Paul Hikasp's Open Salon Blog

Armchair army to save the Amazon rainforest

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:11:36 -0500

SPEND a pound and save the rainforest. A conservation group led by a millionaire sports tycoon and a former Labour minister is launching an appeal today to recruit 100,000 green heroes to protect trees in the Amazon.

With less than three weeks to go before the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Cool Earth, which has already protected 125,000 acres of rainforest, is hoping armchair guardians will achieve something world leaders cannot agree upon.

As deforestation accounts for 17% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, it wants people to sponsor individual endangered South American trees for as little as £1 each and keep watch over them by means of satellite images. The idea is to “lock in” 3m tons of carbon before the end of the conference on December 18.

Christmas Appeal: How you can help the children of Iraq

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:11:43 -0500

Hussein Mohammed Janabi is a loving little boy who adores his younger siblings, Amneh, 3, and six-month-old twins Zeid and Sajad. But his parents find it difficult to answer him when he asks — as he often does — “Why are they beautiful and I am not?”

Hussein’s dream is that the “kind doctors” in Amman will make him as pretty as the rest of his family. “Mama,” he says every day, “look at how beautiful and perfect the eyes and eyebrows of Zeid and Sajad are. When can mine be the same?”

Hussein was 10 months old and asleep in his cot having his morning nap when a car bomb exploded outside the family home in Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, four years ago. Burning shrapnel rained through the windows of his house and the nylon sheets on his cot caught fire.

Mimicking of Sir Trevor McDonald lands ITV with £5m lawsuit

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:11:58 -0500

AN ITV newsreader has been accused of imitating Sir Trevor McDonald by a female presenter who is bringing a £5m racism and ageism case against the television company.

Lisa Aziz, the first Asian news presenter to appear on national terrestrial television, claims that Steve Scott “regularly mimicked” the famous Afro-Caribbean newsreader’s accent during rehearsals.

Scott, a former ITN Africa correspondent and a regular presenter of ITV’s lunchtime and weekend news bulletins, is also alleged, in papers prepared for an employment tribunal, to have imitated Pakistani and Irish accents and the accent of Alex Beresford, the black ITV weatherman.

The troubled television firm has been forced to launch an internal investigation into allegations of racism at ITV West Country in Bristol where Aziz and Scott co-presented the nightly news programme until she was suspended over alleged expenses irregularities in June.

Irish republicans try to blow up Belfast police building

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:11:01 -0500

Irish republican terrorists tried to blow up a police building in Belfast and murder police officers in an ambush in Fermanagh last night.

Police said that the attacks, both of which failed, were another sign of growing terrorist activity.

A 400lb bomb in a car left outside the headquarters of the Policing Board in Belfast exploded only partially, leaving the vehicle ablaze.

Two men were seen running off and a burnt-out vehicle, possibly used as a getaway car, was later found in the republican New Lodge district of north Belfast.