#children-of-the-world

#children-of-the-world

Normal showcases extreme violence, including characters being stabbed, shot, and subjected to graphic injuries, alongside strong language and themes of parental abuse and suicide.

Play is hard to tamp down, and exuberance breaks through even as busy spacefarers are carrying along the weighty hopes of humanity.

Abida's world is a strip of cracked pavement along a busy four-lane road, surrounded by plastic-sheet shelters and dozens of other families who live there without walls or doors.

"We don't have a bomb shelter near our house, so we were just sitting on the floor in the corridor all night," Katia said.

Learning today doesn't usually look broken. It looks like a well-run treadmill, always on, always moving, quietly exhausting everyone. New initiatives, new tools, new priorities. New "must-have" skills. Even when learning is thoughtfully designed, there's a nagging sense that nothing sticks because nothing gets a chance to. People finish the course, grab the badge, and move on to the next thing before the last thing has had time to show up in how they work.

The physical nature of the project was inspiring and fun for everyone and also contained within it a kind of message. If we are going to change the direction of our climate we are going to have to do it for real too - in the real world, by doing real stuff.

The daughter of undocumented immigrants from Morocco, Nada had lived there since she was four. Only one other person was travelling with Nada. Grover Morales was a neighbour with a saintly air. In La Florida, the poor neighbourhood in which he and Nada's family lived, Morales made a point of greeting everyone, regardless of race or faith. He read religious books, not just the Christian Bible, but also the Torah and the Qur'an.

Already, 2026 is proving to be a challenging year for global hunger. Last year, the global development sector faced enormous upheavals, with the United States and other donor countries slashing aid budgets even as low-income countries struggled with debt burdens. Steep aid cuts have exacerbated existing food security crises-whether from Russia's war with Ukraine disrupting international food supplies or farmers losing tens of billions of dollars due to climate change.

Education has long been understood as a cornerstone of social development, shaping not only individual futures but also the collective capacity of societies to respond to change. Observed annually on 24 January, the International Day of Education invites reflection on the role education plays in addressing global challenges and sustaining social progress. As the world confronts overlapping challenges, from technological transformation to deepening inequalities, the question of how education is imagined, governed, and experienced has become increasingly urgent.

Since October's ceasefire, which meant Israel would allow some - but not nearly enough - aid trucks to enter our besieged Strip, people in Gaza have desperately been eating, whenever possible, what they had been deprived of previously. Yet, as a result, many have developed " refeeding syndrome," which is a serious medical condition. Refeeding syndrome occurs when food is suddenly reintroduced after a prolonged period of starvation - and Israel has subjected those of us in Gaza to such periods on multiple occasions.

In 2025, the administration of US President Donald Trump ordered the US Agency for International Development to be closed; this year, it withdrew the country from 66 international organizations. Other Western nations that are plagued with high levels of debt and pressure to prioritize domestic challenges have slashed their foreign aid, too. According to projections, official development assistance dropped by 9-17% in 2025, amounting to some US$55 billion.

The Missing Social Unit From middle school onward, American children don't belong to a "class" in any stable sense. They move continuously - subject to subject, room to room, teacher to teacher. There's extensive discourse around respect, equity, and inclusion. But there's remarkably little structured attention to the actual social life of any group. Because there isn't really a group.

Aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date. In the past two decades there have been dramatic falls in the number of young children dying from infectious diseases, driven by aid directed to the developing world, researchers wrote in the Lancet Global Health. But that progress was at risk of reversal because of abrupt budget cuts by donor countries, including the US and the UK.

What many reception teachers say they did not sign up for was spending large chunks of the school day managing toileting, feeding and basic self-care because growing numbers of children are arriving without those skills in place. New data points to a widening gap in England and Wales between what parents believe school ready means and what classrooms are actually experiencing