'The Happiest Days of Your Life' is a tribute to how children remain children against the odds. The exhibition of photographs, taken by Ben Ingham is an intimate portrait of children's innate instinct to retain their childhood in some of the most troubled countries in the world. Commissioned by Save the Children, Ingham set off earlier this year with the remit to explore how vulnerable children in the developing world play and enjoy treats - two things fundamental to any childhood.

Accused of airing pornography and political propaganda, and of inflaming ethnic tensions, Kenya's numerous private FM radio stations may soon face curbs following a controversial probe into their content. Attorney-General Amos Wako said on 28 April that the government would soon take to parliament a Media Commission Bill aimed at ensuring professionalism among media practitioners.

Governments are not held accountable to the people they govern even in countries with a long tradition of democratic elections, according to a study released by the Washington-based Centre for Public Integrity. None of the 25 election-holding countries studied in the report achieved a "very strong" ranking on the Public Integrity Index, which measures access to information and the strength of anti-corruption mechanisms. Of the 25 countries, just six received "strong" marks - the United States, which finished first, followed by Portugal, Australia, Italy, Germany and South Africa.

Children everywhere are spending more time in school than ever before, but there remain substantial differences between countries and regions, according to UNESCO’s Global Education Digest 2004. According to the Digest, a child in Finland, New Zealand or Norway can expect to receive over 17 years of education, almost twice as much as in Bangladesh or Myanmar and four times as much in Niger or Burkina Faso. The new edition of the Digest presents the latest global education indicators, one example of which is school life expectancy (SLE), or the number of school years that a child, on average, is likely to spend in the education system.

Overall, young people today are better off than previous generations, but many are still severely hindered by a lack of education, poverty, health risks, unemployment and the impact of conflict, a new United Nations report on the global situation of youth reveals. The World Youth Report 2003 provides an overview of the global situation of young people. The first 10 chapters focus on the priority areas of education, employment, extreme poverty, health issues, the environment, drugs, delinquency, leisure time, the situation of girls and young women, and youth participation in decision-making identified by the World Programme of Action for Youth (WPAY) adopted by the General Assembly in 1995.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) has announced a global reduction of 30% in deaths from measles between 1999 and 2002. At 35%, the reduction in measles deaths was even greater in Africa, the region with the highest number of people affected by the disease. This progress demonstrates that collectively countries can achieve the United Nations goal of cutting global measles deaths in half by the end of 2005.

Brazil has won a landmark victory at the World Trade Organisation that could spell the beginning of the end of rich countries' subsidy payments to their farmers. The WTO, based in Geneva, has ruled that $1.5bn (£830m) of annual subsidies given by the United States government to its 25,000 cotton farmers are mostly illegal. The provisional ruling is confidential, but trade sources said pubic confirmation would be available as soon as next month and could start a domino effect whereby much of the £300bn in subsidies lavished on the rich world's farmers might tumble. "This could be the first domino," one said. The ruling is the first time a developing country has won such a decision from the WTO when arguing against one of the big trade powers.

The International Telecommunication Union, the organizing entity of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), is conducting a survey to obtain views on the perceived importance of agreed upon targets for improving connectivity and access in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The targets outlined in the WSIS Plan of Action were agreed to by 175 countries represented at the first phase of the Summit in Geneva, 10-12 December 2003. The objectives of WSIS are to build an inclusive information society that will put the potential of ICTs at the service of development and to promote the use of information and knowledge for the achievement of internationally agreed upon development goals, including those contained in the United Nations Millennium Declaration.

An international team of academics from the University of Cambridge, Harvard Law School, and the University of Toronto has begun formally monitoring worldwide Internet censorship and surveillance. "The Open Net Initiative represents a new approach to university-based research," says Cambridge University's Rafal Rohozinski. "We fuse cutting-edge intelligence-derived techniques with a networked model of analysis that includes some of the brightest minds in this field - we are striving to become the eyes and ears on digital censorship worldwide."

Nearly half of Brazil's 178 million people are descendants of black Africans. If they can be encouraged to start speaking with their pocketbooks, they will be hard to ignore, activists say. Racial unity has long been elusive in Brazil. Even though the country projects an image of tolerance and equality, people with lighter skin hold most of the country's wealth and power.

Racism is an assault, often intentional but also covert, by individual acts or regular practice, against persons for the sole reason of their ancestry, history, or physical appearance. The person who has never had an encounter with someone hostile to his or her race will find it hard to comprehend. It is sheer horror, the worst of mockery. What then is race? This is a much harder question. Racial theorists like to say that race is both real and imaginary, a construct and a reality. This desire to have it both ways leads to some odd and contradictory conclusions.

Frustrating the hopes of peoples and nations all around the globe will certainly not help make the world a more secure place for our children, concludes the Social Watch report 2004, summarizing the findings of citizen coalitions in 50 countries, poor and rich, about what they see as main obstacles to human security. The Social Watch report keeps track every year about progress and regression in the path towards eradicating poverty and achieving gender equity, a promise made by governments at the UN in 1995 and reaffirmed in the year 2000 in the largest gathering ever held of world leaders.

The trafficking of human beings is a problem in every African country, says the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef). The report, which covers 53 African nations, says children are the biggest victims in what is a very complex phenomenon. It describes how they are forced into slavery, recruited as child soldiers or sold into prostitution.

Recent IMF/World Bank reforms have real limits, deftly illustrated by the cause of debt cancellation. Ministers from wealthy nations have almost universally conceded that debt is a crisis, but assistance has been slow in coming. The creditor-based system of debt relief administered by the IMF/World Bank doles out aid at levels based more on poor countries' ability to cough up future payments than on what they actually need to reach humanitarian targets like the Millennium Development Goals. As economist Jeffrey Sachs writes, "It is perfectly possible, and indeed is currently the case, for a country or region to have a 'sustainable' debt" under IMF/World Bank definitions "while millions of its people are dying of hunger or disease."

Can South African schools be led away from apartheid's grim legacy? Are policy interventions ridding schools of injustice? Are schoolchildren learning values of democracy and equity? Or are classrooms still places where kids learn about the unjust divisions that exist between different groups of people?

Thabo Mbeki recently advocated unity with 'anti-globalisation' activists: 'They may act in ways you and I may not like and break windows in the street, but the message they communicate relates.' This raises two critical questions: is the South African government genuinely opposed to what Mbeki calls 'global apartheid'? And are the reforms advocated by Pretoria failing -- even on their own limited terms?

Mbeki's critics, from left and right alike, suggest that his AIDS policies, corrupt arms deal and support for Zimbabwe's repressive regime have damaged his credibility beyond repair. Others claim Mbeki's global ambition is his saving grace. But the content of Pretoria's broader reform strategy is rarely examined.

Between incomparable drawings by Zapiro, Patrick Bond considers the dynamics of international political economy and geopolitics.

He reviews a series of contemporary examples where Pretoria is frustrated by unfavourable power relations: US unilateralism and militarism, the UN's World Conference Against Racism and reparations for apartheid profits, soured trade deals, stingy debt relief and counterproductive international financial flows, unsuccessful reform of multilateral institutions, the New Partnership for Africa's Development, the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development and the World Water Forum.

Bond poses alternatives and also assesses the progressive social movements, which may well be Mbeki's most persistent, unforgiving judges, both locally and globally. (back cover)

Education For All Week 2004, 19-25 April, will focus on the world’s 100 million children who have no access to education. UNESCO and the Global Campaign for Education are organising the Big Lobby to give children the world over a chance to ask their governments to do more to enrol all children. The aim of the Big Lobby is to raise awareness of this fundamental human right, the denial of which makes children more vulnerable to poverty, hunger, violence, exploitation and disease.

Children’s right to education is being seriously undermined in dozens of countries by contradictory laws that allow them to work, be married or held criminally responsible at an age when they are legally bound to be in school, concludes a new report. “In the same country,” concludes Angela Melchiorre, children’s rights expert and the author of ‘At what age…are children employed, married and taken to court?’, “it is not rare to find that children are legally obliged to go to school until they are 14 or 15 years old but that a different law allows them to work at an earlier age or to be married at the age of 12 or to be criminally responsible from the age of seven.” The report, launched on the occasion of Education for All Week (April 19-25), found that there is no compulsory education in at least 25 States, of which ten are in sub-Saharan Africa.

This book is concerned with assisting providers of online education with useful tools to carry out teaching and learning transactions online. It presents the theory, administration, tools, and methods of designing and delivering learning online. It aims to bring to the teaching community a valuable product which should go a long way in popularizing the use of the learning technologies.

Angolan refugees coming back under a formal programme from the Republic of the Congo, and neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Namibia are aided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But many more - the so-called spontaneous returnees - have struggled home on their own since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002. In recent months their passage has been hampered by the rainy season, which has rendered many roads impassable and increased the ever-present threat of landmines. Just crossing the border back to Angola can be the biggest challenge facing returning refugees.