By the time she was seven she had signs of serious physical abuse. Just how her carers in the north-west London borough allowed the vulnerable teenager to disappear into London’s underworld will be the key question before an inquiry by an independent child care expert, appointed by Harrow to study its own conduct.So what happened to Aliyah Ismail? Carol Sensky, a Harrow social worker, told the inquest that the marriage between Aliyah’s Jordanian father, Jamal, and her mother, Agnes, fell apart when she was four. The St Pancras coroner’s court this week recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, but details of her short life tell a story of failure by her parents, friends and society.
During her final few months, she was put into the care of Harrow council. She died of a drugs overdose, alone on a threadbare blanket in a derelict building in the red light district of King’s Cross She was just 13 years old. ALIYAH ISMAIL was a homeless prostitute, hooked on methadone, desperate for money and exploited by dozens of men. As the Independent on Sunday reported in December, top scientists believe the world is entering a “new era” of hurricanes..

This in turn means more evaporation, more destructive storms, and more flooding.”The Munich Reinsurance Company, one of the world’s largest, adds: “Changes in the environment and climate are leading to a greater probability of new extremes in temperatures, precipitation, water levels, and wind velocity.”It pleads for “speedy and comprehensive measures to be taken with a view of man-made changes in the environment”.Experts expect things to get worse. Last year was the hottest on record.The Worldwatch Institute says: “Higher temperatures mean that there is more energy driving the earth’s climatic system. It is disturbing to note how grave the economic and social consequences are turning out to be.”Two factors are particularly blamed: the rapid increase of housing and industry in risky areas such as flood plains and global warming. Fires in southern Mexico caused air pollution in Texas and smoke drifting as far north as Chicago.An entire county in Florida had to be evacuated as a result of another forest fire.Klaus Topfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, told an international conference of environment ministers last week: “Human activities are multiplying the severity and incidence of some of these environmental disasters. The report describes this as a “storm of geological proportions” and the US government has described it as the worst disaster ever to hit the western hemisphere.Meanwhile, more than 100 people died in intense heat in Texas and 3,000 perished in the biggest heatwave to hit India in half a century.And, says the report, “a combination of severe heat, drought and economic mismanagement” cut Russia’s harvest to its lowest level in the past four decades.Severe drought led to normally moist tropical forests drying out, causing massive fires in South-east Asia and the Amazon. And last autumn Hurricane Mitch dumped six feet of rain on parts of central America within a week, sweeping away nearly three-quarters of the crops in Honduras and killing more than 10,000 people.

They have caused nearly $300bn (pounds 187.5bn) worth of damage so far in the 1990s, compared with just $50bn (pounds 31bn) in the whole of the 1980s.A new report by Washington’s authoritative Worldwatch Institute says that last year 54 countries suffered from floods, and 45 from severe drought.Bangladesh was hit by the worst flooding on record, covering two-thirds of the country for more than a month and making 21 million people homeless.Some 2,500 people drowned in the worst floods in China for 44 years and 56 million had to leave their homes. And experts predict that they will get even worse.
The world’s insurance industry, which compiled the statistics, is deeply alarmed at the development, which could drive it towards ruin, and is calling for “speedy and comprehensive measures”.Last year, catastrophes caused by the weather cost the world $89bn (pounds 55.5bn), well up on the previous record of $60bn (pounds 37.5) in 1996. The figures, which come in the wake of the Colombian earthquake which killed 1,000 people and left a quarter of a million homeless, show that hurricanes, storms and droughts have been striking increasingly frequently and severely over the last decade. Last year, which was by far the worst on record, the world suffered more than twice as much damage as during the entire decade of the 1980s. NATURAL disasters are increasing at a terrifying rate, startling new statistics show. They mobilised a powerful army of letter writers who appealed to medical bodies and politicians to take their views on board. It was a turning point for the campaign, and the Guilds’ view on the use of cannabis on the grounds of compassion for people suffering from painful illnesses were fully endorsed by the House of Lords..

According to Maggie Chiltern, a member of a Guild in west London whose 80 members range from their 40s to their 80s, one of the organisation’s major aims concerns is the lack of younger members.Just how powerful the Guilds can be – and how in tune with current thinking – became clear during its debate on the legalisation of cannabis. Many Townswomen, including Mrs Hall, joined the Guilds in the Sixties as a way of escaping the isolation faced by young mothers and housewives. She saw the Guilds as her university, a place where she could take part in debates and make new friends.The shift of young women from the home to the workplace has meant that the average age of Townswomen is now over 40 and new members are increasingly women who have taken early retirement. It still does “village halls and jam” but its 250,000 members also campaign on many issues including women’s health, human rights and Aids awareness. They wanted to set up an organisation that would provide women with an informal education to make sure they didn’t waste their vote.It was the urban equivalent of the Women’s Institute network that already existed to promote ties between women in rural areas The WI, too, has changed. Their origins go back to 1929, when the Guild was founded by a group of suffragists, the peaceful arm of the suffragettes.

Its publications contain reports on subjects ranging from long- term care to the internet. Nor are they shy of making their views known: they talk to supermarket managers about the need for better labelling of genetically modified food and protest over traffic congestion.Being social activists is not so much a dramatic change for the Guilds’ members as a return to their roots. Visit their web site and you will be greeted by the smiling but decidedly mature faces of Marjorie Hall and the 16 members of the national executive committee. Interest in the role of grandparents came from the grassroots.Many of the Townswomen are mothers with grown-up families or grandparents themselves, and while they may tire of being misrepresented as “middle- class greying grannies”, in some cases this is exactly what they are.It’s this mix of tradition and radicalism that makes the Townswomen’s Guilds at once such a curious and powerful force in modern British life.