A smattering of media hits from my time managing media relations for the Center for Global Development in the U.S. and Europe.
Gunmen launched an attack in Mali's capital on Friday. We explore the conditions that continue to fuel extremism in West Africa and the challenges of combating them.
WHEN TENG PENGFEI was 16, he asked his parents for money to travel around China. They refused, so he threatened to get on his bike and pedal hundreds of miles to Beijing anyway. "You can't stop me," he told them. They paid up. After school he went to Griffith University in Australia.
Were Oxfam right to compare the wealth of the rich with that of the poor?
News Corp is a network of leading companies in the worlds of diversified media, news, education, and information services. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank promises to be more efficient than peers such as the World Bank BEIJING-China put its stamp on the world order over the weekend by launching an infrastructure bank aimed at increasing its soft power and offering a new vision for global development not led by Washington.
A headline for a chart caught our eye this week: "US Holiday Lights Use More Electricity than El Salvador Does In a Year." According to the chart, America burns 6.63 billion kilowatt-hours to shine its end-of-year holiday lights. By comparison, annual kilowatt-hours in the developing world are paltry.
The United States spends more on international aid than any other nation - more than $32 billion a year. Yet it has come in near the bottom of a newly released ranking that scores the wealthiest nations according to how much they help the world's poorest people.
Volker Schimmel works in Amman, Jordan, with the UNHCR - the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees - on an initiative that allows asylum-seekers, many of whom have never owned a debit card, to access humanitarian aid money via ATMs that identify individuals by scanning their eyes.
One of the most significant, but least covered, parts of the war on terror has been the Treasury Department's effort to shut down al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups' access to financial institutions. It's an attractive way of tackling the problem: Freezing accounts here isn't as expensive as sending in troops or airstrikes, and no civilians get hurt.
The Obama administration insists that the just-released Trans-Pacific Partnership is great not only for the US economy - "supporting more well-paying American jobs, strengthening our middle class" - but for global development too. "TPP is the first U.S. agreement to include a development chapter," the US Trade Representative's office writes, "incorporating commitments to promote sustainable development and broad-based economic growth."
Washington DC - At a time when there is a dire need for assistance in Europe and the Middle East to counter the refugee crisis in Syria, the US government's main international aid agency is a ship without a captain thanks to a Republican presidential hopeful who's blocking the White House's nominee for the job.
The world's girls are healthier than ever. They live longer and more of them are going to school than at any time in history. But most of them face discrimination simply because they are girls. The discrimination happens at every point in their lives.
THERE are 20m refugees worldwide, most of them children. Some 1.6m Syrians live in Lebanon; even more in Turkey. Humanitarian agencies struggle to meet their basic needs. In July the World Food Programme (WFP) cut assistance to refugees across the Middle East, saying that its regional operation was 81% underfunded.
Europe is facing a crisis that is straining its political and social fabric: an influx of migrants and refugees on a scale larger than the continent has seen in decades. In July, a record number of 107,500 migrants reached European Union borders - triple the number that did so last year, according to the BBC.
Europe is now struggling with the most severe refugee crisis in decades, as millions of people flee violence in Syria and Iraq. Even as German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel outlined a proposal this week to place 160,000 refugees in nearly two dozen countries, he acknowledged that the plan was merely "a drop in the ocean."
Tropical forests face a lot of threats, particularly from the logging and agriculture industries. Their continued disappearance from the face of the Earth is therefore no greatnews - but new research suggests that they may be disappearing even faster than we thought. And that could have big implications for the global effort against climate change.
On Monday 13 July, world leaders will gather in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, for the third Financing for Development summit (FFD3). On the agenda: work out where the money will come from to fund the two processes that start this year and aim to change the future for people and planet.
