Global water facts

844 million people in the world – one in nine – do not have clean water close to home

2.3 billion people in the world – almost one in three – do not have a decent toilet of their own

Around 289,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by poor water and sanitation.

That's almost 800 children a day, or one child every two minutes

Every £1 invested in water and toilets returns an average of £4 in increased productivity

Just £24 can provide one person with clean water.

On Sunday, Vladimir Putin was re-elected as Russia’s president with almost 77 percent of the vote. With his relentlessly propagandized image at home, Putin would have won a free election, but that wouldn’t have been enough: He feels the need of an unassailable mandate, of recognition as his country’s savior. So serious opposition candidates were excluded (and one murdered), while ballot box stuffing was shameless. Czars are just that way.

Days earlier, China’s President Xi Jinping engineered his lifetime tenure (he didn’t bother with the charade of a nationwide vote). Xi’s the most powerful leader China has had since Mao in his heyday, and Mao cost China tens of millions of lives.

In NATO member Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a would-be sultan, has dismantled the constitution; jailed tens of thousands of opposition members; staged massive show trials; destroyed freedom of the press; attacked minorities; empowered religious fanatics; and, now, invaded Syria not to defeat the remnants of ISIS, but to crush our Kurdish allies.

In Egypt, where democracy came and went in a blink, President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi rules ruthlessly, while Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has survived every prediction of his fall. In Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, unelected, remains the undisputed ruler. Even Kim Jong Un, a tin-pot despot, has gained international recognition at a level his predecessors never achieved.

In NATO and European Union members Hungary and the Czech Republic, strongmen dominate the political scene. Romania and Slovakia struggle to maintain democratic forms, and even Poland has seen its constitution undermined. Corruption, tyranny’s handmaiden, is everywhere. In Italy and France, pro-Putin, neo-fascist parties are political forces to be reckoned with, while Moscow also backs far-right parties in Germany and Austria.

Tyrants may oppress you. They may lead you into disastrous wars. But they don’t demand that you take personal responsibility, that great burden of democracy. And every tyrant worth his salt provides scapegoats for his people’s failures: It’s never your fault, it’s them. It’s a message demagogues promote even here. Tyrants offer certainty. All you have to do is let them run things. It’s a deal too many humans gladly embrace.

Meanwhile, freedom means insecurity, and democracy signals chaos to unprepared societies. As we’ve seen for almost three decades now, the sudden imposition of democratic forms on traditional societies is like handing a child a grenade.

He reaffirmed his commitment to maintaining America’s military spending.“We are going to remain stronger than any other nation in the world by far,” he said. “We will never allow anyone to have anything close to what we have.” At the proposed meeting, they would also discuss Ukraine and North Korea, Trump said.

The US currently spends around $700 billion on its military, more than any other country in the world. This includes $640 billion on weapons and personnel, and $60 billion for wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, as well as other countries.

During a speech in Ramallah, Abbas blamed Hamas for the March 13 bomb attack on Hamdallah’s convoy in Gaza, saying it was a “despicable and sinful act.” “I have decided to take national, legal and economic steps against the Gaza Strip for the protection of the national project,” Abbas announced.

“This is an attempt to undermine the opportunity to achieve unity between Gaza and the West Bank,” Hamas claimed shortly after the speech. “Abu Mazen is paving the way for chaos which will facilitate the approval of President Trump’s plan and Israel’s plans,” the statement added, using Abbas’s nickname.

But the firm never tried to stop them when they realized what it was doing, and even told them they'd made a special exception for them. They 'were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,' she tweeted.

Davidsen said that she felt the project was 'creepy' - 'even though we played by the rules, and didn't do anything I felt was ugly, with the data'. Davidsen posted this in the wake of the uproar over Cambridge Analytica, and their mining of information for the Trump campaign.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.

“My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” he said. Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused.

Parakilas, whose job it was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings. “It has been painful watching,” he said. “Because I know that they could have prevented it.” 

After trolls were sent to jail for sending threatening messages to the activist Caroline Criado-Perez and MP Stella Creasy, a debate ensued over whether the likes of Facebook and Twitter should be classified as platforms or publishers. Facebook is treated as if it is simply a conduit for information, meaning it is not liable for the content its users share – in the same way that BT can’t be sued when people make threatening phone calls.

In 2014 Iain MacKenzie, a spokesperson for Facebook, said, “Every piece of content on Facebook has an associated ‘report’ option that escalates it to your user operations team for review. Additionally, individuals can block anyone who is harassing them, ensuring they will be unable to interact further. Facebook tackles malicious behaviour through a combination of social mechanisms and technological solutions appropriate for a mass-scale online opportunity.”

But the company is evasive about the number of moderators it employs, how they work, and how decisions are made. It has started taking a firmer line on far-right content – recently removing Britain First pages from the site – but it is still resisting many legislative attempts to regulate its content. What content users then see is decided by an algorithm that can change without any consultation, including with the government or the businesses that rely on Facebook for revenue – meaning that some can be quickly wiped off the map.

“I actually think the question is more ‘what is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘yes or no, should it be regulated?’” Zuckerberg told CNN. The Facebook CEO said that “he would love to see” new transparency regulations for political advertisements. Facebook has been criticized for a lack of transparency.

“If you look at how much regulation there is around advertising on TV, in print, you know, it's just not clear why there should be less on the internet,” he said. Facebook and other tech firms have resisted legislative efforts in Congress to impose new regulations.

The issue at the heart involves nations who are asserting the sanctity of national sovereignty versus those who want to dissolve borders and create some form of top-down EU Superstate, euphemistically called the “ever closer union.” The conflict will determine the future viability of the entire European Union project. Brexit was only the first crack in the EU edifice.

During a visit to Berlin March 3, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte bluntly came out against the recent trend led by Germany, France and other EU states to create a top-down central supranational state along the lines of a United States of Europe. He told press, “There has been this narrative that there is this inevitability of closer cooperation in a European federal state.”

He became blunt: “This horrible language about ‘ever closer Union’ I don’t like. In the past 20 or 30 years this has moved from ever closer union of the peoples of the EU working together on collective issues, where member states weren’t able to deal with it themselves, to become an inevitable goal in itself.”

Then Rutte declared the unspeakable “S” word: “We can never forget that these are sovereign nations. This is not a movement in itself, just when needed in special occasions. It has moved from a collective effort of nations to a goal in itself. It’s totally wrong!”

No one foresaw what happened next. In just two generations Lagos grew 100-fold, from under 200,000 people to nearly 20 million. Today one of the world’s 10 largest cities, it sprawls across nearly 1,000 sq km. Vastly wealthy in parts, it is largely chaotic and impoverished. Most residents live in informal settlements, or slums. The great majority are not connected to piped water or a sanitation system. The city’s streets are choked with traffic, its air is full of fumes, and its main dump covers 40 hectares and receives 10,000 metric tons of waste a day.

New research suggests that the changes Lagos has seen in the last 60 years may be nothing to what might take place in the next 60. If Nigeria’s population continues to grow and people move to cities at the same rate as now, Lagos could become the world’s largest metropolis, home to 85 or 100 million people. By 2100, it is projected to be home to more people than California or Britain today, and to stretch hundreds of miles – with enormous environmental effects.

The commission is holding a discussion with religious leaders and experts on the prevalence of cults in the country. Meanwhile, the CRL has approached the Constitutional Court for clarity on its ability to hold organisations and churches accountable.

David Strachan comments: It's about time that mankind evolved enough to move past the need for religion. Man has created over 5000 gods so far and the followers of all of them say that all the others are false. Therefore, by default, they are ALL false.

Religion is, and always has been, a method of controlling people by using their fear of their own mortality, and profiting from it.

Now, according to a recent Harvard University analysis, doctors who prescribe these pain-killers are being paid huge sums of money from their manufacturers.

The research, which was conducted by Harvard scientists and CNN, discovered that in 2014-2015 thousands of doctors were paid over $25,000 from opioid manufacturers and hundreds more were rewarded with six-figure sums. Also, the more opioids that were prescribed, the larger the reward.

“It smells like doctors are being bribed to sell narcotics, and that’s very disturbing.” – Dr Andrew Kolodny, Executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.