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Former B'nai B'rith head admits downloading 9 hours of child pornography for "education"

Ex B'nai Brith head ashamed of child porn

Friday, October 29, 2010


The former director of B'nai Brith Quebec says he's ashamed he had pornographic videos on his computer, but Bill Surkis maintains he's not a sex offender.

Surkis, 71, has admitted to downloading nearly nine hours of videos of men engaged in sexual activity with girls, but said it was because he was curious.

At his sentencing hearing in a Quebec Superior Court in Montreal on Thursday Surkis's lawyer asked him how he would feel if his name were added to the national sex offender registry as the Crown is requesting.

The father and grandfather said he still has contributions to make to his community and he wouldn't be able to make them if he were registered.

The Crown and the defence are recommending Surkis be sentenced to 45 days in jail to be served on weekends, the minimum sentence allowed by law.

They're also recommending he be placed on probation for three years and do 240 hours of community service.

Explicit files were discovered on Surkis's computer when he took it in for repairs in 2008.

The technician contacted Montreal police who uncovered 21 videos and dozens of photos, including images of girls aged six to 13.

Surkis's lawyer said in November 2009 that the videos were downloaded for research reasons.

"The purpose of his viewing the child pornography material [was] to educate himself on the topic of child pornography," lawyer Steven Slimovitch told CBC News outside court. "Then he would go into schools and give lectures on people abusing people."

But, prosecutors argued in court that there was no evidence to back up that claim. Surkis had not been hired by anyone to research child pornography and had not begun work on a study, they said.

In May, Surkis agreed to a plea bargain. In return for pleading guilty to charges of possessing and accessing child pornography, Crown prosecutor Cynthia Gyenizse dropped a charge of distributing child pornography.

Surkis served as the academic dean at John Abbott College on Montreal's west island for 22 years. He also served as the executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Montreal.

Slimovitch provided the court with eight letters of reference on his client's behalf in which Surkis is described as honest, truthful, and a man of exemplary character.

Gyenizse said although Surkis may be at low risk to re-offend, she said the risk is not zero.

She said the court needs to send a message that when people do what Surkis did they help feed the child pornography industry, creating more child victims.

"Possession will help the people who produce child pornography to produce more because there's a demand for it so there's an industry for it," she said.

Judge Céline Lamontagne will hand down her sentence Dec. 9.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/10/28/sentence-montreal-pornography.html?ref=rss#ixzz13oN47ig0

Learning route on women’s access to land in East Africa

Kampala, Sunday 7th of March
ILC-Procasur-ULA Learning Route: “Action-oriented research and Policy Influence for Women’s Access to Land in Africa. The experience of Uganda and Kenya”

I arrived late last night at Entebbe airport and woke this morning to a sunny day – it has been raining buckets here in the past week, so this seems a good omen for our Learning Route!

The Route, organised jointly by International Land Coalition (ILC), Procasur, and ULA (Uganda Land Alliance), both of them members of the Coalition, starts tomorrow and continues until 17 March.

The Route includes case studies from the project “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action” ILC has been carrying out in cooperation with the Makerere Institute for Social Research – MISR (Makerere University in Kampala) and the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies – PLAAS (University of the Western Cape in Cape Town) over the last two and a half years. The aim is to link research and action by bringing together different stakeholders in small, action-oriented, research projects, accompanied and supported by MISR and PLAAS on the research side and by ILC on the advocacy side. All projects (except Rwanda, unfortunately) are participating in the Route with two people each, with one person coming from the community where research was carried out.

Having been involved in the coordination of the project from Rome, I can't wait to see what has been happening at the community level!

The Route also includes two panels on the work of Uganda Land Alliance and Kenya Land Alliance on influencing national policy, to which different stakeholders including policy-makers, are invited. Originally, the Uganda panel was suppose to be tomorrow, but it turns out that 8 March is a public holiday in Uganda. Why? Because it is International Women’s Day, of course! What better day to start a Learning Route on women's land rights?

Over the next 9 days, we will travel across Uganda and Kenya with a group of 25 people (mainly women!) from 11 countries, including Uganda and Kenya, of course, but also Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe (other countries with small research projects under the above mentioned project) – as well as Bangladesh and Bolivia (the representatives from ILC members taking a lead role in coordinating work on women’s land rights in Asia and Latin America respectively).

Tomorrow we open the Route here in Kampala and after lunch we set off to our first destination in Uganda on the Learning Route Bus! We are heading to Kagadi to see the work of URDT (Uganda Rural Development Training) on “Voices of Women’s Aspirations over land and land matters: The case of Kibaale district” from up close. More to follow in the next few days!

Greetings from Kampala to Rome,
Sabine

P.S.: For more information on the Route, go to www.landcoalition.org and click the banner! For more on the IDRC- funded project “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action”, go to: http://www.landcoalition.org/?p=2891

The Workshop on Knowledge and Technology Exchange for Enhanced Quality of IFAD/ICARDA Operations in NENA continues

The “Knowledge and Technology Exchange for Enhanced Quality of IFAD/ICARDA Operations in the Near East and North Africa Workshop” was opened by Mahmoud El Solh, Director-General of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) and Nadim Khouri, Director of the Near East and North Africa Division of IFAD in Aleppo, Syria, last evening (Monday, 26/10/09). About 70 workshop participants, including staff members of the two institutions and other experts and resource persons from IFAD supported projects in NENA, attended the opening ceremony.

In his opening speech, Mahmoud El Solh, Director General of ICARDA said the workshop will deepen the strategic partnership between ICARDA and IFAD. “This is our opportunity to learn from IFAD colleagues on the sustainable agricultural development aspects because our research agenda should target such aspects, El Solh said.” “At the same time,” he added, “I am happy to see so many Country Programme Managers who can see what ICARDA has to offer of technologies that may facilitate their work in development.” He affirmed that there are many technologies that are winning grounds quickly, some others are really new and some technologies that need more fine tuning to meet the needs of the ultimate target group, which is the resource poor farmers.

On his part, the Director of IFAD’s Near East and North Africa Division, Nadim Khouri, thanked the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic and ICARDA for hosting and organizing the workshop. He said “the objective of this learning event is to update our knowledge on enhanced rainfed agricultural production systems.” “About 80% of cultivated land in the world is rainfed while about 60% of the food produced is produced by systems that do not rely on irrigation,” he said. Large numbers of resource-poor rural people live in dry areas, with limited opportunities to enhance their capacities to improve food production and standards of living. He added: “We understand that poor people have their own strategies to move out of poverty and the best strategy we can have is to understand their strategies and help them realize them and multiply their assets.”

Khouri further stated: “We basically have US$ 300 million that are going to come out of IFAD funds for the region over the next three years.” On the basis of 1:1 dollar cofinancing, IFAD could attract a similar investment from co-financiers of its projects, bringing the total external funding to US$ 600 million. Kouri said: “Normally, the largest co-financing comes from the recipient countries and beneficiaries of development projects themselves. So if our investment starts with US$300 million by the end we will have about US$1 billion basically entrusted in us and our partners to decide how to allocate in the next three years.”

Khouri emphasized that helping the most vulnerable, IFAD’s target group, requires greater efforts to make best use of available resources, knowledge and technologies to enhance the quality of the Fund’s interventions in the region, which is facing increasing challenges under climate change conditions. The learning event should help the staff of the Near East and North Africa Division further enhance their capacity to reflect upon the newly acquired knowledge and to boost the impact of IFAD’s operations.

The opening ceremony was followed by a dinner reception, which provided and initial opportunity for the experts and staff members of the two institutions and participating resource persons from IFAD-supported projects to meet and exchange views on various issues under consideration.

Most of the participants expressed satisfaction that the workshop will strengthen country capacities in the NENA region on the latest agricultural packages available from research. Many indicated that it would also would help align ICARDA operations with the Country Strategic Opportunities Papers (COSOPs) and IFAD loan projects. The workshop should also help foster a strategic partnership between IFAD and ICARDA country programmes and take stock of joint initiatives and assess future collaborations.

On Tuesday, 27 October 2009


The first day for the workshop started with a PowerPoint presentation by the Director General of ICARDA, Mahmoud El Solh on research outputs and approaches to enhance food security and improved livelihoods in dry areas. The presentation dealt with constraints leading to food insecurity and poverty in Dry Areas; technologies towards food security and better livelihoods; approaches for technology transfer; and ICARDA’s Strategic Plan 2007-2016 on Agricultural Research for Development in Dry Areas. He underlined that the severest impact of climate change will be in the NENA region. He underlined the need for new technologies to face the challenge of ever scarcer water resources. In this regard, El Solh highlighted the importance of developing more drought tolerant varieties of crops; improved management of water resources; and alternative solutions to traditional irrigation including the use of supplementary irrigation methodologies in rainfed areas.

Following a plenary discussion, a group photo was taken for all participants who then broke into four working groups dedicated to discussing in depth the following areas of work:

• Group 1: Improved agricultural productivity and food security – Crops
• Group 2: Improving agricultural productivity and food security – Livestock
• Group 3: Water and natural resource management and climate change
• Group 4: Value chains, microfinance and market diagnostics

Each of the four groups attended and discussed presentations by ICARDA scientists, IFAD experts and resource persons. Following a couple of hours of discussions, the working group formulated their findings and presented brief reports to the plenary.

Focusing on crops, the first group presented what has been identified as the main challenges in this area. This includes, among others, the challenge of enhancing research for development and expanding its coverage to larger scale projects as well as the challenge of scaling up innovation and technology dissemination and outreach. The group also identified a number of constraints to overcome, such as the need for expanding the lack of awareness and “buy-in” at the national level; lack of capacity to indemnify products and creating enabling system of support linked to markets and a disconnect between National Agricultural Systems (NARs) and the national priorities. The group also highlighted the weakness of marketing systems and trade issues as well as the need to develop alternative crops, including alternatives to the cultivation of poppies, and the need for policy reforms to enable small farmers to compete for market opportunities.

The report of the second group, which focused on livestock, indicated that the discussion was based on the experience of the IFAD-supported Mashreg-Magreb project, which has developed animal feed technologies and helped establish community development organizations and approaches. The group outlined the needs for improved feeding technologies and alternative fodder and feed resources, improved milking and cheese processing with a focus on shifting market demand. Among others, a range of approaches were discussed for enhanced adaptation rate of such technologies.

Addressing water and natural resources issues, the third group affirmed that a new water productivity concept has emerged with the climate change challenge and increase severity of water scarcity. It recommended that new policies and strategies at different levels should be accommodated to improve farmers and nomads productivity ensuring good life quality and livelihood. Land productivity and water productivity concepts are to be seen together during the design and implementation phases of projects. The group also underlined the importance of mapping of resources and management of natural resources using GIS, indicating that ICT is important to have a role in transfer of technologies to farmers and nomads within search Institutes and projects. The development of technologies for scaling up and adoption requires engagement of research and development projects to fill in the gaps in production.

Dealing with value chains, markets and diagnostics, the fourth group focused its discussions on the analysis of the value-added chains of Onions and Pomegranate and the constrains facing small producers. It concluded a series of recommendations, including, among others, the possibility of increasing the use of seed capitals and start-up capital to introduce and develop the activity, institutionalization of small farmer groups and their role in processing, transfer of resources and empowering of small growers in the value-chain.

Following this first half a day of brain storming, the workshop participants moving their debates to the field visiting three ICARDA supported projects.

IFAD and ICARDA hold a regional knowledge and technology transfer workshop in Aleppo, Syria

Monday, 26 Ocober 2009

With emphasis on rainfed agriculture, a three day regional information exchange and knowledge sharing workshop starts in Aleppo, Syria this evening. Some 70 staff members of IFAD, IFAD-supported projects in the Near East and North Africa region (NENA) and the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) are expected to participate. The “Knowledge and Technology Exchange for Enhanced Quality of IFAD/ICARDA operations in the NENA region” workshop aims at strengthening PN’s capacity to incorporate the latest research-generated agricultural Science and Technology (S&T) packages and other up-scalable innovations in its future operations in the region.

The learning event will take place at ICARDA headquarters with several field sessions at the sites of IFAD-supported development projects and ICARDA research stations. It will provide learning opportunities for the participants to identify and discuss major needs and priority areas that could benefit the design of development projects for NENA countries. The field work should provide ample opportunity to demonstrate the technological packages in the areas of:

• improving agricultural productivity and food security
• adaptation to climate change and natural resource management
• upgrading pro-poor untilization of value chains and markets
• diagnostics for targeting pro-poor research and development investments

The workshop will reach its objectives through wide application of several KM activities & tools, including round table discussions, focus groups (World Café), informal meetings, and direct interviewing of beneficiaries from IFAD and ICARDA projects. The participants will select specific themes (out of a list of 22 themes extending from themes like rangeland rehabilitation and water harvesting to the themes like biodiversity, gene management and biofuels) as the main focus of their work during the workshop. Designated staff will facilitate plenary sessions, contribute as resource persons, lead the field visit groups, and generate success stories from the field. The event will end with a divisional PN retreat that will examine a number of deliverables including the Divisional Management and Medium Term Plans.

Besides the benefits of cross fertilization and lifting of the overall team spirit, the workshop is expected to yield concrete deliverables, including:
• 20 learning notes on available technologies and approaches in rain-fed agriculture
• 6 success stories (human stories) from the field
• validated Divisional Management Plan 2010 and a PN Medium term plan 2010-2012
• strengthened networking and systematic knowledge sharing mechanisms between the country programme and IFAD HQ
• Outlines of 2-3 specific projects that would build on ICARDA’s knowledge and expertise in areas relevant to IFAD’s thematic priorities in the NENA region