She was wearing a polka dot skirt and her favorite pink flip-flops the day she left her village in Albania. Her mom called out her name before she got into her boyfriend's red Mitsubishi. She didn't turn to wave goodbye. She was 12 and angry.

Her stepdad has been raping her for as long as she can remember. She couldn't tell her mom. She knows she'd be sent away. She'd be the one blamed. Girls tempt grown men and bring it on themselves, they'd say. And there was also his drinking that made him do it, they'd add.

Once they were in Italy, her boyfriend changed - he told her she'll work for him as a prostitute. She thought he was playing some silly joke. She left home to be with him; to one day marry him. He is older. She's in love.

He slapped her back to reality. Told her how much money she cost him for the speedboat ride, her fake documents, the clothes and make-up he bought to make her look pretty and pass for 18.

She cried. And he cut her knee deep with a knife to make her stop. For the next seven years, the scar is a reminder she has no one but him to fear and return to.

Years later, I recorded her story at a secret shelter for women and saw court documents backing up what she told me. She pressed charges against her pimp but she says his uncle was a judge and released him on bail. The pimp left Albania until things cooled off. He is still free and has even bought a three-story house in her village in northern Albania.

Meanwhile, her family found out she was a "hooker who didn't even bring back any money, only an abortion and STDs." They disowned her. Her mom still doesn't know her husband was the first to abuse her.

That was the story of a young Albanian girl I met while filming "The Price of Sex" - sold into sex work in Italy and Belgium by a man who pretended to be her boyfriend.

The first woman I photographed had been trafficked to Turkey. She returned to Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Eastern Europe, wearing the same pants, blouse and shoes she left in.

Relying on her contacts in the town where she was sold, I retraced her journey to Turkey and met with one of her pimps - a man notorious for the sadistic abuse of the girls he owned.

Unable to take photographs, I posed as a Bulgarian woman for sale and spoke with Tania, a girl from Ukraine who was trafficked at the age of 23 and purchased as a slave by Yusuf.

I push my camera bag under the white plastic table, slouching down to appear more relaxed. The sun set four hours ago and the outdoor cafe where I'm sitting faces the fishing boats docked by the bay.

Only now the fear slowly seeps in as I notice a middle-aged man with an off-white cotton shirt and beige trousers approach the table.

The young woman by his side looks straight ahead. Her clothes are a few sizes too small by intent. They sit down at opposite ends of one another. I introduce myself in Russian.

The pimp doesn't understand but he doesn't need to. He is here to price me. He adjusts his gold-rimmed glasses, lights a cigarette and puts his cell phone on the table.

The young woman, Tatiana, also known as Tania, is average – small, tired and looking much older than 25.

We start talking. I'm nervous: "I am coming from Istanbul. For work."

"So you know what this is about?" she asks slowly as if speaking in code and then takes another drag on her cigarette.

(CNN) -- Here's a free idea that will make some businessperson millions of dollars.

Go ahead and take it -- it's yours.

You'll be doing a service to humankind.

In addition to all the money you'll make, you may very well end up with the Nobel Peace Prize, with the thanks of a grateful world.

This is no joke. The idea?

Bring back phone booths.

You're already saying: What? Phone booths? Who uses pay phones anymore?

No one said anything about pay phones. The idea is to put up phone booths -- all right, technically, phoneless booths -- in public places around the country.

The old-style phone booths, with doors that close, and ventilator fans in the ceilings. Either the ones made out of metal and glass that were seen on street corners for generations, or the elegant ones made out of dark wood and glass that were seen in the lobbies of office buildings and in the backs of drugstores.

Phone booths were a wonderfully democratic invention, intended to shut out the noise of the immediate outside world so the person in the booth could privately, in silence, talk with someone miles away.

Are you starting to see where we're going with this?

The new phone booths wouldn't have pay telephones inside. But they would be the solution to one of society's most constantly irritating problems.

You can't escape the yammering all around you -- the people walking down the street blabbing at high volume into their cell phones. The cell phones, of course, are the primary reason that pay telephones are increasingly hard to find. With so many people carrying their own phones, telephone companies have been deciding that it was uneconomical to maintain pay phones.

And here is where the idea comes in.

If there were clean, convenient, phone(less) booths readily available, don't you think that people would step into them to make their cell phone calls? Who wouldn't opt for privacy and quiet if it was there for them to take?

A savvy entrepreneur could finance the project by selling advertising space both outside and -- especially -- inside the new phone booths, whether on the streets, in malls, restaurants -- anywhere that people gather. National advertisers would literally have a captive audience. The person in the booth would have no choice but to stare at the advertising.

Cities and municipalities would love it, too. They could negotiate the rights to a percentage of the advertising fees for the booths on the streets, perhaps in exchange for having city workers help keep the booths clean.

There is a business precedent for this: In some cities, private firms have erected shelters at bus stops, with advertising displayed on the walls. The bus riders don't object to seeing the ads while they wait -- they're just glad to be able to get out of the storm.

Each and every one of them was deeply loved by someone and now they are dead.

These are the names of the men, women and children allegedly murdered by a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan's Panjwai District in Kandahar Province on March 11, according to Afghan officials. The U.S. military has now added one more name to that list but no one has revealed that victim's name so far.

When someone is killed, its natural to want to know who they were and how they died.

In this case, the how was quickly explained by witnesses, village elders, Afghan and NATO officials: They were shot dead. But looking across local, regional and international media for days after the massacre the full list of names and ages was nowhere to be found.

Even when some of the family members of the victims and village elders came to Kabul to the presidential palace to speak with President Karzai, few started by announcing their names but instead launched into accounts of what happened that night. And even they were at a loss to name every single victim at the time.

However, the minute it was discovered that a U.S. soldier was accused in the Panjwai case suddenly the fierce drive to find his name and details of his life became paramount to many journalists, all the while the vast majority of the victims still remained nameless.

It took far longer for us to find out who the dead were than it did for a hungry media to discover the name of the American soldier accused of killing them, to find his neighbors, family, and childhood friends.

The victims' identities seemed almost irrelevant to the investigation, and of far less interest than the legal defense strategy for Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.

Why have does the media seem to have forgotten these victims? Many reasons. None of them make it right, but they may help explain the failure.

For starters, security and communications -- or rather the lack of them -- didn't help the media's efforts. Traveling around Afghanistan is generally a dangerous proposition in Afghanistan. Even experienced journalists committed to investigating every detail found it difficult without putting themselves in serious danger.

In this case, even the government was at risk while investigating. An investigation team sent in by President Karzai including his brothers was fired on as they tried to mourn the dead and gather information in the villages of the Panjwai district.

(CNN) -- Since the debut of "Mad Men," some have called me "The Real Mad Man," with Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) thought of as my alter ego. But "Mad Men" misrepresents the advertising industry of my time by ignoring the dynamics of the Creative Revolution that changed the world of communications forever.

From where I sit, claiming this exasperating show is even remotely representative of the times we lived through would be like trying to show "Dynasty" on the History Channel! "Mad Men" is nothing more than the fulfillment of every possible stereotype of the early 1960s bundled up nicely to convince consumers that the sort of morally repugnant behavior exhibited by its characters -- with one-night-stands and excessive consumption of Cutty Sark and Lucky Strikes -- is glamorous and "vintage."

It was not like that. That dynamic period of counterculture in the 1960s found expression on Madison Avenue through a new creative generation -- a rebellious coterie of art directors and copywriters who understood that visual and verbal expression were indivisible, who bridled under the old rules that consigned them to secondary roles in the ad-making process dominated by noncreative hacks and technocrats.

George Lois

In the very first week of the 1960s, after a successful year as an award-winning art director at the legendary Doyle Dane Bernbach, I left. And with two copywriters as partners, started what was unthinkable at the time, the first ad agency to have the name of an art director in its masthead, and later, the first to go public.

It was a testy time to be a graphic designer like me who had the rage to communicate and, to create icon rather than con. And, unlike the TV "Mad Men," we worked full, exhausting, joyous days: pitching new business, creating ideas, "comping" them up, storyboarding them, selling them, photographing them, and directing commercials. And our only "extracurricular activity" was chasing fly balls and dunking basketballs on our agency softball and basketball teams!

(CNN) -- This week, Republicans announced their new budget with a highly produced video full of great rhetoric and patriotic music, but one major piece of Americana is missing -- a single mention of the middle class.

The narrator, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, had promised to offer a "path to prosperity" but instead introduces economic policies that represent a dead end for America's middle class and American manufacturing. Rarely has a budget been so brazen about protecting the richest and most powerful at the expense of the rest.

Ryan, considered by many to be an ideological leader of conservative thought, correctly asserts that this is a moment for America to choose between different futures. He then outlines the conservative vision that Americans have rejected over and over again -- increasing U.S. debt through special deals to protect the most powerful corporations and dumping that burden onto the already struggling middle class.

Tom Perriello

Though Ryan's plan has deliberately avoided explaining how the tax numbers add up, in order to pay for the massive tax cuts at the top, everyone else would have to pay more. It's likely that a middle-class family with two kids making about $70,000 a year would pay about $1,150 more in income tax, according to calculations made by the Center for American Progress. That's an 80% increase over what they pay now, while millionaires will pay less. That same family currently receives about $5,500 worth of federal support from K-12 education, transportation, health and science research, consumer safety, natural resource protections and federal law enforcement. The GOP budget would cut these "nondefense discretionary spending" by about 25%, taking away a typical family's services and protections by about $1,400 per year. To borrow a phrase from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, these budget priorities are truly "of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%."

Opinion: GOP budget will tackle economic challenges

House Republicans further threaten the middle class by rewarding companies for sending American jobs overseas. They want to revive the outsourcing loopholes that Democrats, including myself, have fought hard to close. These loopholes would exempt overseas profits from taxes, creating a greater incentive to relocate investments to other countries and leaving more of the tax burden to our middle class.

(CNN) -- I don't trust cops and I don't know many black people who do.

I respect them. I sympathize with them. I am appreciative of the work they do.

But when you've been pulled over for no good reason as many times as I have; when you've been in handcuffs for no good reason as many times as I have; when you run out to buy some allergy medication and upon returning home, find yourself surrounded by four squad cars with flashing lights and all you can think about is how not to get shot, you learn not to trust cops.

LZ Granderson

The first instance of injustice surrounding the Trayvon Martin tragedy occurred February 26, the night George Zimmerman decided to pursue, confront and ultimately shoot and kill Martin. The second started the moment the Sanford police failed to properly investigate what, given the 911 tapes, is clearly a questionable claim of self-defense made by Zimmerman. But seeing that Martin's parents were forced to sue the police department just to hear the tapes, it seems as if Zimmerman isn't the only questionable component in this case.

Thursday, Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee stepped down "temporarily." On Wednesday, Sanford city commissioners had voted "no confidence" in him.


Opinion: What every black mother fears

But at a town hall meeting hosted by the NAACP on Tuesday, Sanford's black residents said they lost confidence in the police long before because of the extensive history of prejudicial treatment in the area.

Law enforcement isn't easy. In fact, it is extremely dangerous. But that in no way excuses improper procedure and lies. And given the amount of effort put forth by the Sanford chief to exonerate Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman with a history of 911 calls that suggests paranoia, versus efforts to find out the truth, it sure feels like another case of racial profiling and police trying to cover up an impropriety. The shooter may not have been a police officer, but the story of how the police handled this case is oh-so-familiar.

It's the same story the nation heard from blacks in Los Angeles surrounding the 1991 Rodney King beating.

(CNN) -- What's the best way of encouraging men to pee more accurately in public urinals? Answer: Give them a target.

That's what a maintenance man working at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport suggested: Etch an image of a house fly on the urinals to give men something to aim at. Overnight, the quantity of misdirected urine fell by about 80%, according to the airport.

The painted fly is an example of a "nudge" -- a subtle way of influencing behavior without offering material incentives or imposing punishments.

"Normally, if a government, employer or even parent wants to promote a certain type of conduct, they introduce rules, offer a financial reward or both," says economist Richard Thaler who, alongside fellow academic Cass Sunstein, popularized the concept of "nudging."

Subliminal sway

Whether we're conscious of them or not, nudges -- of a sort -- are all around us. From the rumble strip along motorways -- gently encouraging motorists to remain in the correct lane -- to rows of brightly colored candy wrappers, less subtly inviting us to pick them up and place them in our shopping cart.
Such subliminal influences are nothing new. But Thaler and Sunstein argue that they have the potential to be harnessed on a much grander scale -- and for the collective good.

"Just imagine if your surroundings were arranged to help you make better decisions to achieve your goals," says Thaler.

The question is, could we be "nudged" into better, more sustainable practices that help the environment?

How bad habits start

Much of our behavior is habitual, says Pelle Hansen, behavioral philosopher at the University of Southern Denmark and chairman of the Danish Nudging Network. "We have long showers, leave appliances turned on and throw away rubbish as part of daily routines that involve little thought."

Some of this automatic behavior is not even in our own long-term interests, let alone the planet's. Hansen points out that dropping litter, for instance, obviously degrades the quality of the shared environment while leaving lights on costs us money.

More from Road to Rio: Counting the carbon cost of bringing water to the desert

So why do we do it? The problem is that once a pattern of behavior has formed, it's difficult to break, especially if the negative repercussions are not experienced immediately, says Professor Robert Cialdini, psychologist and author of "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion."

"Our brains are designed to go into autopilot once we've established a routine that works for us. This is useful because it frees us up to think about things other than day-to-day tasks. But it's also unhelpful if the behavior has negative, albeit not immediately felt, consequences," he adds.

Jaipur, India (CNN) -- How did buildings keep cool before the invention of air conditioning? As architects consider how to reduce the energy demands of new builds, some are turning to the past for simple, low-tech solutions.

At the height of summer, in the sweltering industrial suburbs of Jaipur, Rajasthan in north-west India, the Pearl Academy of Fashion remains 20 degrees cooler inside than out -- by drawing on Rajasthan's ancient architecture.

While the exterior appears very much in keeping with the trends of contemporary design, at the base of the building is a vast pool of water -- a cooling concept taken directly from the stepwell structures developed locally over 1,500 years ago to provide refuge from the desert heat.

Award-winning architect Manit Rastogi, who designed the academy, explains that baoli -- the Hindi word for stepwell -- are bodies of water encased by a descending set of steps.

"When water evaporates in heat, it immediately brings down the temperature of the space around it," he says.

While traditional stepwells often go many stories below ground level, Rastogi's go down just four meters. However, the effect is the same and -- like the ancient Mughal palaces before it -- the academy enjoys its own microclimate.

CNN) -- The recent announcement by the United Nations that 89% of the world's population (6.1 billion people) now has "sustainable access to safe drinking water" was described by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as a "great achievement for the people of the world."

Meeting part of the target of one of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ahead of the 2015 deadline was "a testament to all those who see (them) not as a dream, but as a vital tool," he added.

But the goal of universal access to clean water is far from complete says Stef Smits, program officer for IRC International Water and Sanitation Center.

"Reaching the last 10% of the population -- those living in remote rural areas and on the fringes of big cities -- will become increasingly difficult and expensive," Smits said.
Lots of organizations do monitoring and that's great, but it tends to be a very slow process. 'FLOW' is something that (can be done in) real time
Keri Kugler, Water for People

Furthermore, he says, the MDGs on basic sanitation are unlikely to be met before 2025.

It's an area which the U.N. concedes is "lagging far behind" the millennium commitments, with 2.5 billion people (including one billion children) still exposed to poor sanitation and one child dying every 20 seconds as a consequence, the U.N. estimates.

But hope that this horrifying statistic can be eradicated is being fueled by technology which is helping monitor water supplies more quickly and efficiently.

U.S.-based NGO Water for People is helping lead the charge in this area with the development of a new system called FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch).

London (CNN) -- This April, in Washington D.C., ministers from developed and developing countries will discuss how we can prevent the unnecessary deaths of over a million children a year.

Death caused mostly by diarrhea due to a lack of safe drinking water and sanitation. Deaths that outnumber those caused by AIDS, malaria and measles combined. In fact, the biggest cause of child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and the second biggest worldwide.

The Washington gathering, as part of the Sanitation and Water for all partnership, comes soon after the announcement that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve the number of people who do not have access to safe drinking water has been achieved, a full five years ahead of the target date.

The news that an additional two billion people now have access to safe water in the last 20 years is certainly a cause for celebration, but our journey towards universal access to water still has some way to go. Now is not the time for complacency.

Despite this recent progress, 783 million people from the poorest and most dispossessed communities across the world do not have access to safe drinking water. They will be the hardest to reach, the most marginalized and excluded. If context was needed for the scale of the challenge, we are talking about reaching the equivalent of over two and a half times the population of the U.S. with clean water.


We should focus first and foremost on the poorest of the poor when investing in water. They must be our priority moving forward.
We are talking about reaching the equivalent of over two and a half times the population of the U.S. with clean water.
Barbara Frost, WaterAid

Basic systems that can be managed by communities themselves accounted for less than 20% of donor funding to the water and sanitation sector in 2010. This is a worrying statistic as it will leave many of the 783 million without access to safe water on the sidelines. You certainly won't hear these people celebrating achieving this water Millennium Development Goal when their need remains so great.

But more worrying still, is the consistent failure to achieve the other half of the same MDG goal -- that of halving the proportion of the population without access to basic sanitation.

A staggering 2.5 billion still live without toilets, and access to sanitation is one of the most off-track targets of the Millennium Development Goals, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. On current trends, it will be over 250 years before the region has universal access to both water and sanitation.