Environment

·       Problem: World Toilet Day promotes the belief that we can solve the sanitation crisis by simply building more toilets across the developing world. But despite building more toilets, sanitation is the most off-track Millennium Development Goal.

·       Barrier to Progress: Organizations must rethink sanitation and the solutions to this global crisis.

The deal that helped one of the poorest nations raise $850 million and bond investors lock in rates three times higher than U.S. Treasuries is also spurring concern some of the money isn’t going where the buyers -- and one of the underwriters -- expected.

OpenCongress brings together official, congressional data and allows anyone to track how a bill becomes a law, the voting records of elected officials and more. Major features of OpenCongress include:

Ron Baker: I have had the privilege of posing this question—Who’s in charge of value in your organization?—to thousands of leaders around the world. I’m usually met with a momentary staring ovation, and then someone will inevitably shout out, “Everyone!”

Guinea: It is no easy task to transform a country that is corrupt from top to bottom. During President Condé’s first months in office, he performed a kind of triage.

With the assistance of Revenue Watch—an organization, backed by Soros, that encourages transparency in extractive industries—Condé established a committee to inspect existing mining contracts and determine if any of them were problematic.

Conde Nast, the worldwide publisher of fashion, culture, food and home magazines, illegally employs interns in violation of federal and state labor laws, Outten & Golden LLP alleged today in New York federal court.

The class action complaint, filed on behalf of two former interns who worked at W Magazine and The New Yorker, accuses Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc., which does business as CondeNast Publications, of failing to pay interns proper wages for the work they perform in violation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the New York Labor Law (NYLL).

Nicaragua's new waterway will be a higher-capacity alternative to the 99-year-old Panama Canal, which is currently being widened at the cost of $5.2bn.

Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications.
The president of the country's national assembly, Rene Nuñez, announced the $40bn (£26bn) project, which will reinforce Beijing's growing influence on global trade and weaken US dominance over the key shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again

In his inaugural address in 1949 Harry Truman said that “more than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of those people.” It has taken much longer than Truman hoped, but the world has lately been making extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty.