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Several million people inside and outside Afghanistan are destitute and desperately in need of help.

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

The conditions of suffering that exist today in our impoverished communities are not acceptable. The reflection of those conditions are less concerning to me. And I work everyday about changing the conditions.

For far too long the world's poorest people have seen no benefit from the vast natural resources in their own backyards. It is time to end the injustice where ordinary people are silent witnesses, left to suffer without basic services, as the profits from their countries' assets are hidden and plundered by corrupt regimes.

In our fields, on our fishing vessels, in our factories and our homes, there are people deprived of their freedom and trapped in a life of unimaginable suffering.

By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.

I know a lot of people who are weak, who are in a perpetual cycle of poverty and being locked up. There are guys from my neighborhood who are in jail or who are dead. It does take a certain strength to know your environment and say, 'I can grow beyond it.'

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

Many troubled Midwestern towns are grasping for ways to fend off decline and, in some cases, extinction.