 Hero Excellency President Polkagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda. My dear friend, Mr. Carlos Slim, hello, Chairman of the Carlos Slim Foundation. My dear friend and colleague, Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, dear commissioners, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Let me offer you a very warm welcome to the Yale Club for the eighth meeting of the Broadband Commission. I would very, very much like to thank each and every one of you for joining us here today and for your continuing passion, participation and involvement. In fact, as Carlos was saying, it's very rare to see such a momentum on an issue, and we are very much privileged to see all of you here this time. Without you, the Broadband Commission could not succeed. Let me thank the two co-chairs of the Commission, President Kagame and General Slim, who have been very much committed. They have not missed a single meeting of the Commission, no matter where it took place. And really, this gathering is due to their leadership, and I would like to again thank them and thank my co-vice chairman, Irina Bokova, with whom I'm proud to show that we are working in the UN as one, my other UN colleagues who are part of the Commission, and our friend from the European Commission, who are showing that indeed we can work together and make something successful. I would like to have a special thank to Mr. Carlos Slim, who generously hosted the last meeting. We had an excellent and insightful time in Mexico. I think this memory will go for a long time. Today, as always, we have an exciting and very full agenda, and we will be hearing about the tremendous progress being made in Broadband. We will also be launching the State of Broadband 2013 report, to which so many of you contributed. I very much want to make sure that we have time for fruitful and interactive discussion today. So, as usual, I will keep my opening remarks as brief as possible. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to say that we are witnessing growing interest in our work and that the Broadband Commission is clearly gaining momentum. This has been especially a busy year for the Commission, with several of the working groups in particular being very active and a number of strong conclusions and position statements coming out of these groups. The Working Group on Education published a semi-annual report in February in Barcelona, which generated extensive interest. The Working Group on Gender and Broadband has been engaged in considerable debate with a very stimulating and productive meeting yesterday, and will publish its report today. Meanwhile, the Task Force on Sustainable Development has been very busy as well, and also has a report that will be published this week, calling for ICTs to be a clear and important part of the post-2015 development agenda. I was also delighted to see the pivotal new research into national Broadband plans that was published earlier in the summer by ITU and Cisco, which provides real concrete evidence of the tangible impact of such plans. These research gained wide recognition, justifying the Commission's focus on national Broadband plans, and was published in the Economist magazine. It was also cited by the World Bank, telecom paper, tech crunch, and various other industry media. Finally, the Commission is also in the process of publishing a joint report and global survey on ICTs and people with disabilities. All of these demonstrates the value of the Commission and is a good reward for your efforts and investment. I am delighted to announce that the British Commonwealth approached us with a view to citing the work of the Broadband Commission with a call for all Commonwealth member states to consider developing a national Broadband plan in its communique, which is to be published by the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting taking place later in November this year in Sri Lanka. We are also seeing some very positive results from our advocacy work. The Sengish Commissioners, as many of you will know, we are just back from the BYND 2015 Global Youth Summit, which was held in Costa Rica and was a completely amazing event. The youth declaration resulting from the summit is a powerful statement from young people and it is being taken by President Laura Chinchilla, President of Republic of Costa Rica, to the General Assembly this week. The Broadband Commission should be proud of its role in making the Global Youth Summit happen. The summit was inspired by the Broadband Commission working group on youth and Broadband, which was proposed by Mohamed Yunus. Thank you, Mohamed. He's coming here today, right? He's coming. He's coming. He's coming later. And at lunchtime, just before lunch, he will be signing a paper, a partnership agreement with some of his partners here, and which I had the honor to chair this commission, this working group. I would like to take this opportunity to give special thanks to the institutions that sponsored the Global Youth Summit and some of them are here, especially those from the commission, ICT Qatar. Dr. Haissa is here and I'm very pleased that you put so many young people in the plane to Costa Rica already do the same thing. And I'm very pleased that Shahabdallah was able to come personally to the meeting, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, and Claro. My good friend Carlos Slim has specially helped for us in this meeting, and we are very much grateful for the support, as well, of course, as the participation of United Nations agencies who were there on our side. The summit demonstrated a new way of working with a special role being played by connected youth around the world at over 40 networked hubs, and also reinforced the incredible power of social media in charging the way forward. In addition to the 600 or so participants, youth from 67 countries, there were 3,500 youth in those groups participating remotely, so it was really quite vibrant and powerful, innovative, and influential. As a global summit could ever, never have taken place without the power of broadband. Broadband networks, the arteries of our digital economy, are today vital and responsible to nations' economic competitiveness, so we hope that the UN Secretary General's high-level panel of eminent persons can take this message on board. Indeed, later today, we will be hearing from the Task Force on Sustainable Development, chaired by Ericsson, about how the Commission is planning to take this key message forward with the transformative solutions. I would like to also mention the participation of my young brother, Ahmed Alendawi, the special envoy of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for youth. He was present with us at the Costa Rica meeting. We did it together, and we did something very well, and he showed his leadership. I understand why Mr. Ban Ki-moon chose him for this very challenging task, and you will later on hear from him. Later today, we'll be hearing from the Task Force on Sustainable Development, chaired by Ericsson, on how the Commission is planning to take this key message forward with the report on transformative solutions. And we encourage all to sign the broadband manifesto, which will be circulating in the room later to emphasize the importance of broadband in the United Nations framework for sustainable development. Distinguished Commissioners, later on today, we will be launching this year's State of Broadband Report, and we will have time for a separate discussion on that. But let me just highlight some important findings from the report, and this is that extra effort that will be needed if we are to achieve all of the broadband commission's advocacy targets by 2015. Target one for broadband policy suggests that policymakers have responded well to the policy challenge and have been busily engaged consulting and formulating policy with strong growth in the number of countries with a national broadband policy. However, the industry is at a critical juncture trying to fund extremely expensive next-generation broadband networks at a time of flat or even declining revenues. This is why we are devoting extra time to listening to industry at this meeting to hear what they have to say in terms of what needs to be done to ensure that everyone can enjoy the benefits of a universal broadband. Ladies and gentlemen, before I conclude, let me offer a very special welcome to the newest members of the Broadband Commission and Buvaro of GSMA, and Dr. Sukh Chayli, the CEO of Korea Telecom, Katie, our very strong partners. We have a very special welcome to you both, and we look forward to hearing from each and every one of you shortly. I thank you very much.