How WhatsApp became a tool for Indian police to fight harassment

Phone lines in Africa and South Asia would never have gotten to the poor - but these places have leapfrogged over last-century technology and gone straight to mobile phones. Now the same thing is happening with off-grid solar power: the fastest -- perhaps the only – way to power the poor.

In the debate over how to reduce sexual assault on university campuses, proposing self-defense classes for women is controversial. But, according to new landmark Canadian research, it works.

The mobile phone is doing more than revolutionizing communication. It has the potential to improve many aspects of life in poor countries: commerce, health, agriculture, education - public health, especially, is being revolutionized by governments taking advantage of the mobile revolution by texting advice or sending voice messages to pregnant women, texting reminders to AIDS patients to take their meds, tracking the spread of diseases, allowing community health workers to keep records electronically and variations on all these themes.

Domestic abuse of the staff in the households of the 1% is often overlooked or ignored. But foreign missions in the US that abuse their domestic staff are finally being held accountable.

A national survey showed that few college students intervene when witnessing a sexual assault. The school with the highest rate of student intervention was Dartmouth College, where students receive bystander prevention training.

The 2008 recession’s job losses spurred a development of a Do-It-Yourself economy. With the advent of Uber, Etsy, Airbnb, and others, the marketplace has become full of micro-entrepreneurs who thrive with independent web-assisted businesses.

In war zones, people have a difficult time finding clean water and safe areas to inhabit. Social media, smart phones, and technology applications are aiding in people’s survival. In Aleppo, Syria, the International Committee of the Red Cross posted a map on Facebook to show alternative sources of clean drinking water that reached approximately 140,000 people.

2014 was a year marked nationwide by activism and unprecedented federal attention to the issue of campus sexual assault. The University of Texas system is putting $1.7 million into a comprehensive, multi-year effort to combat sexual assault on campus.

An average of 28,000 children born in the U.S. each year die before their first birthday – and many more face disabilities and serious life-long health problems, often because they are born prematurely or at low birth weights. A free service, text4baby, delivers crucial health advice via text message to pregnant women and new mothers.

Sexual harassment and assault, and almost non-existent job security, are just some of the problems that plague migrant workers in the United States. A decade-long farm worker-led effort to push corporations to demand farmers submit to “clean labor” audits has yielded, for the first time, the introduction of shade tents, mandated water and bathroom breaks.