Developing countries are to receive greater funding and transfers of technology to boost their use of renewable energy supplies. The pledge was made yesterday (8 November) in a declaration signed by 78 countries at the Beijing International Renewable Energy Conference. Representatives of Brazil, China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the European Union were among those who signed the declaration. The United States, however, was not involved. Because progress in renewable energy technology has been led by developed countries, most developing nations have been left behind, said Mohamed El-Ashry, a senior fellow with the United Nations Foundation.

Ex-deputy president Jacob Zuma sang and danced with supporters on Saturday, November 12 after hearing that his corruption trial would start in the high court on July 31 next year. Zuma was cheered by the large crowd outside the magistrate's court as he sang the struggle song Mshini. According to people in the crowd, the song means "bring my machine" but implies "bring my machinegun". Speaking in Zulu, Zuma explained the judicial process to the crowd and asked for them to be disciplined and not repeat any incidents such as the one at his previous court hearing when people burnt T-shirts showing the face of President Thabo Mbeki. Earlier a court official formally served Zuma with an indictment outlining the two corruption charges against him.

Unscrupulous individuals are using elaborate internet scams to prey on vulnerable people by offering them resettlement in exchange for money, the UN refugee agency has warned.There is always a risk of fraud in migration programmes. Governments have long recognized that people wanting to migrate will resort to exploiting vulnerabilities in admission procedures and systems. At the same time, desperate refugees can fall victim to fraudulent schemes offering them a quick-fix solution to their plight.UNHCR has been combatting these and other forms of fraud for some time.

Differences in labour force attachment across gender are important to explain the extent of the gender earnings gap. However, measures of women's professional experience are particularly prone to errors given discontinuity in labour market participation. For instance, the classical Mincerian approach uses potential experience as a proxy for actual experience due to lack of appropriate data. Such biases in the estimates cannot be ignored since the returns to human capital are used in the standard decomposition techniques to measure the extent of gender-based wage discrimination.

Source: Agenda News