Global crisis hurting emerging nations: IMF; Forced evictions rise in China; End of the office desk; Long live paper textbooks; First ever Day of the Girl

1 Global crisis hurting emerging nations: IMF (BBC) The International Monetary Fund head, Christine Lagarde, has warned the global economic crisis has started to hurt growth in emerging economies. She said that uncertainty surrounding the global economy was hampering policymakers' ability to take measures to boost growth. Earlier this week, the IMF warned that the global economic recovery was getting weaker. The fund has also cut its global growth forecast amid the ongoing crisis.

Separately, the World Bank has cut its forecast for major Asian economies, including China and India, citing global risks. "Whether you turn to Europe, to the US, to other places as well, there is a level of uncertainty that is hampering decision makers from investing, from creating jobs," Ms Lagarde said during a press conference in Tokyo. "We need action to lift the veil of uncertainty."

2 Forced evictions rise in China (BBC) Forced evictions in China have risen significantly in recent years as local officials sell off land to property developers, Amnesty International says. Many cases involve violence and harassment, in what the group called "a gross violation of human rights". Pressure on local officials to meet economic goals and vested interests were behind the coercion, it said.

These evictions are a rumbling cause of social discontent and have led to protests across the country. All land in China is effectively controlled by the state, and laws allow local governments to claim land for urban development projects. Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty's senior director of research in Hong Kong, said seizing and selling off land was how local authorities were paying back funds borrowed to finance stimulus packages during the economic downturn.

3 End of the office desk (John Thistleton in Canberra Times) Andrew Balzanelli is one ACT managing director relaxed on his return to work to find someone else in his seat. Framed photos of his children and pets no longer adorn the walls of his office, nor do files spill over his desk.

Ten months have elapsed since Jones Lang LaSalle, Canberra, became the first in its global real estate network to adopt activity-based working.

No one has an office. They share benches and rather than look at walls, borrow views across the office to the city's skyline and bush landscape beyond. Mr Balzanelli said employers liked to say people were their biggest assets, but in reality many workplaces treated them like confined cattle.

Activity-based working moved them from two work settings - office and meeting room - to a choice of eight settings including a cafe, formal work points, informal drop-in zones, meeting rooms, hush rooms and focus desks.

As more mobile phones and tablet computers link to server-stored documents in offices, activity-based working is set to replace open plan office layouts in Canberra, as it has in major banks in the bigger capital cities and throughout Europe.

4 Long live paper textbooks (Justin B Hollander in The New York Times) A renowned expert on reading, Maryanne Wolf, has recently begun studying the effects of digital reading on learning, and so far the results are mixed. She worries that Internet reading, in particular, could be such a source of distractions for the student that they may cancel out most other potential benefits of a Web-linked, e-learning environment.

As both a teacher who uses paper textbooks and a student of urban history, I can’t help but wonder what parallels exist between my own field and this sudden, wholesale abandonment of the technology of paper. For example, when cars began to fill America’s driveways, and new highways were laid across the land, the first thing cities did was encourage the dismantling of our train systems. Streetcar lines were torn up. But in recent years, new streetcar lines have been built or old systems extended.

This lesson of technology-inspired extinction can be retold in many other domains of life: the way phonographs nearly disappeared when the music CD was invented; the rejection of bicycles in the middle of the 20th century; the shuttering of Polaroid factories with the advent of digital cameras. In other words, we shouldn’t jump at a new technology simply because it has advantages; only time and study will reveal its disadvantages and show the value of what we’ve left behind.

Which brings us back to paper. With strength and durability that could last thousands of years, paper can preserve information without the troubles we find when our most cherished knowledge is stuck on an unreadable floppy disk or lost deep in the “cloud.” The digitization of information offers important benefits, including instant transmission, easy searchability and broad distribution. But before we shred the last of the paper textbooks, let us pause and remember those old streetcars, and how great it would be if we still had them around.

5 First ever Day of the Girl (Ela Bhatt and Desmond Tutu in Dawn) Today is our human family’s first-ever International Day of the Girl. This is a day to celebrate the fact that it is girls who will change the world; that the empowerment of girls holds the key to development and security for families, communities and societies worldwide.

In our travels, as Elders, in Asia and Africa, we have met brave girls — and boys — who do not hesitate to stand up to tradition and say no to child marriage. In Bihar, where nearly 70% of girls marry before they turn 18 (contrary to national law), we met young people who were signing pledges not to marry before 18. In Amhara in northern Ethiopia, where the most common age for a girl to marry is 12, we visited girls who participated in workshops to discuss collectively the benefits of ending child marriage.

These meetings convinced us that there is a real need to connect groups around the world, enable them to work together and help to end this practice. This led to the creation, last year, of Girls Not Brides, a global partnership of organisations dedicated to stopping the practice, with a membership now growing in the hundreds.

When we created Girls Not Brides in 2011, we committed to ending child marriage in one generation. Why not, then, pledge the elimination of this harmful practice by 2030? On this inaugural Day of the Girl, we call on the international community to promise a different life to those girls — a life of their choosing.