In the aftermath of the recent global food crisis and economic downturn, the world's poor face unparalleled challenges to their food and nutrition security. While increased volatility in food prices will likely continue, wages for unskilled labour are failing to keep pace. Meanwhile, the financial crisis has pushed up unemployment and further reduced the purchasing power of poor people, who in a globalized economy now feel the effects of economic shocks more acutely.

In 2006, I gave some lectures at Harvard during which I called for a month, a week -- a day even -- of collective mourning for the millions whose souls still cry for proper burial and mourning rites. These lectures have now been published under the title: Something Torn and New. I did not know then that others were thinking along the same lines. I am glad that this day is being commemorated at the United Nations, but it should be actively observed in the whole world, as slave trade and plantation slavery were of prime importance in the making of the modern world.

After the worst of times, we are perhaps entering the best of times for proponents of nuclear disarmament. At long last, advocates of the elimination of nuclear weapons have reason for some guarded optimism. The road to a nuclear-weapons-free world will be long and bumpy, but those expected to take the initiative seem to have finally decided to lead. That is encouraging.

The world's first nuclear test, Trinity, took place on 16 July 1945, in a torrid desert in New Mexico which the Spanish Conquistadores had named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man). In the decades that followed, over 2,000 such tests occurred in eight countries, some in the atmosphere, some underground and others underwater. Today, the world is poised to turn a new page in the history of nuclear testing.

A thousand people die each day from gunshot wounds, and three times as many are left with severe injuries. If the death, injury and disability resulting from small arms were categorized as a disease, it would qualify as an epidemic. Yet the media and popular perception tend to suggest that gun violence is simply an unavoidable consequence of human cruelty or deprivation, rather than a public health problem which can be prevented or at least reduced.

Women today lead very different lives from their ancestors and are very influenced by the prevailing culture when it comes to breastfeeding. For many, breastfeeding seems to be a matter of opinion rather than a necessity for their child. Success or failure at breastfeeding will vary based on their preconceived notions.
As a Maternal-Child health nurse, and a full-time lactation consultant for over two decades, Máire Clements embraces an holistic and objective understanding of the process of breastfeeding. She calls it Conscious Breastfeeding. She shares this simple, but powerful approach to breastfeeding success in a new multi-media ebook The New Motherly Art of Conscious Breastfeeding.

As we think about how to reduce and eliminate new victims of landmines, we are reminded of the remarkable advances during the evolution of mine action work which began with the Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan in 1989. Our determination to live in a world free from the threat of landmines and explosive remnants of war is fortified, as we remember those lost and those affected. It is my fervent hope that a world with zero new victims of landmines will become a reality in my lifetime.

We have reached a tipping point. In less than a century, breastfeeding has become the exception rather than the rule -- a devastating trend to the health and well-being of large segments of the world population. Increasing the rates and duration of breastfeeding could save the lives of 1.4 million babies. It could also help national and local governments, in both developing and developed countries, to achieve the health-related United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

It is almost 65 years since the development of the first nuclear bomb, and yet we have had only two cases of use of nuclear weapons in war, namely Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So we have been spared the horror of a large nuclear war during this period when more than 130,000 nuclear weapons were built. This is a very unusual event in the history of mankind: so many weapons built, never to be used. Why has this happened? First, the leadership of the two nuclear superpowers and of the smaller nuclear States behaved as rational decision makers, as far as the control of nuclear weapons and the decision not to initiate their use were concerned.

Women's Global Health and Human Rights, Murthy et al. fills a deep void in scholarship and provides practical insight on the challenges facing women's health advocates worldwide. Readers will be taken by the work's encyclopedic breadth and conceptual depth. Divided into seven sections and 42 chapters, major themes include the impact of globalization, economics and development, chronic diseases, human rights, and cultural practices. Together, the work is at once inspiring and sobering -- informative in describing current trends and identifying avenues to remedy existent problems, yet daunting in its appraisal of pervasive social impediments that cause innumerous harms and preclude women from realizing their human right to health. Women's health advocates will find in its pages a clarion call to redouble their efforts.