MANILA, June 23 (Xinhua) — Casamudin Riga, a displaced Marawi resident temporarily sheltered in an evacuation center, is anxious about the situation of thousands of evacuees that fled the southern Philippine city over the ongoing fighting between government forces and militants allied with the Islamic State (IS).
"Our situation inside the evacuation center is not easy.
Fighting is ongoing, and civilians who are trapped or are displaced continue to face challenging situations," said Roberto Petronio, head of the ICRC sub-delegation in Mindanao.
He said limited food and drinking water supply, as well as access to sanitation facilities, remain as the most urgent needs of displaced residents.
"The rainy season has started, and thousands are still scattered in evacuation centers, while many families have sought shelter with relatives," the ICRC said.
While evacuation efforts are underway, the ICRC said an estimated 300-500 people remain trapped inside the city.
The aid agency said efforts to secure a humanitarian corridor should continue to ensure the safe evacuation of the trapped civilians.
Presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella said efforts continued to clear Marawi of remaining armed terrorist that continued to pose pockets of resistance to the advancing troops.
There are also continuing efforts to rescue trapped residents "to include those held as hostages (and) recovery of civilian casualties or cadavers," Abella said.
"The Duterte administration is now preparing a comprehensive multi-year Marawi reconstruction plan," Abella said, adding that an inter-agency task force will be convened to make an assessment of the situation.

Caroline Rigby and Brian Johnson heading to Glastonbury Festival as Water Warriors with Water Aid.
A WELLINGTON couple is heading to Glastonbury Festival to support a water charity.
Caroline Rigby, leader of the Blackdown Community Choir, and her husband Brian Johnson, will be heading to the music festival to support Water Aid as Water Warriors.
The pair will be part of a 500-strong team handing out free fresh water to festival goers at one of 13 water kiosks.
“We’re going to be working at the water kiosks where we will be giving out free fresh drinking water to thirsty revellers which is especially important as it may be a hot weekend.
“We will also be supplying re-usable stainless steel water-bottles to help save resources.” Mr Johnson said: “Access to clean water and improved sanitation really can transform lives.
“This will be a great opportunity to get fellow festival-goers thinking about the realities of life for children living without clean water and toilets and to help engage thousands of people in a cause we feel passionately about.” Mrs Rigby has supported the charity over the last 13 years through her work leading choirs and raising funds through the Sing for Water project.
Mr Johnson attended the second Glastonbury Festival in 1971 and helped to build part of the first Pyramid Stage.
Water Aid volunteers will be hoping to gather 40,000 signatures at the festival, alongside giving out free water, to support its new petition The Water Fight which calls on the UK government to make sure all plans for schools globally include taps and toilets for children.
The charity’s volunteers will also be collecting rubbish for recycling and manning the toilets.

Natarajan is a one-man army, who is trying to make a dent in that ocean.
He has earned the epithet of being Delhi’s "Water Man" because in a single day, he delivers 2,000 litres of potable water to the city’s urban power.
Watchmen, household help, rickshaw pullers and children from a nearby slum began frequenting his house at all hours of the day to make use of the clean water.
"I live in an affluent area.
What does it cost to give people water?
That one pot has multiplied to 60.
Every morning, Natarajan wakes up at 4.30am, gets into his modified van with a huge water tank where the seats should be and makes his first water run.
Natarajan feels he still has a long way to go before he can make a difference.
He said: "My voice is not loud enough yet – it needs to be much more forceful.
His dream is that one day all homes in Delhi will keep a pot of water outside to help the poor.

Turning Salt Water into.. Fresh Water.
This new method of distillation is game changing.
The process requires a huge amount of energy to produce enough heat needed to boil the water.
According to Water treatment expert and co-author of the study, Qilin Li: Direct solar desalination could be a game changer for some of the estimated 1 billion people who lack access to clean drinking water This off-grid technology is capable of providing sufficient clean water for family use in a compact footprint, and it can be scaled up to provide water for larger communities.
By using a technique called membrane distillation.
When the nanoparticles are added to the membrane, it’ll heat up by itself.
Unlike the distillation method used at present, this method will not require energy to heat the water.
It’s called "nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation" technology, or NESMD.
The team tested the NESMD chamber and managed to get a water production rate of about 6 litres per square metre per hour.
Header: Shutterstock

Davis Smith knows what he’s doing when it comes to e-commerce. A 38-year-old serial entrepreneur, he founded, and later sold, an online pool table retailer straight out of business school; that venture lead him to cofound Baby.com.br, Brazil’s largest baby care retailer, for which he raised over $40 million in venture capital funding. But when Smith approached his attorney, with whom he’d worked through all his startup ventures, with the idea to found an outdoor gear brand with a humanitarian mission—and incorporate, from the beginning, as a benefit corporation—his attorney said no way. “He just told me, ‘Look, no one incorporates as a benefit corporation from inception,” Smith tells Fast Company. In 31 states (including Utah, where Smith is based), benefit corporation legislation allows businesses to incorporate while agreeing to support a wider mission than just appeasing shareholders—that could mean pledging to mitigate environmental problems, providing services to in-need communities, or more broadly, contributing to the “general public benefit.” The idea behind benefit corporations, as Fast Company has previously written, is that the impact-focused nature of these ventures should allow founders to pursue more humanitarian goals without fear of being sued by their investors for not immediately raking in profits. But even with that leeway, Smith’s attorney saw launching as a benefit corporation as a risky move. “He said we should incorporate as a C corporation like everybody else, then convert to a benefit corporation once we’d figured out how to make the business work,” Smith says. Smith did not take that advice. He founded Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear and apparel e-commerce brand, in 2013 as a benefit corporation, and began to raise venture capital funds from there—Cotopaxi is the first of the approximately 4,000 existing benefit corporations to take that route. “One of the biggest ideas behind Cotopaxi was the belief that I could have a bigger impact by building a business than I could if I just did humanitarian work on my own,” Smith says. “If there’s an investor that won’t invest in me because I founded a benefit corporation, and am giving some of my money away from the get-go, that’s not the right investor for us.” For Smith, his foray into the outdoor gear industry necessitated a social-impact approach. Growing up in Latin America, where his father, who spoke fluent Spanish, worked as an engineer, Smith became highly attuned to issues of global poverty and inequality from a young age. “My first memories as a four-year-old, having moved down there from the States, were seeing other children my age…

Davis Smith knows what he’s doing when it comes to e-commerce. A 38-year-old serial entrepreneur, he founded, and later sold, an online pool table retailer straight out of business school; that venture lead him to cofound Baby.com.br, Brazil’s largest baby care retailer, for which he raised over $40 million in venture capital funding. But when Smith approached his attorney, with whom he’d worked through all his startup ventures, with the idea to found an outdoor gear brand with a humanitarian mission—and incorporate, from the beginning, as a benefit corporation—his attorney said no way. “He just told me, ‘Look, no one incorporates as a benefit corporation from inception,” Smith tells Fast Company. In 31 states (including Utah, where Smith is based), benefit corporation legislation allows businesses to incorporate while agreeing to support a wider mission than just appeasing shareholders—that could mean pledging to mitigate environmental problems, providing services to in-need communities, or more broadly, contributing to the “general public benefit.” The idea behind benefit corporations, as Fast Company has previously written, is that the impact-focused nature of these ventures should allow founders to pursue more humanitarian goals without fear of being sued by their investors for not immediately raking in profits. But even with that leeway, Smith’s attorney saw launching as a benefit corporation as a risky move. “He said we should incorporate as a C corporation like everybody else, then convert to a benefit corporation once we’d figured out how to make the business work,” Smith says. Smith did not take that advice. He founded Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear and apparel e-commerce brand, in 2013 as a benefit corporation, and began to raise venture capital funds from there—Cotopaxi is the first of the approximately 4,000 existing benefit corporations to take that route. “One of the biggest ideas behind Cotopaxi was the belief that I could have a bigger impact by building a business than I could if I just did humanitarian work on my own,” Smith says. “If there’s an investor that won’t invest in me because I founded a benefit corporation, and am giving some of my money away from the get-go, that’s not the right investor for us.” For Smith, his foray into the outdoor gear industry necessitated a social-impact approach. Growing up in Latin America, where his father, who spoke fluent Spanish, worked as an engineer, Smith became highly attuned to issues of global poverty and inequality from a young age. “My first memories as a four-year-old, having moved down there from the States, were seeing other children my age…

Several US senators spoke out this week on the importance of net neutrality to innovation and free speech. They are right. The Internet has become our public square, our newspaper, our megaphone. The Federal Communications Commission is trying to turn it in something more akin to commercial cable TV, and we all have to work together to stop it. What makes the Internet revolutionary is the ability of every user to create news and culture and participate in conversations with people all across the globe. Mass consumption of entertainment products may be big business and may even help drive adoption, but it’s not new and empowering like the opportunity to participate in speech on an infinite variety of topics. As the Supreme Court recently observed, Internet platforms “can provide perhaps the most powerful mechanism available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard.” Seven in ten American adults regularly use at least one Internet social networking service. Facebook alone has more than 1.79 billion monthly active users around the world. Twitter has over 310 million monthly active users who publish more than 500 million tweets each day. Instagram has over 600 million monthly users who upload over 95 million photos every day. Snapchat has over 100 million daily users who send and watch over 10 billion videos per day. And that’s just a small sampling of the commercial Internet platforms many of us use everyday. Millions more log into sites like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, news outlets, government services and local libraries to access a wealth of information and…

CSC to examine State Water Policy NL Correspondent SRINAGAR: A six member cabinet sub-committee be examine the proposal of J&K water policy, which says “unreliable” water supply system has the potential of causing “social unrest” in the state.
It was framed in the backdrop of the cabinet decision to examine the draft to make the policy more comprehensive.
It has been tasked to submit its report within a period of one month.
“Rapid growth in demand for water due to population growth, urbanization and changing lifestyle pose serious challenges to water security,” it reads.
It states that access to safe water for drinking and other domestic needs, continues to be a problem in many areas.
The draft of the policy says that public agencies in charge of taking water related decisions tend to take these on their own without consultation with stakeholders, often resulting in “poor and unreliable service characterized by inequities of various kinds”.
The draft also stresses on preparation of the master plan for the flood-prone areas, and called for various measures to protect the valley from floods in future.
“Measures to establish the extensive networks for flood forecasting to give timely warnings to the people likely to be effected shall also be outlined.
A roadmap for determination of the limits of the flood basins and the necessary exercises to be carried out shall be prepared,” it reads.
The State had enacted Jammu and Kashmir State Water Resources (Regulation and Management) Act for regulating water resources, ensuring judicious, equitable and sustainable management, allocation and utilization of water resources and fixing the rates for use of water in 2010.

Make Public Drinking Water Fountains Great Again.
This cost may increase somewhat depending on the purchase, installation, and maintenance costs for each drinking fountain, but it remains far cheaper than the cost of bottled water, which typically ranges from $1 to $5 per gallon, or about 200 to 1,000 times more than tap water.
(High-end bottled waters can be even far more costly.)
Drinking fountains located outside will need to include features to help weather the elements, such as exposed aggregate finishes to prevent corrosion.
The cost of a bottle filling station can range from as low as $500 per unit for a retrofit kit (an attachment) to over $1,700 for a standalone freestanding model.
The cost of carbon filters ranges from $90 to $160 per unit, depending on filtration capacity and effectiveness, and filters must be replaced according to the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule, typically once or more each year depending on use.
In addition to carbon filters, reverse osmosis (RO) is an advanced filtration process that is also used by desalination plants.
Since filters add to the cost of water fountains, water quality tests should be done before making any filter investments to both ensure that filters are needed and to identify the most appropriate type of filter to install.
More effort is needed to improve access to affordable and safe drinking water at the national, state, and local levels.
As we move toward better public drinking water access, whether installing new fountains or replacing old ones, we should strive to use the most appropriate fountain designs in order to effectively provide high quality and affordable tap water to all who need it.

ABOUT 500 villagers of Nasivikoso in Magodro, Ba, now have access to clean drinking water after the commissioning of their rural water project last week.
Nasivikoso Village headman, Epeli Navatoga, 34, said they had wrestled with issues for the past eight years.
Villager Sulueti Bakabaka said in the past women fetched water from a nearby creek every evening for use.
"At times we had to wait until 10 or 11pm for us to fetch water because of the animals that cross the river," she said.
"We are now very happy.
We are also overjoyed because the water is available at every doorstep in our village."
"This empowers the water committee to be responsible for ongoing maintenance and repairs, thus ensuring the longevity and sustainability of their village water supply system," he said.
"This also builds the local capacity of contractors to undertake water supply construction work.
For this project, the village water committee will receive $4550 as payment for the village assistance provided."
Momo na Tui Magodro, Ratu Simione Vutevute said he was grateful to WAF for its assistance.