MISCELLANEOUS NEWS ITEMS

[The Daily Telegraph, September 18, 2009]

A boy aged 12 turned up at school as a girl -- after changing sex during the summer holidays. The lad, whose parents have changed his name to a girl's by deed poll, arrived in a dress with long hair in ribboned pigtails. He is preparing for sex-swap surgery.

Angry parents told yesterday how their kids were left tearful and confused after school staff announced the boy pupil was now a girl. They said the head teacher should have informed them in advance of the "sex change" so they could prepare their sons and daughters and inform them about gender issues. They added that the school's failure to do so had left the boy to suffer cruel taunts and bullying.

One mum said: "They behaved appallingly by throwing this hand grenade into the room and then leaving the inevitable questions about it for unprepared parents. "Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive if we'd had a chance to be involved."

Over the summer holidays his parents changed his name to a female one by deed poll. He is preparing to undergo hormone treatment and surgery -- and could become the world's youngest sex-swap patient in the coming years. The Sun knows his identity but will not reveal it. His mother told us last night: "We are committed to ensuring the very best for our child. We are working with other agencies to ensure our child's welfare is protected."

The 1,000-pupil school, in southern England, has given the lad a separate toilet and changing room in the sports hall. It is understood he hoped his transformation would go unnoticed as he was starting secondary education and children stepping up from other primary schools would not recognize him. But his former classmates at primary level DID spot the difference -- and quickly spread the word. The boy, who for years has told pals he yearns to be a girl, had to endure spiteful jibes and was asked by some kids: "Are you gay?"

Teachers stepped in with the emergency assembly, at which pupils were threatened with tough disciplinary action if they failed to treat him as a girl or use his new name. Some bewildered youngsters burst into tears. The mum, whose daughter was a classmate of the lad at primary school, said: "She told me the pupil is already a target for bullying. And what has really upset the parents is that the school didn't see fit to send us a letter first so we could explain it to our children in our own way.

"Parents surely have a right to know when their children are being confronted with such sensitive issues as gender realignment at such a young age. They were simply told, 'You may notice one pupil is not present in this assembly -- that is because the pupil is now a girl.' Kids are by nature immature and insensitive. It is not fair either for the child who is undergoing this change. The girl, as she now is, will go through hell because of how this has been handled."

The lad was absent from school yesterday because of the taunts. His family, who live on a council estate, have received threats and are under police protection. It is understood the head at his primary school insisted he was treated as a boy -- and used male toilets -- despite his frequent "girlie" behaviour. He wore a bikini instead of trunks at swimming lessons, dried himself on Barbie towels, rode a pink scooter to school and wore pink ribbons in his hair.

But a source at the secondary school, who referred to the pupil in both genders, said: "His parents have accepted he has now chosen to be a girl, and that's how he will be. She has not come into school since the assembly. There were things that went on in the community which have been extremely upsetting for the family.

"It was a knock-on effect from what was said in school. So they can't let her come in for her own safety. We have no idea exactly when she will be coming back, but she WILL be back." Transgender counsellor David Hawley last night paid tribute to the pupil's "strength of character."

He said: "It is very unusual for a child of that age to be that clear about what they want to do. She has had a lot of support from her parents. So I imagine she was comfortable with herself before going to school and now she is discovering it can be a nasty world, which is hard at that age."

Psychotherapist James Caspian said the child would not be allowed hormone treatment in the UK until passing puberty. Meanwhile he and the other kids would have to cope with the shockwaves caused by the switch. "These children are old enough to have picked up a lot of taboos from society," he said.

German Kim Petras -- born Tim -- became the world's youngest transsexual at 16 earlier this year.

[SMH, August 4, 2007]

A lunchtime stroll in Sydney's CBD will soon feel like an obstacle course as big retailers close their doors to make way for a $1 billion-plus redevelopment of the city centre. It is being played like a game of musical chairs, but by the time work is finished, Town Hall will boast a new park, CBD residents will finally have a choice of grocers and gourmet supermarkets and Pitt Street Mall will charge the highest shop rents in the country.

But before the gains will come plenty of pain.

The scope of work in the CBD, scheduled to begin in a few weeks, is enormous. New developments will extend all the way from the northern end of George Street, opposite Wynyard, to the redevelopment of the old Menzies Hotel and Wynyard station building to, Justin Hemmes's The Ivy - which comprises a boutique hotel and eateries - then south to the Skyvue office and shopping complex and through to the Gowings site on the corner of George and Market streets and the Lumiere project in the nearby cinema district.

It all begins when the Mid City Centre, which connects George and Pitt streets, closes soon. A new office tower and shopping centre will be built before Westfield embarks on its $600 million demolition and transformation of the big three, Sky Garden, Imperial Arcade and Centrepoint. The eastern and western corridors of the CBD will not be left out, with Castlereagh Street boasting luxury boutiques, while York Street will cater for the more affordable designers. The Mid City Centre's tenants -- which include Rebel Sport, HMV, Priceline, HobbyCo Toys, the Body Shop, Marcs fashion, Review and a host of smaller speciality stores -- must be out by September 13. While most are moving to other city sites, HMV music store will not reopen.

And while dodging cranes, trucks, broken footpaths and an army of construction workers will become the norm for city workers, the upside for shoppers will be a month of sales to get rid of stock.

Another Sydney landmark that is set to go is the nine-storey Woolworths building on the corner of Park and George streets. While the grocer still has eight years left on its lease, in the commercial world big tenants such as Woolworths need to begin examining their options. The City of Sydney bought the building for $17.3 million in the late 1980s and signalled plans to create a piazza and park to complement the historic sandstone Town Hall complex.

It has been many years since the CBD has had such a serious facelift. It was given a spit and polish in preparation for the 2000 Olympic Games, but has languished since then as the development of office skyscrapers took priority over shopping.

A walk through the prime shopping artery makes it difficult to envisage the halcyon days when the Pitt Street Mall commanded rents that once ranked it as the fifth most expensive shopping strip in the world, according to the annual Main Streets Across the World by the US company Cushman & Wakefield. Now it languishes at No. 1, with the average rent at $4990 a square metre -- a figure that has not changed for two years. Eight years ago the Swatch watch group paid a record $8000 a square metre to rent on the corner of Pitt and Market streets.

There are industry suggestions that rents could rise as high as $14,000 a square metre when the development is completed. According to Alex Alamsyah of Knight Frank retail services, another new shopping complex planned for the old Westpac site on the corner of King and George streets is set to house a flagship Apple Computer store, which will take up 3000 square metres over the ground, first and second floors. Rebel Sports is to make its new home in the basement.

Nearby, in Castlereagh Street, new luxury boutiques will join Tiffany & Co, Escada, Chanel, Bulgari and the new Omega watch outlet, opened two months ago. The British giant Burberry opened its first Australian boutique on King Street. The French design house Hermes has moved to a much larger store in Castlereagh Street, opposite David Jones. A few blocks away is the newest kid on the block: the Hemmes Ivy project, scheduled to open in December. According to Mr Alamsyah, who is handling the lease of the building, designers such as the pyjama seller Peter Alexander are in negotiations.

A redesign of the old Gowings site, which Amalgamated Holdings bought for nearly $70 million in April, has also begun. The owner plans to integrate its nearby State Theatre property with Gowings into a new theatre and arts area. The biggest crater in the CBD, due to become home to the Skyvue development, will incorporate a 10-storey office tower, lobby and three levels of retail straddling George, York and Market streets. Rumours abound that the German-based Aldi supermarket chain is among those looking at the giant basement.

The emergence of Aldi and Hong Kong's grocery giant Citysuper, beneath Lumiere, the residential tower in George Street's cinema district, is bound to fuel a battle for the city's grocery dollar. Coles owns four shops in the CBD, but these barely match the $75 million annual turnover of Woolworths' Town Hall site. Citysuper is expected to open a gourmet supermarket, giving David Jones's Food Hall a run for its money.

Of course the city has seen all this before -- when Westfield rebuilt Sydney Central Plaza -- but that was just one property.

SIR ELTON JOHN RECEIVES AWARD FROM AMERICA

Sincerely,
Scott Campbell
Executive Director
Elton John AIDS Foundation

[New Scientist, June 13, 2007]

In the beginning the Australian drought was fun. A talking point over the barbecue, an excuse to shower with a lover or spend more cloud-free days with friends at the beach. Tales of thirst-crazed camels rampaging through country towns merely added to the excitement. Sometime last year, the mood changed -- perhaps with the first inkling that water restrictions had all but destroyed urban gardens and that agricultural production across the country had fallen by a fifth. Last month, when water storage fell so low that energy supplies were threatened, the sense of panic became palpable.

Australia is facing a national crisis, one that promises to transform the country, inexorably changing where people live, what they eat, what they do in their spare time, and -- most threatening of all -- their future economic well-being.

Whether Australia can adapt remains to be seen, and water experts around the world will be following closely as regions as far afield as the south-east and south-west US, and south-west China grapple with their own droughts. "Water will still come out of the tap, but at what cost?" asks Chris Mitchell of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (CMAR) in Melbourne. "Will we adapt and ameliorate the problem or adapt and exacerbate it."

"Water will still come out of the tap. But at what cost?"

Across the continent, average rainfall has actually increased marginally over the past century. But there has been a shift in where rain falls. Since the 1970s the unpopulated regions of the north have got wetter, but the southern and eastern regions, where most people live, are drier. To make matters worse, Australia's average temperatures have been increasing at an accelerating rate in the past 20 years. Seven of the past 10 years have been hotter than average, and four states have just clocked up their warmest autumn on record. Higher temperatures increase evaporation, making a bad drought even worse.

Today large swathes of six of Australia's seven states and territories, and all of Australia's major cities, are officially "in drought" and have been for years. That's in spite of the rain that has fallen over the past few weeks, and the once-in-30-years storms and floods that hit Hunter valley, north of Sydney, last weekend. Because the land is bone dry, it has simply sucked up the rain. That has helped some farmers but water run-off is still well below average and the level of reservoirs remains perilously low.

Melbourne's water storage stands at 28 per cent of its capacity. Sydney's is at 37 per cent. Perth, where rainfall has fallen 15 per cent in the past half-century, and inflows into the dams by more than 40 per cent, now accepts drought as the norm, and has dropped its expected annual catchment from 340 to 180 gigalitres. Last year, just 120 gigalitres flowed into its dams. "People have been taken by surprise at the speed this has happened," says John Langford, director of UniWater, a research initiative shared by Monash and Melbourne Universities.

What makes the Big Dry more shocking is that just 10 years ago, Australia was considered drought-proof. Precisely because the country is so susceptible to huge variations in rainfall, the nation-builders of the 1950s and 1960s equipped city and country with massive multi-year reservoirs, providing the highest water storage capacity per capita in the world, and plumbed in hundreds of kilometres of irrigation channels. What they hadn't bargained for was the thirst of the country's growing population, or just how brutal a drought could be.

Australia sits at the centre of three oceans, the Indian, the Pacific and the Southern. Its reputation as the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and the one with the most variable rainfall (in the 1970s, large parts of Australia were beset with floods), depends on a complex interplay between these oceans and the atmosphere.

The best understood system is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. During El Niño events, which usually peak in the Australian summer, warm water develops in the eastern and south-eastern tropical Pacific, triggering differences in air pressure that drive rain that should fall onto eastern Australia out over the ocean. Australia has had two such El Niños in quick succession, one in 2002 and 2003, and one in 2006 and 2007, with no intervening wet periods.

Since 1997, the Indian Ocean Dipole -- a cooling of the tropical eastern Indian Ocean, and a warming of the west -- has also been more active, reducing spring rains in south-east Australia. Finally, winter rains have dropped off due to changes in the Southern Annular Mode, a climate pattern that prevents rain-bearing low-pressure systems reaching southern Australia. A large portion of the drought-inducing changes is undoubtedly due to natural variation. But there is the possibility that climate change, especially rising temperatures, has turned a severe drought into a historic one. In Australia's worst-hit region, Perth and the south-west, increases in greenhouse gases account for about half of the reduction in rainfall, according to an analysis of 70 experiments using 21 climate models by Wenju Cai of CMAR and CSIRO colleague Tim Cowan (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, p L247098).

For many water experts the spectre of climate change makes arguments over the cause of the current drought almost irrelevant: the most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was confident that climate change would make the southern regions of Australia where most people live warmer and drier, and more susceptible to extreme variations in weather. In other words, Australia may survive this drought, but there will be more to come. "For our major cities, supply will fail to meet demand by 40 per cent by 2025. We will need another 800 to 1000 gigalitres per year," says Tom Hatton, director of CSIRO's Water for a Healthy Country Flagship. In comparison, Perth, Australia's fourth largest city, uses 300 gigalitres a year. "That's based on projected population growth, and in hindsight, on rather optimistic estimates of the improved efficiency with which we can use water, and rather conservative estimates for declines in rainfall."

Can technology keep the water flowing? All but the greenest policy-makers now see desalination plants as essential, at the very least as back-ups to see Australia through this and future droughts. But you need huge amounts of energy to pump seawater through membrane filters, and the waste brine created by desalination is bad news for the environment.

Perth completed its first desalination plant last year, with a new wind farm being built to supply the electricity and offset the 24 megawatts required to run the plant. Desalination now supplies 17 per cent of the city's drinking water and a second plant has been commissioned. Sydney is building one, and Melbourne is expected to follow suit. Industrial plants which depend on a secure water supply, such as BHP Billiton's copper and uranium mine in South Australia, are considering building their own large desalination plants.

Recycling waste water could be a more sustainable option because it uses roughly a third of the energy required to desalinate seawater. But last year Toowoomba, Queensland's largest inland city, overwhelmingly voted to reject adding recycled effluent to the water supply, making politicians elsewhere nervous about introducing similar measures. Nonetheless, Queensland's government hopes to start recycling sewage before Brisbane's main water supply runs dry early in 2009. Most experts agree that recycled water will be supplementing Australian drinking supplies within the decade.

Even the politically unpopular and costly option of piping water from one catchment area to another -- robbing Peter to pay Paul -- will become more common. "Desalination, recycling and piping all cost more energy per unit volume of water than traditional reservoirs," says Hatton. That worries climate experts, because more energy tends to mean more greenhouse gases, which in turn will exacerbate climate change and future droughts. Hatton believes we can still save the day by reducing demand for water, for example by increasing its price, and by making the same water stretch further.

The Water for a Healthy Country Flagship is developing new techniques to bring down the economic and environmental costs of desalination and recycling, and to improve how water use is measured, which in turn will make water use more efficient. It is also working on new storage techniques, including "managed aquifer recharge," in which partly recycled water is pumped into underground aquifers. Not only does that reduce evaporation, which can be significant from a dam surface, but water quality also improves with time as pathogens die off.

Not everyone is convinced this will be enough. "You can fiddle around with technology, but there is a limit to the amount of water available. Population needs to be part of the discussion," says Graeme Pearman, director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University in Melbourne. He and others say people are failing to address the impact of Australia's burgeoning population, expected to grow from 21 million to between 25 and 33 million by 2051, for fear of appearing racist or anti-development.

That attitude may be starting to change. In March, delegates at a high-profile conference in Canberra on population and water use discussed the need both for a national population policy that took into account the scarcity of resources such as water, and for more strategic regional planning that ensures new settlements follow the water rather than vice versa. Barney Foran, a policy analyst at The Australian National University in Canberra, says Australians must also address their per capita water use. When you factor in the water used to make products such as food, drink, clothing and newspapers, the average Australian consumes roughly six to eight times more water than what their domestic water meter records, with more affluent Australians consuming twice as much as less affluent ones.

Meanwhile, illogical as it seems, the biggest obstacle to dealing with an ever drier Australia could be rain itself. "We have a window of opportunity," says Quenton Grafton of The Australian National University. "My concern is that if the drought breaks then people's attention will move on to something else. Five years down the track when we have another drought - which will happen - we won't be ready."

[From issue 2608 of New Scientist magazine, June 13, 2007, page 8-11]

See statistics of Sydney water supplies HERE

Read about the options for a desalination plant HERE

See how you can help by installing a rainwater tank HERE