Any event that involves two or more nations.
The 2011 edition of the G(irls)20 Summit is happening this weekend!
The G(irls)20 Summit brings together one delegate from each G20 country, plus a representative from the chair country of the African Union. The delegates debate, discuss and design innovative ideas necessary to empower girls and women globally. While the agenda is the same as the G20 leaders and focuses on economic innovation – the participants are all girls, aged 18-20.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been awarded a peace medal from the Sydney Peace Foundation for the work that WikiLeaks has been up to. I’m sure that this is given symbolical to Assange but intended to thank everyone who has contributed to the great work happening at WikiLeaks.
The peace foundation presented Mr Assange a gold medal in recognition of his “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights” at a ceremony in London on Tuesday.
It is only the fourth time in the organisation’s 14-year history that the prize for extraordinary achievement in promoting peace with justice has been given out.
Previous winners are Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Japanese Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda.
Foundation director Professor Stuart Rees said the award was to honour Mr Assange’s work in challenging official secrecy.
The Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education is happening this June in Toronto and they want people who are interested in discussing the relationship between academia and media to attend. I was invited to a pre-conference brainstorming session recently and I have to say that I’m looking forward to this event.
There are a lot of really good people speaking at the conference so if you’re interested in how the media represents academic findings and how academic institutions relate to media organizations you should conference out.
Higher education affects every aspect of our lives – from the economy and the environment, to culture and communications. While the media play a critical role in shaping public understanding of this institution, little discussion has taken place about how that influence is manifested – or about how, in turn, higher education uses the media to mould how the public perceives it.
But that’s about to change.
Introducing Worldviews: Media Coverage of Higher Education in the 21st Century. This innovative conference, scheduled for June 2011 in Toronto, Canada, will not only examine these issues, but explore why it’s important to do so.
The 2011 inaugural conference will consider a range of important issues, including:
How media coverage of higher education has changed over the past two decades and where it is headed
The impact of social media and how it is changing what is covered and how higher education is understood
The role the media play in influencing public policy debates on public education
How higher education engages with the media to inform public opinion
The different realities of the developing and developed worlds
World Toilet Day is today! For those of you who care about sanitation it’s time to celebrate this campaign to increase awareness of the plight of loos around the world. Access to toilets is a huge issue in poor areas that has cascading effects on all levels of society, particularly women.
It’s great to see this campaign get so much attention and there’s stuff you can do to help out!
WTO which has over 200 partners worldwide, 42 of which are in India is one of the few organisations that focusses only on sanitation and toilets instead of water. “Everyone clubs water and sanitation, and 95% of the funds go towards water projects. But good sanitation is the first step towards clean water,” he says.
Toilets weren’t really top of the pot for Sim, who ran a number of businesses from the age of 25. “When I turned 40, I realised that I had 13,000 more days to live the average Singaporean lives to 80 and wanted to do something useful,” he says. Sim started reading and “realised that the toilet is really neglected”. So he started “the other WTO” in 2001 to disseminate serious facts with a sense of humour. The logo is a toilet seat shaped like a heart. “I thought the best way to break the toilet taboo was to use lots of puns.” But the name, which everyone thinks is “really bad at first” sticks in people’s minds. “That’s because every mother has told her child not to talk about the toilet. It’s not polite’. And here we are talking about the loo quite freely,” says Sim, who is often called Toilet Man.
And it’s not just about getting toilets installed. “You have to keep them clean too. So Sim has started the World Toilet College in Singapore that provides training in toilet maintenance and design. “I’m hoping we can open one in India too to train toilet cleaners like technicians.”
Read more: The big squat’ to take a stand on sanitation
Rescue efforts in Chile have come to fruition today as the first of the trapped miners have been raised to ground level. You may not agree with the reasons the miners were there in the first place, but no one can deny that the pending rescue of 33 miners is incredible. Trapped underground since August 5th, they have endured more time trapped underground than anyone in documented history.
The rescue operation has proceeded nearly as smoothly as could be expected by the team of more than 1,000 that spent so long planning this moment. Crews have had to adjust the door to the capsule, and make other small changes along the way, but the miners have been evacuated almost exactly as planned.
Delirious celebration erupted across “Camp Hope,” the encampment of waiting families and media, as the first miner rescued, Florencio Avalos, emerged.
Read more at The Globe and Mail, or pretty much any news outlet anywhere in the world. This isn’t just good news, it’s big news!