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What is one thing world leaders should do to empower girls worldwide? That’s the question we put to the Girl Up campaign’s current class of Teen Advisors.

Everybody’s talking about the crazy weather. The polar vortex walloped the Eastern United States with ice and snow while the West suffers through extreme drought. Big parts of Britain were hit by record-breaking floods. January 7 was the hottest day in Australian history, with an average high temperature of 105°F over the entire country.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is generally the first place the world turns for information on potential international health emergencies. In addition to WHO’s roster of health experts and its decades of experience with health threats, it also plays a central role in carrying out the International Health Regulations (IHR), a global framework adopted in 2005 to help improve global public health security.

In the United States, we are given a birth certificate and an official identification number when we are born. We become official citizens. When I turned 16 I got a driver’s license. Many of us will travel overseas and need to apply for a passport. As we live our lives, go to school, visit a doctor, or register to vote, we are able to do these things because we have been given a number that recognizes us as a member of society.

Flowers are beautiful. Chocolates are delicious. But really, what gift is better than helping brighten someone’s day?

At the end of January, we were taught a lesson in the power of social media in global health as a striking interactive map of vaccine preventable outbreaks since 2008 went, well, viral on Twitter.

The United Nations’ Kakuma refugee camp sits near the South Sudan border in neighboring Kenya. If that feels a world away, consider this: It is home for more than 100,000 individuals — a population roughly the total size of Charleston, South Carolina.

Cooking often brings families together and contributes to far more than just our physical sustenance. Yet every year 4 million people die from the health impacts of toxic smoke from cooking over traditional open fires or inefficient cookstoves.

Every four years, we all get to celebrate the best in winter sports, and this week in Sochi, the Olympics will host some of the most incredible winter athletes in the world on the biggest stage in sports. It’s going to be amazing.

The Olympic Winter Games in Sochi are set to begin on February 7th. The athletes have spent years – sometimes almost their entire lives – preparing for their chance to compete in the Olympics.