinds of diseases—cancers, TB [tuberculosis]—all kinds of problems."

She and her colleagues are currently comparing the structure of the sapling to modern date palms and examining DNA from one of the sapling's leaves. The team plans to publish preliminary results in a peer-reviewed journal early next year.

Ancient Seed

Several ancient date seeds were taken from an excavation at Masada, a historic mountainside fortress, in 1973. In A.D. 73 Jewish Zealots took their own lives at the fortress rather than surrender to the Romans at the end of a two-year siege.

Carbon dating indicates the seeds are about 2,000 years old.

Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer found the seeds and gave them to botanical archaeologist Mordechai Kislev at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

The seeds sat untouched in a drawer in Kislev's office until last November, when Sallon asked if she could have a few to pass on to desert agriculture expert Elaine Solowey.

"I said, Thank you. What do you want me to do?" Solowey recalls. Told to germinate them, she said, "You want me to do what?"

Solowey, director of the experimental orchard and the NMRC cultivation site at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, focuses primarily on finding new crops that grow well in the arid Middle East climate.

By January Solowey had done enough research on revitalizing the seeds to get the project off the ground.

First she soaked the seeds in hot water to make them once again able to absorb liquids. Then she soaked them in a solution of nutrients followed by an enzymatic fertilizer made from seaweed.

I assumed the food in the seed would be no good after all that time. How could it be?

Elaine Solowey

Desert agriculture expert

"I assumed the food in the seed would be no good after all that time. How could it be?" she said.

Tu B'shevat, a Jewish holiday known as the New Year for Trees, fell this year on January 25. Solowey chose that day to plant the seeds in new potting soil, hook them up to a drip irrigation system, and leave them locked up.

She occasionally checked on the plants for a few months, and in March she noticed cracked soil in one of the pots—a sure sign of sprouts.

"I couldn't believe it," she said. "I did everything to avoid contamination, so it had to be that seed. And by March 18 I could see it was a date shoot."

The first leaves were almost white with gray lines. They looked like corduroy but felt totally flat, Solowey said. She thought the plant would never survive. But by June healthier-looking leaves were growing on the young sapling.

As time progresses, she said, the leaves continue to look even healthier.

The researchers are now repeating the experiment with another batch of the ancient seeds to see if their success was a "one in a million" stroke of luck or if their technique can more readily bring ancient seeds to life, Sallon said.

Slow Grow

Date palms are either male or female. The sex of the sapling is unknown, but the researchers are hoping for a female, which would bear fruit.

If a modern date with similar DNA is found, the researchers may be able to tell the sex of their sapling soon. Otherwise they'll have to wait about four years, when female dates usually begin to bear fruit.

In ancient times the Judean date palm was a staple source of food, shelter, and shade. References to it are made in the Bible, the Koran, and other ancient literature. Judean date palms were wiped out by about A.D. 500.

Today's date trees in Israel were imported during the 1950s and '60s from modern cultivated Iraqi, Moroccan, and Egyptian varieties, Sallon said.

Solowey, who also works for Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, said it already appears the ancient plant has some interesting differences from modern dates.

If Methuselah bears fruit, Sallon and her colleagues will study its medicinal properties in hopes of better understanding what made the Judean date so famous in antiquity.

If funds can be found, the researchers hope to apply any novel properties to modern medicines.

"Maybe there are genes there that have actually died out or become extinct [in modern dates], in which case [the sapling] has very exciting possibilities for date cultivation as well," Sallon said.

Yangtze ship disaster: Chinese salvagers right Eastern Star

From the section China

 

 

 

 

Yangtze boat disaster

Chinese salvagers have fully righted the ship which capsized on the Yangtze River, on which more than 400 people are thought to have died.

The Eastern Star overturned late on Monday after being caught in a storm.
Just 14 of the 456 passengers and crew are known to have survived what looks set to be China's worst shipping disaster in decades.
The beginning of the operation to right the stricken ship seemed to signal the end of hopes of finding more survivors.
Rescue workers on the upturned hull, which was just barely visible over the brown waters of the Yangtze, were towered over by two cranes.

The ship's name was visible above the water on Friday morning

Hooks were welded onto the ship and a net stretched around the entire structure in preparation for lifting it.
By first light on Friday, the ship could be seen lying on its side with its name visible just above the water. Xinhua state news agency later tweeted a picture of the righted vessel, its roof apparently crushed.

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Media caption Gao Ruihai and his daughter Gao Yuan are struggling to cope with the unknown

As the ship is righted, the focus of emergency workers at the site in Jianli, Hubei province will switch from attempting to find survivors to searching the ship's 150 cabins for bodies.
About 80 bodies have so far been recovered, some after three holes were cut into the vessel's upturned hull. The holes were later welded closed in order to preserve the ship's buoyancy.

Only three people have been rescued alive from inside the ship

Xu Chengguang, a spokesman for the transport ministry, said on Thursday night said there there had been no further signs of life inside the ship, Xinhua news agency reports.
He said officials would "absolutely not cover up anything" in the investigation, state media reports.
Chinese President Xi Jinping promised a thorough investigation into the cause of the disaster, after angry relatives protested at the scene.
Authorities tightly controlled access to the site, leading family members and journalists to complain about a lack of information.

The Eastern Star

• The 76m-long, 2,200-tonne ship was named Dongfangzhixing in Chinese
• It was carrying 405 passengers - mostly elderly tourists but also one three-year-old - as well as five travel agency employees and 46 crew members.
• The ship is owned by the Chongqing Eastern Shipping Corporation, and passengers had booked their trip through a travel agency in Shanghai.
• The cruise left the eastern city of Nanjing in April and was travelling to Chongqing in the south-west via the Three Gorges - a journey of at least 1,500km (930 miles).

Most of the 14 people known to have survived jumped from the ship as it began to sink. Three were rescued by divers from air pockets in the upturned hull.
The cause of the sinking is not yet known, but survivors have spoken of an intense storm which flipped the boat over in minutes.
The captain and chief engineer, who were among those who escaped, have since been detained.
Maritime agency records showed the ship was investigated for safety violations two years ago. It was held alongside five other vessels in 2013 over safety concerns.
China's deadliest maritime disaster in recent decades was in November 1999, when the Dashun ferry caught fire and capsized in the sea off Shandong province, killing about 280.
The Eastern Star could become China's deadliest boat accident since the SS Kiangya sank off Shanghai in 1948, killing somewhere between 2,750 and 4,000 people.

How to fix a problem like Fifa

Lucy Marcus

(Credit: Michael Buholzer/Getty Images)

Who was minding the store?

Fifa is a perfect example of a fundamentally broken organisation.

The arrest of seven Fifa executives in May for corruption at the highest levels of football’s world governing body has raised alarm bells worldwide. Sepp Blatter has announced he is stepping down, but remaining as President until at least December. How could this corruption and poor leadership have been allowed to happen, and for many years?  Who was overseeing the overseers?
While the magnitude of Fifa’s alleged malfeasance and dysfunction is stunning in its longevity and scale, it is a cautionary tale of the potential risks for groups which are governed solely by their members.
These membership organisations come in many forms, such as professional bodies and clubs, associations made up of multiple groups like Fifa, co-op boards of buildings and even parent-teacher associations.
For all organisations of this type, it is important that members hold key roles in their governance, but there is a danger that if they are governed only by members (as they determine the strategy and provide  the oversight on its execution), the atmosphere becomes an echo chamber — a place where the self-interest of individual members overrides actions that are best for the organisation as a whole.
Concern over problems that can arise from this governance structure are hardly limited to Fifa. The Co-operative Group, the UK’s largest cooperative group which operates a wide range of businesses including supermarkets, a bank, travel agencies, funeral homes and much more, has been forced to transform its governance structure. The change was prompted by a serious crisis in the group's banking business, followed by multiple headline grabbing leadership catastrophes and a badly dented balance sheet.
Find the root
What can go wrong? One of the biggest issues is related to self-interest. Organisations such as Fifa can suffer when members, driven by their own wants, needs, and desires, enable group decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of the organisation.
Organisations can also suffer from wilful blindness, where people look away from problems, or even ignore opportunities that might benefit the organisations, as long as their own needs are being met.
If these issues are left to fester, it can mean nothing short of the very destruction of the organisation.
There is some good news, however. While endemic rot may be rooted in poor governance and lack of solid governance principles, so, too, are the solutions.
Leadership sets the tone. The board and the executive team can’t simply proclaim that the decisions they are making are unbiased and for the good of the organisation as a whole. They must actually act with integrity, transparency and a willingness to be held to account if something goes wrong.

(Credit: Valeriano di Domenico/Getty Images)

Above all else, they need to put in place concrete measure to ensure that that is the case now and always.
New governance for Fifa
This can sometimes be a painful process, depending on where an organisation finds itself. There are three stages where change must be made: Broken, bent, and clean slate.
Fifa is a perfect example of a fundamentally broken organisation. Sepp Blatter has announced he is stepping down and an extraordinary congress will be held to elect a new president. That won’t be enough. Nothing short of root and branch change is needed. An entirely new governance structure needs to be put in place. The role of chief executive and chair of the governing body should be separated. Importantly, a full and unflinching investigation must be done. To conduct such a thorough investigation, trusted outside advisers need to be called in. By trusted I don't mean trusted by the people currently running the organisation. Rather it needs to be a neutral party with a strong global reputation, who will investigate, report, and help create a pathway to restructuring and resurrection.

(Credit: Valeriano di Domenico/Getty Images)

One urgent question: Who will these advisors report to? Blatter has said he will remain until the new president is selected, and the earliest time that will happen will be December, 2015. He should really step aside now and allow an interim head named, or a council of people who are untainted by the previous scandal.
If he stays, Blatter will be “managing from the grave”. There is a danger that he will be concerned with his own individual legacy rather starting the real change that needs to happen.

One other "nuclear" option if it seems the problems are just too deep to fix: disband the organisation completely and start from scratch. That is one way to jump from the broken category to the clean-slate category and sometimes it is the only way forward.
What about an organisation that is bent but not broken? Perhaps one that shows signs of trouble, but isn’t as systemically damaged as Fifa is? There are plenty of organisations that fall in this category. Some started down a path with a governance structure that made sense at their inception but is no longer fit for purpose. For others, things have just gone wrong. It is time to boldly and bravely make a change. I have been involved in several organisations that have gone through this process and it can be painful and arduous to institute such a turnaround. But, on the upside, almost all of them have come out much stronger and more capable organisations and have benefited as much from the process of change as they have from the change itself.

Co-op is in the midst of such a transition. They have introduced new governance structures, an independent chair, new independent board members to sit along member directors and a new chief executive. The whole thing has played out under the glare of the public spotlight, and there is no doubt that it has been a difficult journey, and it is one that is far from over. The jury is still out, but the push for change is certainly impressive.
And what of new organisations? They are in a great position because they begin with a clean slate, and they have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others. There are several key things to institute and clarify right from the start. The first is to appoint one or more independent members to their boards. Just as independent directors in start-up companies play an important role in offering an unaffiliated and unbiased voice in the room. The same reasoning applies for membership organisations.
Term limits, and not just for board members, but also for the board chair, should also be instituted from the beginning.

Separating the chair and chief executive roles is important. If something goes wrong and one or the other leaves, the organisation will remain relatively stable. Separating the roles also protects members who speak up to try to bring about change since they are less susceptible to retaliation if their bid for change is not successful.
One other key thing is often forgotten: it is important to clarify the roles of those sitting around the board table. Are they there as representatives of their own organisations and interests, or do they leave that direct affiliation at the boardroom door and become board members of the organisation they are stewarding on that day?

Membership organisations, like Fifa and Co-op, as well as many of the boards of organisations we belong to on an everyday basis, are best run when they abide by sound governance principles and have educated and engaged board members.
Often these organisations are created for the public good. Whether they are huge complex organisations that touch many people, like Fifa, or small organisations that touch only a few, good intentions are not enough. Fixing them can sometimes be a daunting task, but it is one that is best faced head on and as early as possible, when changes can be less painful and the benefits will be many.

The opinions expressed here are those of the author and not the BBC or BBC.com. Lucy Marcus is an award winning writer, board chair and non-executive director of several organisations. She is also the CEO of Marcus Venture Consulting. Don’t miss another Above Board column by subscribing here. You can also follow Lucy on Twitter @lucymarcus.
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