United Nations

Since their inception in 2000, The Millennium Development Goals have revolutionized the global aid business, using specific targets to help mobilize and guide development efforts. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty simultaneously and provided a standard for judging performance. As their 2015 expiration looms, the time has come to bank those successes and focus on what comes next.

For decades, the WHO has debated whether to address specific diseases or to broadly strengthen healthcare systems. With the increasing threat of noncommunicable diseases, however, the WHO has to double down on the latter, and convince states that health concerns are integral to decisions about trade, agriculture, and urban planning -- the whole of government.

Science journalist Sonia Shah says private money is influencing the decisions of the World Health Organization. The WHO responds.

Despite the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, humanitarian intervention still has plenty of critics. But their targets are usually the early, ugly missions of the 1990s. Since then -- as Libya has shown -- the international community has learned its lessons and grown much more adept at using military force to save lives.