Almost every country in the world is affected by the scourge of human trafficking a UN report will reveal today

Almost every country in the world is affected by the scourge of human trafficking, a UN report will reveal today. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which has compiled the first such study from open sources, there are 127 countries of origin, mainly developing countries, and 137 destination countries, mainly in the industrialised world.The report also highlights 98 transit countries.
“The fact that slavery – in the form of human trafficking – still exists in the 21st century shames us all,” said UNODC’s chief, Antonio Maria Costa.The report, to be presented to the UN crime commission meeting in Vienna, calls for the protection of victims, particularly women and children, and for the systematic prosecution of offenders. In his first public pronouncement in three months, the leader of al-Qa’ida also appeared to justify attacks on civilians in the West by declaring that they bore responsibility for “the attack on Islam” being carried out by their governments.. Osama bin Laden called for his followers across the Islamic world to support the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories and start a holy war in Darfur, according to a new audio tape issued yesterday. It is demanding a new assembly to rewrite the constitution, and debate whether Nepal should have a monarchy at all..

The French, whose caf?are disappearing (some sources claim up to 75 per cent have closed down since the Sixties, driven out by McDonald’s, television and le stress) restrict themselves to a noncommittal grimace.Americans don’t so much preserve their past as reconstruct it without too much concern for historical accuracy, or even for whether the past they are preserving is actually their own. whatever it is, if it has outlived its usefulness, two or three will be gathered together in its name, drawing up the articles of association to preserve it.Other nations do not do this. And diesel engines, too, even though they aren’t in the past yet, which you could also say of computers and software and old computer games: are they in the past? Really?
They are. Look up “computer preservation society” on Google and you get 11 million hits. Given the nature of Google (how curious that you get no little advertisements when you google “organ preservation”; you’d have thought that would be a goldmine for the big-schlong-and-Viagra crowd) that 11 million doesn’t tell us much, except that there’s a sizeable crowd of obsessives out there, spending their weekends munching beetroot sandwiches and talking fondly of the golden age of computing.Or of cinema organs, church organs, fairground organs, barrel organs; of public clocks, The Goon Show, television programmes in general, old films, railways, the Trident, the Humber Keel and Sloop, the great British Breakfast, Waltham Windmill, windmills in general… Here we turn around, going with the current, hell-for-leather towards a golden, wonderful past filled with milestones and hedgehogs, greasy spoon caf?and lighthouses, beer and sandwiches, tall ships and glossy, panting steam locomotives smelling of salt and tar, and of hot brass and coal-smoke respectively.

It is a curiously British obsession Not for us the helpless romanticism of Scott Fitzgerald. “So we beat on,” he wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” There’s Americans for you, noses pointing towards the future, paddling like hell towards the shining future, innovation, modernity

It’s different over here. One in 10 women employed a cleaner, but six out of 10 women “still cleaned up before she or he arrives”.. But many were aware of the pressures exerted by media images of women as perfectionist home-makers such as the characters of the American television series Desperate Housewives.Nearly half of those interviewed (46 per cent) described themselves as “cleanaholics”, while 46 per cent wished they could “cut down on cleaning”.Eight out of 10 respondents compared the cleanliness of their home with other people’s, while 70 per cent feared they would be thought “lazy” if their homes were untidy.Dee Smith, executive producer of the channel’s Cleanaholics series, believed that “cleaning was the new therapy”.”British women feel happier and more in control of their lives when their home is clean and tidy – and judging by their high-powered cleaning habits there are more desperate housewives on this side of the Atlantic than the other,” she said.The respondents spent an average of £9.70 each week on household cleaning products. Nearly six out of 10 (58 per cent) defended their role in the home and said they “felt depressed if their house was a mess”, while 59 per cent said “untidiness and clutter made them feel tense”.Only a tiny minority of 4 per cent admitted to being averse to cleaning the home, saying that it was “a waste of time and effort”.The survey of 2,000 women found that cleaning chores featured higher on the average list of priorities than personal grooming – a woman spent two hours and 23 minutes cleaning and tidying, while only 52 minutes on personal appearance.In spite of the feelgood factor around housework, 57 per cent of women admitted that cleaning exhausted them, particularly as 71 per cent also had a job.One-third of all women claimed “cleaning gives them more satisfaction than sex”.Although only 22 per cent said they actively enjoyed cleaning and tidying, the majority (64 per cent) said the “results made them happy” and half said it was “visually joyful” which left them feeling “proud of their achievements”.

But 59 per cent of the women interviewed would have it no other way and said “cleaning makes them feel in control of their lives”, while 60 per cent said they found it “mentally therapeutic”.Where 20 years ago housework was seen by many as a sign of female subjugation, the tide appears to have turned. In an age when women are making economic strides and excelling in the workplace, the one thing that gives the majority a sense of empowerment is a good go around the house with the vacuum cleaner – followed by some cleaning and dusting.
The online study, commissioned by the Discovery Home and Health TV website, found that the average woman between 18 and 80 spent nine years, two months and 25 days of her adult waking life cleaning and tidying. There was a time when the modern woman insisted her partner did 50 per cent of the housework – or iron his own shirts at least. But the postmodern female has more than made peace with doing the domestic chores, and has embraced housework as “mentally therapeutic”, according to a survey. Under grey skies and an almost constant drizzle, some 40,000 people showed yesterday that there are many ways to complete the London Marathon.. One was dressed in a suit of armour and dragging an 8ft-tall dragon Two paused half-way round to get married. And another wheeled his way around the 26.2 mile course quicker than anyone in history.