News for Thursday: October 5th, 2000

Prince Charles talks 'bowels'(BBC News)

Prince Charles turned heads when he helped launch a campaign to get people talking about "bottoms and bowels".
The prince joined television celebrities to promote Loud Tie Day, planned to raise awareness about bowel cancer and £1m funds for research.
He urged the public to lose their inhibitions about discussing the disease which affects 30,000 people a year and kills thousands more people than breast cancer.
"Hopefully as a result of today we will be able to talk about it a great deal more," he said.
"Everyone, I suspect, knows somebody who has had bowel cancer, yet there is a real reluctance to talk about bowels and bottoms in this country."
Say it loud
Prince Charles said the word "breast" prompted similar inhibitions a few years ago.
"But as a result of raised awareness, survival rates for breast cancer are rising dramatically and by talking about bowel cancer we all might help to save thousands of lives in the future," he said.
Strong winds prevented the prince unfurling a specially designed giant tie which instead was secured 140ft up the side of the London Television Centre on the South Bank.
He joked with guests that his blue and yellow tie was not loud enough in comparison.
Loud Tie Day will take place on 3 November, when people will be encouraged to wear outrageous ties and donate £1 to help raise awareness of the disease.
~*~ Prince gibes at Dome's limited life
BY ALAN HAMILTON

THE Prince of Wales took quiet satisfaction yesterday from attending an architectural awards ceremony within sight of the Millennium Dome in which the controversial Greenwich Mushroom failed to achieve even a mention, honourable or otherwise.
Promoters of the Dome entered it for the annual conservation and regeneration prizes given by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. But it came nowhere, soundly beaten by the Sainsbury's branch on the same site, claimed to be the world's first energy-efficient supermarket, a crofter's cottage on the Isle of Skye and a restored medieval house in Wales.
As the Prince arrived at the Trinity Buoy Wharf, a converted 18th-century warehouse in the London Docklands, aides ordered photographers not to take his picture with the Dome - which he has never visited - as background. In the warehouse, the Prince pointedly remarked how sad it was "that so many new, expensive and elaborate buildings seem so often destined for such a brief and one-use life".
Riding his well-known architectural hobbyhorse, the Prince called for the reuse of old buildings: "When there is talk of building four million new homes in the country, why not start with the buildings we've already got rather than cover the countryside with new houses?"
Across the river, the Dome looked positively deflated, either at the Prince's remarks or at its failure to win a prize, even in the urban regeneration category of the RICS awards. By contrast, Simon Pott, chairman of the RICS judges, lavished praise on the British Airways London Eye, enthused over the interior of the Tate Modern and said that the rebuilding of the Royal Opera House was something of which the whole country could be proud - even if the sightlines from the royal box were still less than perfect.

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