Global

Facebook users spend almost 30 minutes a day on the site poking and messaging their friends on average, with access patterns similar on mobile phones and computers, a British study showed on Monday.

Speech by Donald Steinberg, Deputy President, International Crisis Group, to United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict in Geneva, 17 December 2008

Strengthening Resistance focuses on the points of intersection in the social, political and public health crises of violence against women and HIV/AIDS. The report uses a human rights lens to focus on critical political challenges and on innovative strategies used by activists worldwide as they respond to the links between violence and HIV/AIDS. From street theater to telenovelas/soap operas to traditional lobbying, activists in both VAW and HIV/AIDS communities are beginning to work together to focus attention to ways both crises are causes and consequences of each other. Neither can be addressed adequately without taking into account the links between them and the human rights implications of each crisis on its own, and in conjunction with the other.

This week I participated in a conference "Overlaps of Prostitution, Migration, and Human Trafficking" in Berne, Switzerland which brought together European government experts from Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain to discuss a very hot topic: the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking.

The United States Government believes that prostitution fuels sex trafficking based on solid empirical evidence. It estimates that approximately 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked each year across international borders. (This is not to mention millions more who are trafficking victims who never cross borders.) Two-thirds of these victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation, making trafficking for prostitution the single biggest category of transnational human trafficking.

Welcome to the world of social networking, a phenomenon that is increasingly driving creation and deployment of applications oriented around whole new universes of communication. Facebook, MySpace, instant messaging and a new generation of Internet-enabled devices is drawing the younger set to connect in new ways and attracting businesses to a new way of reaching this demographic.

Certain predicted technological revolutions are more myth than reality.

After all, TV phones and laserdiscs were hailed as the wave of the future and yet, despite influencing today's technology, they've gone by the wayside.

Social networking sites might have seemed as if they'd follow the same route, but all signs suggest they're here for the long haul.

Employers are checking job applicants' profiles on sites like Facebook, Brightfuse and LinkedIn, according to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey.

Twenty-two percent of employers say they use social networking sites when evaluating job candidates, and an additional 9 percent intend to do the same soon. Yet, only 16 percent of workers with social networking profiles have modified their pages with potential employers in mind.

The Open Net Initiative's Information Warfare Monitor project has published a stunning report by "Hacktivist" Nart Villeneuve titled: "Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform."  It has been covered by both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

It is indeed a loaded question in a world where technology and easy access to it has transformed the role of journalism and how it is practiced.

Can I be considered a journalist because I do have access to the necessary technology and information to express my ideas and convictions through a medium, the Internet, which has worldwide reach?

If we ask that question to a Chinese blogger raising hell about how the Communist regime represses free press and democracy in that country, the answer would be a resounding yes. But what if the blogger operates in a democratic country with a free press that has historically assumed the role of watchdog of democracy? Can anyone with a computer, a modem and an opinion be considered a journalist?

Reforms of public pension programs have been a top social policy priority in a great number of countries around the world over the last decades. The increasing recognition of the implications of demographic changes, awareness of income insecurity in old age, the desire to ensure financial sustainability of pension systems and concerns about the management of public schemes were some of the concerns driving reform debates.

The design of pension schemes differs greatly among countries around the world. How pension schemes look like depends crucially on choices made about system elements, including membership criteria (voluntary vs. mandatory), management of the scheme (public vs. private), possible income-policy or other social goals embodied in pension systems (insurance and equivalence vs. redistribution), the financing method used (funded vs. pay-as-you-go), and procedures for determining the size of a future pension benefit (defined benefit vs. defined contribution schemes). As most national pension systems are comprised of more than one tier, combinations of system elements are found in many cases.

Business people, community activists and policy-makers have an interest in as many people as possible -including people in the lowest income-brackets- having access to the internet, being able to check out important information on websites and communicate cheaply via email or internet phone.

In order to reduce poverty and foster inclusive development through affordable access to the internet, APC is working on a resource kit for realising a universal access agenda, present promising options, experiences, lessons and opportunities in pro-poor access provision in developing societies.