Founded by Harvard Grad Mark Zuckerberg in early 2004, the social networking site was initially aimed at students in America. The premise was very simple: build a personal profile and make friends. Cashing in on the insatiable human appetite for nosying into other people’s lives, the site became a success overnight, and quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. Hundred of uses became thousands, thousands millions. Current figures sit at 64 million active users worldwide. It is worthwhile comparing this to Bebo, which claims 22 million, and MySpace 110 million.
In March 2006, it was reported in Business Week that Facebook’s asking price could be as much as £1 billion. That figure is now significantly higher. Microsoft recently bought a 1.6% stake in the company for £120 million, and investor Lee Ka-Shing paid £30 million for 0.4%. There is little doubt that the site, which is free to join, has enormous earning potential. Advertising opportunities are endless. Last year is announced a range of big-range collaborations, linking with Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Sony, and Conde Nast, among others.

However, are the glory days coming to an end? There is increasing anxiety within the workplace, with the issue of ‘improper conduct’, and relationships are hitting the rocks after facebook flirtation or implicating photos. Just a few weeks ago a Moroccan Court sentenced a 26 year old computer engineer to three years in prison after setting up a profile in the name of King Mohammed’s brother. Fouad Mourtada was found guilty of falsifying data, and imitating the prince without his consent. ‘It was just a joke, a gag’, he is quoted to have said. The judge in Morocco clearly disagreed. Another recent case involved a senior police officer, who was refused promotion after a background check revealed that he had once received a warning about his facebook content. Last year, Argos employee Tom Beech was allegedly fired for setting up a Facebook thread ‘I work at Argos and can’t wait to leave because it’s shit.’

Reports are increasingly suggesting that marketers, employers, teachers, and colleagues are using Facebook to monitor what the rest of us are up to in our spare time. One survey found that 62% of British employers now check the Facebook pages of their job applications, and that a quarter had rejected candidates as a result.

So, you want to get out? Users who have had enough have a long way to go. The onus is entirely on the individual to diligently delete any information about them on the site. While it is possible to strip back your profile entirely from view, even once deactivated your information remains on the servers. In any case, the Facebook phenomenon is not going away. Some economic experts have suggested that there could be anything up to 200 million users by next year.

The Facts:

• Facebook has around 64 million active users.
• There are more than 8 million users in the UK
• Half of the users are outside of college, and the largest growing demographic is the over 25s.
• Half of the active users visit the site daily.
• More than 14 million photos are uploaded daily
• Facebook employs more than 450 people.
• Facebook registers 65 billion page views a month
• The average user devotes 20 minutes a day to the site.
• Traffic is 366% since the start of 2007
• There are 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high-school networks.

Hundreds of South African women took to the streets on March 4 calling for the end to sexual harassment after a young woman was assaulted by taxi drivers for wearing a miniskirt.

The demonstrators marched to the Johannesburg taxi rank where the attack took place, demanding action from the Government and for taxi associations to punish those responsible for such acts. Minibus taxis are notorious for packing in as many passengers as possible and for their poor safety record. Women passengers are often exposed to taunts, jeers, and drunken sexual advances from both drivers and fellow travellers.

In the latest incident Nwabisa Ngeukana, 25, was set upon by taxi operators as she was travelling from her Soweto home to work at a bar in the upmarket suburb of Sandton. They stripped her and sexually assaulted here as ‘punishment’ for being ‘indecently dressed’. Ms Ngeukana was paraded naked around the rank while onlookers jeered and beer was poured over her.

This incident has highlighted violence against women in South Africa, which has one of the highest incidents of rape in the world. According to official statistics, nearly 23,000 women were raped in the six months to the end of September. Further, women’s rights groups contend that only one in nine attacks is reported.

Redi Direko, a radio talk show host led the march, dressed in a miniskirt, orange strap-top, and high heels. She said, ‘It is time to end all this. Drivers need to be taught how to behave. There is no dress code for women who frequent the taxi rank’. The protestors who t-shirts, saying ‘pissed-off women’, and some held placards reading ‘we love our minis’.

Attendants sit at the entrance of a public lavatory shaped like an insect as official in the Chinese capital said that it had more public convenience than any other city in the world. The ‘toilet revolution’ has swept the city since it was awarded the Olympic Games – ending thousands of years of poor sanitation. The city’s 5,174 public toilets gave it the No1 ranking as it prepares to host the Games in six months’ time, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. This is a higher number than in New York, London, or Tokyo.

The Grand Canyon is being flooded with 300,000 gallons of water per second in an attempt to save a rare fish, the humpback chub from extinction. This is a controversial plan, since it involves emptying water from Arizona’s drought stricken Lake Powell reservoir.

The dam, which is upstream from the Grand Canyon, provides hydroelectric power to about 650,000 people and has come under strain as more Americans have moved to the southwest for the relatively low taxes and cheap real estate.
Some locals argue that the dam can barely afford to lose any more water, and therefore tens of millions of dollars of hydroelectric generating capacity, to save a single species of fish. Essentially, the humpback chub is facing a fight to the death with Americans’ need for air-conditioners and plasma TVs. For the time being, at least, it seems that the chub is winning.

Police in Italy have recently issued footage of a man who is accused of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers. In each case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy. A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630). CCTV from the bank showed her apparently being hypnotised by the man, according to the reports. According to Italian media, the cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, only realising what had happened when she saw the money missing.

Shanghai expected the Icelandic singer, Bjork to surprise audiences, and there was no disappointed. Her first concert is set to be her last. The Chinese Ministry of Culture has said that it will impose stricter rules on foreign artists wanting to come to China after Bjork ended her performance last week with a cry for Tibetan independence. She concluded a passionate rendition of ‘Declare Independence’ with a shout of “Tibet, Tibet” – an outburst intended to draw local attention to Chinese rule of the Buddhist Himalayan region.

The Culture Ministry said that her behaviour hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and would be handled according to the law. ‘We will further tighten controls on foreign artists performing in China to prevent similar cases from happening in the future. We shall never attempt to tolerate any attempt to separate Tibet from China and will no longer welcome any artists who deliberately do this’, it maintains.

The singer issued a statement defending her action and said that she was not a politician but a musician whose duty was to express human emotions.

BBC Arabic TV is being launched at a very difficult time. Arab governments are increasingly seeking to censor existing satellite TV channels that ‘negatively affect social peace, national unity, public order, and public morals’, or ‘defame leaders, or national and religious symbols.’

The pioneering Qatar-based-al-Jazeera and Lebanon’s al-Manar TV, owned by Hizbullar, are seen as the main targets of the ‘charter of principles’ issued last month by the 22-member Arab League, opposed only by Qatar and Lebanon. ‘Media institutions should be watching governments, not the other way around’, said news editor at al-Jazeera.

The initiative came from pro-western Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which dominate the Middle Eastern media scene and dislike the anti-regime irreverence, anti-Americanism and Islamist bias of the channels. Al-Manar TV is seen as supporting Iran, often blamed for solidifying sectarianism that pits Shia Muslim communiies against the Sunni majority.
The league character, which has no legal force, recommends regulatory bodies confiscate equipment, impose fines, and suspend or withdraw licences from satellite channels that authorities deem to have violated its ‘principles’.

Arab ministers’ talk of codes of conduct and professional standards is seen by journalists and media watchdogs as a prelude to censorship and persecution. ‘Yes, we do need to prevent channels which promote heresy, pornography, and terrorism, from operating, but this is not the primary goal’, said the editor of Bahrain’s al-Wasat daily, Mansur al-Jamri.

Domestic laws in most Arab states already severly restrict freedom of expression. Egypt has repeatedly prosecuted reporters and editors. Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Morocco have all arrests bloggers and journalists, and Iraq has closed down three satellite TV stations since 2004.

It was the spectacular creation of a modern utopia: in the heart of a continent, built from scratch with daring architecture and urban planning, arose a city like no other.

Unveiled over half a century ago, Brasilia astonished the world. The purpose built capital of perfect grids and avant-garde buildings exuded wonder and optimism, control and beauty. The United Nations designated the city a world heritage site: it was a living, futurist museum. The plans to build a new capital in the savannah of Brazil’s mid-west began to become a reality in 1955. Just over five years later, the capital was inaugurated. Thousands of impoverished workers flocked to Brazil’s interior hoping to benefit from the project, which included around 8,000 miles of highways, connecting the development to other cities.

As the 50th anniversary approaches, however, the future seems to have ambushed Brasilia. What was supposed to be a shiny citadel has in places degraded into a violent, crime-ridden sprawl of cacophonous traffic jams. The real Brazil has spilled into the utopian vision.

Instead of 500,000 people as planners envisaged, the population has ballooned to 2.2 million, choking infrastructure and, in the rundown outskirts, ushering in scenes of gang violence more commonly associated with the favelas of Rio or Sao Paolo.

Oscar Niemeyer, legendary architect, designed many of the city’s civic monuments. Now 100, Niemeyer gave a rare interview to the Guardian, lamenting that his masterpiece was out of control. He defends the city’s conception and his designs for landmarks, seeing the problems as stemming from the dramatic expansion: ‘It should have stopped growing some time ago. The city should call a halt’, he says.

The town planning is faultless. Commercial and residential zones were meticulously demarcated. Less fine were the subsequent waves of migration and lines of jobless people. The population surge aggravated problems of access to healthcare and education. Unemployment continues to rise, particularly amongst the youth. It has jumped from 21% in 1992, to 40% in 2003.

Even more dramatic has been the rise in crime, especially on the outskirts of Brasilia. Over 100 members of an elite security force were recently dispatched to the outskirts of one federal district to try to control the violence. The high level of violence is thought to be a result of the huge migration and an almost total absence of social services or policing.

Freeloaders can best be described as people who put their town interests ahead of the common good and try to manipulate the generosity of others to their advantage. The research, which involved tests in 16 countries, shed new light on this group of people, and what happens when they are punished. The findings help understand the impact of their behaviour upon everyday actions which require cooperation, such as voting, recycling, and abiding by basic laws.

The survey highlighted marked national differences between the residents of the UK, US, and Switzerland, compared with those in more traditional societies such as Oman, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Russia. In some countries, Freeloaders who were punished for their selfishness took the route of revenge, further limiting the amount of cooperation.

The survey made use of a game, which examined behaviour in 16 cities around the world. Volunteers were given tokens and told they could either keep them, or put them in a common pot which would yield extra interest for all the players.

Levels of cooperation were remarkably similar across all the nations, the study concluded. However, behaviour changed dramatically when contributions were revealed and players were able to inflict punishments, such as removing tokens. The study uncovered a new phenomenon when, in subsequent rounds of the game, the punished freeloaders took revenge and hit back in what is described as ‘anti-social punishment’. This happened most in cities in more traditional societies based on authoritarian and parochial social institutions, for example Greece and South Korea. British, Australian, Chinese, German and Swiss freeloaders become more cooperative after being punished.

It was a gesture of sheer desperation. A father, engulfed by flames, dripped his baby from the third floor of his apartment block.

The baby was caught by a fireman and has suffered no injuries. Contrastingly, nine people, including five people and a pregnant woman, were killed by the blaze that destroyed a house in Ludwigshaven, an industrial city in South Germany. Two children found cowering behind a couch with wet cloths over their mouths were saved, but television news recorded a charred baby being pulled out of the wreck and lowered down a firemen’s ladder. The heat was so intense that the wooden staircase that could have carried many of the inhabitants to safety, simply collapsed. The strong risk that the building would cave in prevented rescue workers from searching all the floors, for fear that this would result in an even higher death toll.

The century-old house was full of people celebrating a carnival that is held throughout Catholic parts of Germany. The carnival procession, with huge floats, cheerleaders and brass band has passed by outside. Just hours later adults were jumping from the windows, screaming as their clothes burned.

The mayor of Ludwigshaven, Eva Lohse, held back tears as she described the tragedy as the worst fire to hit the city since the Second World War.