To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.

I urge the Iraqi leadership for sake of its own people... to seize this opportunity and thereby begin to end the isolation and suffering of the Iraqi people.

World Health Day is an opportunity to highlight the problem, but above all, to stimulate action. It is an occasion to call on all partners - governments, international donors, civil society, the private sector, the media, families and individuals alike - to develop sustainable activities for the survival, health and well-being of mothers and children. On this World Health Day, let us rededicate ourselves to that mission.

Often, we take stability - peace in terms of security and economic activity - to mean a country is doing well. We forget the third and important pillar of rule of law and respect for human rights, because no country can long remain prosperous without that third pillar.

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.

Most people forget that even in Iraq, by the time the air and no-fly zone was established, the air defence system had been removed through the first Gulf war. All of them had been neutralised.

[Refugees] cannot be stopped, but they can and must be managed better, more humanely, protecting migrants' human rights whilst accepting states' rights to control their borders.