Fashion Festival in March

Translated by Atefeh Rezvan-Nia
Edited by Mohammad Reza M. Karimi

The 2nd International Festival of Fashion and Clothing is slated for March 2-10 in Tehran to influence fashion trends and maximize the artistic potentials of Iranian designers.
The festival’s objectives include creating a suitable ambiance for introducing domestic clothing brands, introducing the newest designs, promoting innovations in Islamic-Iranian designs, raising designing standards and organizing the garment design, production and distribution sectors.
The event also aims to find the most talented individuals active in the fashion industry and increase clothing export.
The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Foundation of Iranian-Islamic Fashion and Clothing have announced that producers who display 10 designs in the exhibition will receive permission for publishing their clothing journal.
The first editions of journals named Chador (full-body veil) and Fashion and Manteau (long coat), to be published next spring in Iran, will present a framework for Islamic-Iranian designs.
The festival has different sections, including a section for displaying ‘ethical’ clothes and another for showing students’ uniforms.
Announcing the above, Mohammad Ebrahim Mohammadi, the director general of Artistic and Cultural Affairs in Education Ministry, said the festival aims to introduce Iranian-Islamic designs appropriate for different occasions.
“The festival will be held at Tehran’s Mosalla (Grand Prayerground) where visitors can see and purchase the newest clothes for students,” he said.
Highlighting the importance of setting good role models for students, Kamand Amir-Soleimani, an Iranian actress, said teenagers are influenced by the clothing style of cinema and television actors.
Pointing to the importance of holding such events in the country, Amir-Soleimani said she visited last year’s exhibition and purchased some clothes but she could not wear them because such designs were not publicized in the society.
She said that if actors wear such designs in TV and cinematic works, they will become popular in the whole country.
Earlier, Maryam Mojtahedzadeh, the head of Women and Family Center affiliated to the Presidential Office, has proposed the creation of a new field named “Islamic Fashion” in high schools and universities to train experts and promote Islamic-Iranian fashion in the country.
The fashion industry is among the top earning industries in the world. Iran can earn huge revenues by holding international fashion festivals and introducing attractive designs to Muslims.

No End to Gazan Woes, Sufferings

There seems to be no end to the sufferings of Gaza Strip residents perpetrated and maintained by the Zionist Israeli regime.
Gaza remains polluted with the untreatable sewage pumped into the sea at the rate of 90 million liters per day, to gas-less filling stations, to the tunnels that serve as border crossings and bring Israeli-banned construction materials into Gaza, which continues to be devastated by Israeli bombings.
Wassim abu Shabaan, 10, is one of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza whose homes have been destroyed by Israeli bombing and bulldozing in the last four years.
“The whole house was destroyed, everything was destroyed … Our computer, my room, our clothes, everything,” says the boy of the 2009 Israeli bombing of his home.

Deprivation
In the November 2012, Israeli attacks on Gaza, Israeli warplanes bombed Palestine stadium, one of Gaza’s few venues for sports and a place where disabled athletes trained.
The Gaza Community Mental Health Program found in 2009 that over 91 percent of children in Gaza suffer from moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Children make up roughly half the population of Gaza’s 1.7 million people.
Gaza’s infrastructure had likewise not recovered from the attacks and the siege, with hospitals reporting consistent shortages of essential medicines and medical supplies, and Gaza’s schools severely overcrowded, the vast majority of whom run double, even triple, shifts to accommodate all of the students.
Since 2006, when Israel bombed Gaza’s sole power plant, the entire Strip has been under daily rolling power outages, ranging from 18 and 20 hour outages in the worst years to the current eight hours on, eight hours off scheduled outages.
The Strip is currently enduring another crisis of cooking gas shortages, particularly hard during winter months when hot meals and beverages help make up for the lack of heating in the typically un-insulated homes.

Medical Misery
The problem of sewage treatment has yet to be solved, for want of building materials to expand Gaza’s outdated sanitation facilities. The combination of power outages and little clean water to begin with contributes to a general water crisis, with 95 percent of Gaza’s water undrinkable by World Health Organization (WHO) standards.
The WHO reports that at least 81 patients have died due to delayed medical referrals since 2008 alone.
In 2012, Palestinian authorities reported over 400 kidney patients were at risk due to lack of essential dialysis equipment shortages.
Medical Aid for Palestinians reports that 10 percent of children under five years suffer from chronic malnutrition, while anemia is rampant among pregnant women.
Since 2007, the Israeli army has killed 2,300 Palestinians, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ June, 2012 report.
Many of these deaths and hundreds of the 7,700 injuries the UN reported (not including the November 2012 Israeli attacks) have occurred in Gaza’s border regions and on the sea, where fishers and farmers alike are targeted by the Israeli army as they work.

Economic Impact
A 2012 United Nations report entitled “Gaza in 2020: a Livable Place?” predicts that Gaza’s sole aquifer, already over-tapped and under-replenished will fail by 2016.
The Israeli-imposed “buffer zone” cuts Gazan Palestinians off from 35 percent of their agricultural land, impacting on their economy and local food sources.
Produce once exported to the rest of Palestine and to European markets, along with textiles and furniture, have not been exported since 2006, save an insignificant amount.
The same June 2012 UN report notes that Gazan exports “have dropped to less than 3 percent of 2006 levels.”
Some of Gaza’s most desperately poor work in the hundreds of tunnels running to Egypt. As of June 2012, the UN noted that “at least 172 Palestinian civilians have been killed while working in tunnels,” since 2007.

Buddhist Group Calls for Halal Food Ban

A new hardline Sinhalese Buddhist group in Sri Lanka has called for the abolition of the Muslim halal system of certifying foods and other goods.
The Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Strength Force, also said foreign propagators of religions should leave the country within a month, BBC reported.
Thousands of supporters of the group attended a rally in a suburb of the capital, Colombo. Thousands of men and women filled the grounds of the rally and the surrounding streets at Maharagama in Colombo’s outer suburbs to hear nationalist speeches by the group’s monks.
The group’s secretary-general, Galaboda Aththe Gnanasara, told the crowds that “only monks can save this race”, referring to Sinhalese.
He claimed that Christians and Muslims were threatening Buddhists, and said hundreds of monks were ready to fight.
“Our country is a Sinhalese one and we are its unofficial police,” he said.
The calls come at a time of mounting religious tension in the country.
There have been several attacks on both mosques and Muslim-owned businesses as well as on Christian churches and the clergy, the BBC’s Charles Haviland reports from Colombo.
The Buddhist Sinhalese make up three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population.
Muslims constitute about 10 percent and have generally had good relations with the Sinhalese majority.

Unaware of Pregnancy US Woman Delivers Baby

A Michigan woman reportedly traveled to Allegiance Health on Friday, telling doctors she suspected she was suffering from a hernia.
Instead, she gave birth to a ten-pound baby girl, Natmonitor.com reported.
Linda Ackley, 44, of Summit Township, Michigan, reportedly gave birth to the child after physicians determined she was pregnant.
The child, Kimberly Kay Ackley, is the first for the couple and was born at 11:20 p.m. She is normal and healthy, and weighed 1ten pounds, one ounce, the couple announced in a joint statement released over the weekend.
The girl and her mother were discharged from the hospital on Monday afternoon. Doctors at first thought Ackley had three to four weeks to go, but a follow-up ultrasound confirmed that she was full term.
Understandably, the story has captured national attention due to its uniqueness. Speaking on Sunday, Ackley said she never suspected she was pregnant due to the fact doctors repeatedly told her she did not have the ability to bear children.

Chinese Clothes Toxic

Students in 21 primary and middle schools in east China’s Shanghai were ordered to stop wearing their uniforms on Monday after a toxic dye was found in the products of a local garment firm.
In a recent quality inspection campaign, aromatic amine dye, which can cause cancer, was detected in one batch of student uniforms produced in July 2012 by the Shanghai Ouxia garment company, said the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision, Xinhua reported.
Six batches of the company’s clothes products were substandard, said the city’s quality watchdog. The company has been one of a number of producers of school uniforms in Shanghai for five years.
Education authorities in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai said in a statement they have demanded the 21 schools, which had purchased uniforms from Ouxia, to tell students to stop wearing the clothes, which require quality examinations.
The company, which has stopped production, sold 15,000 school uniforms annually.
It is common for students to wear uniforms in Chinese primary and middle schools.

Japanese City Receives £161,000 Of Goodwill Gold

A Japanese city devastated by the 2011 tsunami has received anonymous gifts of gold worth more than £161,000, ahead of the second anniversary of the disaster.
The president of the company, which operates the port in the northeastern city of Ishinomaki, last week received a parcel containing two slabs of gold each weighing one kilogram (2.2 pounds), AsiaOne reported.
“Since it was labeled as ‘miscellaneous goods,’ I casually opened the box,” thinking it must be books or the like as it was heavy, said Kunio Sunow, president of the Ishinomaki Fish Market Co. Ltd.
“I was stunned because what’s in there was 24k gold in two plates. One was wrapped in brown paper and the other in a page taken from a magazine--both were sitting in bubble sheets,” he said.
The parcel had been sent anonymously from Nagano city northwest of Tokyo with no message.
“Just looking at 24k gold can encourage people as it has a presence. It’s great to know we haven’t been forgotten,” Sunow said.

Filipino Super-Typhoon Ignored by Int’l Media

When super-typhoon Bopha struck without warning before dawn, flattening the walls of their home, Maria Amparo Jenobiagon, her two daughters and her grandchildren ran for their lives.
The storm on 4 December was the worst ever to hit southern Philippines: torrential rain turned New Bataan’s river into a raging flood.
Roads were washed away and the bridge turned into an enormous dam. Tens of thousands of coconut trees crashed down in an instant as unbelievably powerful winds struck. The banana crop was destroyed in a flash--and with it the livelihoods of hundreds of farmers, Guardian reported.
The only safe place the family could think of was the concrete grandstand at the village sports stadium. Two months later, Jenobiagon, 36, and her three-year-old granddaughter, Mary Aieshe, are still there, living in one of the improvised tents spanning its steep concrete tiers along with hundreds of other people.
Poor support and continuing neglect are partly because of the lack of international media coverage.
“We were terrified. All we could hear was loud crashing. We didn’t know what to do. So we came here,” Jenobiagon said. “Everyone ran to the health center but houses were being swept away and the water was neck deep. Everywhere we went was full of mud and water. We went to a school but it was flooded, so we came to the stadium.”

British Teens Worst in Europe At Languages

British teenagers are trapped in a “vicious circle of mono-lingualism”, a report warned, as figures showed British youngsters are among the worst in Europe at foreign languages.
Teenagers in 14 different European countries were tested on their ability to speak the first foreign language taught in schools, which for Britain was French, Telegraph reported.
In reading, writing and listening tests, British pupils were ranked bottom.
The study suggests youngsters are lagging far behind their European peers, with many unable to understand more than basic words or phrases.
Just 11 percent of British pupils studying French were considered “independent users” in writing--the lowest in Europe for a first foreign language. In comparison, across all countries, two-fifths of students were at this level.
Only 9.2 percent were ranked in the top category for French reading--again, the lowest in Europe for a first foreign language.

Hepatitis C Risk

Healthcare workers are among those most at risk of contracting Hepatitis C, the Abu Dhabi Municipality said at a lecture for employees aimed at spreading awareness about the often incurable virus.