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This post is my contribution to Shot @ Life’s Blogust campaign, a first-of-its kind, 31-day relay for GOOD! 31 Bloggers have come together to raise awareness and funds to help save children’s lives from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia. Every year, 2.4 million children die from preventable diseases despite the availability of effective vaccines. I visited Guatemala last year and witnessed first hand the importance of these vaccines as I helplessly watched a very ill child struggling with pneumonia. All children deserve these life saving vaccines and all children deserve the chance to live a healthy, productive life.

As you know, social media engagement, comments, tweets, pins, plus, likes, and all that stuff ONLY make sense if transformed into concrete offline actions that change lives. That’s the reason I immediately said YES to the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life #Blogust.

Rebecca Soni made our country proud today by shattering the world record (yes, the record that she had only just set the night before!) in the 200-meter breaststroke, clocking in at 2:19.59 to win the gold.

Want to meet Victoria Justice? Here’s your chance! Enter the Girl Up contest for a chance to hang out with Girl Up’s Victorious Champion on her first national tour!!

It’s high season for politics. Yes, we are back to balancing campaign trail accusations with attack ads, as well as parsing the meanings of sound bites and polls. It would seem as though not much is actually happening in Washington, but that’s not completely true. Despite the rhetoric, there is some action on Capitol Hill – and it’s not a battle over taxes, it’s about treaties.

For the historians, between 1946 and 1999, the United States completed nearly 16,000 international agreements.

The story of indoor air pollution, the silent killer in the homes of almost half the world’s population, is complex: from the environmental degradation, wasted time, and safety risks associated with fuel collection; to the significant health impacts caused by cooking over open fire; to the gases from burned coal and biomass that contribute to climate change – the effects of cooking on traditional cookstoves and open fires present a multilayered issue.

The United Nations Association of the USA website has a new look! With more than 12,000 members and 120 Chapters across the country advocating for a strong U.S.-UN relationship, our organization has a great story to tell. With the new unausa.org, we are more equipped to tell it.

As over 10,000 of the world’s greatest athletes convene in London for the 2012 Olympic Games, three truly stand out. It is not their athletic ability, their hours in training, or their love of competition that makes their stories unique —though certainly they shine in those categories, too. Rather, it is their triumphs in rising from histories of war and conflict to represent their nations with pride. As these athletes prepare to march in Friday’s Opening Ceremonies, we are reminded of how their countries arrived at this day.

Imagine a life where you live on less than two dollars a day. You have been saving for months to afford a trip to the health clinic. With your payment in hand, you walk three hours to get to the nearest clinic, carrying your young children with you. When you finally arrive, you want to be able to receive information and testing for HIV and also pick up contraception to prevent pregnancy, but you’re told that the clinic does not provide both services.

Over the span of three decades, humanity has witnessed the rise of one of the world’s deadliest diseases, and also launched one of history’s greatest global attacks. Just 30 years ago, AIDS was barely uttered in newspapers anywhere around the globe, let alone becoming a household term. Twenty years ago, AIDS became the number one cause of death for U.S. men ages 25 to 44.