The Group of 20, which includes both wealthy, industrialized nations and large developing countries, will permanently replace the Group of 7 as the main global forum on economic policy.

Tens of thousands of Yemenis displaced by weeks of fighting in the north of the country face a humanitarian crisis exacerbated by heavy rains and highway robbers targeting relief convoys.

Afghanistan will recount a limited sample of 10 percent of votes cast in the disputed August 20 presidential election in order to speed up the recount process so that if a run-off is necessary, it can be held before winter.

“As heart wrenching as it is informative…. You’ll have a pit in your stomach by the end of the show.”
–Families.com

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, returns in 2009 with visits to seven classrooms in seven countries to offer a glimpse into the lives of seven extraordinary children who are struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education. We started filming in 2002, watching as kids first entered school in Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya and Romania, many despite great odds. Several years later, in 2006, we returned to film an update — and now, three years later, we travel to check in on our young teenagers who are making the precarious transition to middle school. Among the highlights: in Afghanistan we reunite with 16-year-old Shugufa, who resolutely remains in school despite the Taliban’s recent acid attacks on young women her age. “If they continue attacking schools, our country won’t progress. Without an education you can’t get anywhere,” says Shufuga, whose own education was delayed when her family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan during years when the Taliban ruled her country. We also visit the biggest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where 15-year-old Joab’s mother has died and his father has abandoned the family. We watch as, incredibly, Joab manages to stay at the top of his class while also raising and feeding his two younger siblings. And in the blazing desert of Rajasthan, India, we encounter Neeraj, 15, only to learn that she has been unable to realize her dream of making it to 10th grade: since our last visit her night school has closed, and she now helps support her family by grazing the livestock full-time while her brothers continue their education.

These children’s stories put a human face on the shocking fact that more than 75 million children are currently out of school; of these, two thirds are girls. One in four children in developing countries does not complete five years of basic education, and there are nearly one billion illiterate adults — one-sixth of the world’s people. WIDE ANGLE plans to continue revisiting all the children, and their peers and families, through 2015, the year they should graduate — and, not coincidentally, the U.N.’s target date for achieving universal education, a Millennium Development goal endorsed by all 191 members of the United Nations.

While each child in Time for School 3 has a unique story, taken together their lives tell an epic tale, shedding light on one of the most urgent and under-reported stories of our time.

Afghan election officials begin preparations for a second round of voting to determine last month’s controversial presidential election marred by allegations of large-scale rigging in favor of Hamid Karzai. The second round will take place in five weeks only if Karzai’s share of the vote – which currently stands at 54% – falls to less than 50 percent. With 10 percent of ballots currently under scrutiny, this appears increasingly likely.

The World Bank says development efforts in poorer nations will be derailed without a huge increase in funding for climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. The bank warns that the increase in global average temperatures will still result in shrinking levels of G.D.P. for many African and Asian countries and lead to a global health catastrophe.

Kenyan authorities begin to move residents out of Africa’s largest slum – the Kibera settlement in Nairobi. Officials expect the clearance of about one million people to take up to five years. The first people to move will be housed in 300 new apartments. Prime Minister Raila Odinga says new ground is being prepared for a “modern, low income residential estate with modern schools, markets, playgrounds and other facilities.”

A senior United Nations official begins a visit to Sri Lanka for two days of talks about the slow pace of release of Tamil refugees. Many are still detained in government-run camps four months after the end of the war. The U.N. official may also press for a probe into human rights abuses during the final stages of the military’s victory over Tamil rebels.

Call (718) 506-1351 to join the conversation!

WIDE ANGLE’s unprecedented, award-winning 12-year documentary project, Time for School, follows seven kids in seven countries struggling to get what nearly all American kids take for granted: a basic education.

On Thursday, September 10th at 12:00 noon, EST, we’ll be hosting a live discussion with Oren Rudavsky and Frederick Rendina, two of the film’s producers, and two experts on global education: David Gartner of the Brookings Institute and Faryal Khan of UNESCO.

The discussion will be hosted by Pamela Hogan, Executive Producer of Time for School. You can read a Q & A with Hogan about the series on the Inside Thirteen blog.

Visit our site to listen live through Blog Talk Radio, and call (718) 506-1351 with any questions for our guests. You can also send us your questions in advance by leaving a comment below.

We’d especially like to hear from students and educators, and want to extend a special welcome to members of Classroom 2.0, a social network for people interested in using collaborative technologies in education.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Jenin camp looks like an established city because it has been there since 1953. It is one of 58 Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria where an estimated 1.3 million Palestinians live.

The camps were created when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948 during the creation of Israel, and again after Israel occupied additional land in 1967.

Click on the green markers in this map to learn more about these camps. Use the + button to zoom in and click on overlapping markers.

View Palestinian Refugee Camps in a larger map

Details and photographs in this map are provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which was established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict and operates many of the camps.

UNRWA defines a camp as a plot of land provided by the host government for accommodating Palestinian refugees. Population refers to the number of registered refugees living in the camp.

“Recounts the harrowing, heartbreaking stories of North Korean refugees
who escape – or try to – across the border into China”
–Miami Herald

“The kind of suspense Hollywood cannot manufacture”
– Wall Street Journal

About the Film

In the past decade, up to 100,000 defectors have crossed the waters of the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China to escape from North Korea, the world’s last closed Communist state. In Crossing Heaven’s Border, WIDE ANGLE tells the moving and dramatic stories of a few of them.

Crossing Heaven’s Border reveals the plight of North Korean defectors from the point of view of intrepid South Korean journalists who risk their lives filming undercover for ten months to capture the haunting stories first-hand. The reporters introduce us to a mother working in China as a tour guide to support her six-year-old son who is sick with cerebral palsy and in dire need of medical attention. And we follow the grueling ten-day journey of a teenage girl and a little boy smuggled overland across China and Laos into Thailand, where North Korean defectors can request asylum at the South Korean embassy.

About the Issue

The exodus began in the mid-90s when North Korea was plagued by a famine that killed up to a million people. Most defectors flee from North Korea’s poor border regions into northeast China, where they live in hiding, work illegally and have no access to education or medical care. More than three quarters of the defectors are women, many of whom work in the sex industry. If caught by Chinese authorities, they are repatriated to North Korea, where they face severe punishment: persecution, torture, even execution in prison camps. Only a lucky few reach their ultimate goal: asylum in South Korea.

WIDE ANGLE anchor Aaron Brown further explores the plight of defectors from North Korea in a post-film interview with Debra Liang-Fenton, a human rights expert with the United States Institute of Peace, and the former Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

Israel’s prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu reaches a coalition agreement with Labor party leader Ehud Barak.

Organizers call off a peace conference in Johannesburg after the South African government refuses the a visa for the Dalai Lama.

Serbia marks the 10th anniversary of the start of NATO’s bombing campaign.

Amnesty International reports that the number of executions worldwide doubled last year, with Asian countries putting more people to death than the rest of the world combined, and China leading the way.

Pakistani authorities arrest dozens of lawyers and opposition activists in an effort to thwart a four-day protest march scheduled to begin tomorrow.

Former aides to Saddam Hussein Tariq Aziz and Ali Hassan al-Majid are convicted of crimes against humanity by Iraq’s highest court for the 1992 killing of 42 Baghdad merchants.

Thousands gather for peace vigils in Northern Ireland, in the wake of the murders of two British officers and a policeman by IRA spliter groups.

EDITOR
David Miller

FOR WIDE ANGLE/FOCAL POINT

SENIOR PRODUCER
Nina Chaudry

WEB PRODUCER
Lauren Feeney

COORDINATING PRODUCER
Charlotte Mangin

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Lucy Kennedy

U.S. State Department
Background Note “Zimbabwe,” January 1, 2008

Timeline: Zimbabwe
A BBC chronology of key events in Zimbabwe’s complicated past, including video and audio of recent milestones.

New Yorker: “The Destroyer”
October 2008 article by Jon Lee Anderson about Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

Council on Foreign Relations: “Crisis in Zimbabwe”
Council on Foreign Relations experts participate in a December 2008 conference call about Zimbabwe’s political, economic, and public health crisis.

International Crisis Group: “Ending Zimbabwe’s Nightmare”
A briefing about Zimbabwe’s future published in December 2008 by the International Crisis Group, a leading non-governmental organization that works to resolve and prevent deadly conflicts.

Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading human rights organizations, documents rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

World Food Program
The frontline agency in the United Nations’s fight against global hunger, the World Food Program, provides frequent updates on the food crisis in Zimbabwe.

Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA)
Zimbabwean women’s organization profiled by FOCAL POINT.

Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe
An online alliance of Zimbabwean activists and non-governmental organizations, which aims to improve the accessibility of human rights and civic information in Zimbabwe.

Council for Reconstruction of Zimbabwe
Organization of members of the Zimbabwean diaspora working for peace and prosperity in Zimbabwe.

JOE BIDEN was sworn in as Vice President of the United States just minutes before Barack Obama’s historic inauguration. In the fall of 2004, then-Senator Biden spoke with WIDE ANGLE host Carol Marin about U.S.-Saudi relations.

On Thursday, January 22, the Senate voted 94 to 2 to confirm HILLARY CLINTON as the next Secretary of State. Here, Clinton discusses human trafficking, an issue she’s been working on since her days as the nation’s First Lady, with WIDE ANGLE host Jamie Rubin.

GEORGE MITCHELL, whose 2001 Mitchell Report became the basis of the “road map” to peace between Israel and Palestine, is expected to be named the new administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East as early as today. Mitchell also helped negotiate a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. Here, he talks about ethnic and religious violence between Muslims and Hindus in India with host Jamie Rubin.

LEON PANETTA is Obama’s choice for CIA director. A CIA outsider, Panetta, as Chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission and grandson of a sardine fisherman, spoke to host Carol Marin about the state of the world’s oceans and marine life.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has endorsed SUSAN RICE as Ambassador to the United Nations, and she’s expected to be easily confirmed. Rice was the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the Clinton administration, and here, she talks with WIDE ANGLE host Mishal Husain about black economic empowerment in South Africa.

DENNIS ROSS is expected to be named Obama’s Special Envoy to Iran, a rumor that has angered Obama’s anti-war supporters –Ross says he will not rule out military action in Iran. In July 2006, Ross spoke to WIDE ANGLE host Daljit Dhaliwal about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Assuming Timothy F. Geithner is confirmed as Secretary of Treasury, GENE SPERLING, a well-known veteran of the Clinton administration, is expected to be brought on as an adviser. As a senior economic fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Council on Foreign Relations, Sperling spoke with host Daljit Dhaliwal about education in the developing world.

Promising to promote renewable energy as a means of boosting the rural economy, former Iowa Gov. TOM VILSACK was confirmed as U.S. Agriculture Secretary. Here, he discusses the politics of climate change with WIDE ANGLE host Aaron Brown.

Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cemetery, the country’s largest military cemetery, houses the remains of about 40,000 war veterans, including 575 Muslim headstones which are grouped together and turned toward Mecca. An estimated 500 of these were found spray-painted with either swastikas or with letters spelling out Islamophobic graffiti and Nazi slogans such as “Heil Hitler.”

It is the third time in the past two years that the Muslim section of the cemetery has been targeted. In April, vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves, hung a pig’s head from one tombstone, and graffitied slogans insulting France’s Muslim justice minister. Two men are awaiting trial over this incident, but deny the charges. A year earlier, neo-Nazi vandals painted swastikas on 52 of the cemetery’s Muslim graves. Two youths aged 18 and 21 were jailed for one year over that attack.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned Sunday’s attack as an “abject and revolting act” which demonstrates “repugnant racism against France’s Muslim community” and insults the memory of all World War I combatants. He called for a swift inquiry. An investigation is underway to find the culprits, with around 100 French police at the site to gather evidence.

This French Muslim blogger reacted with anger: “The choice of day (Eid festival) and of location (a military cemetery) signals a double provocation against the memory of the deceased and their loved ones, and against the French republic for whom these soldiers sacrificed their lives…. This unfortunate series of Islamophobic desecrations is evidence of the ineffectiveness of the government’s response to this new form of anti-Arab racism.”

Hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers from France’s African colonies fought during World War I and tens of thousands were killed.

WIDE ANGLE’s Young, Muslim, and French explores tensions between secular and Islamic values in France, home to Europe’s biggest Muslim community.