With the Millennium Development Goals review summit just one week away, the World Bank is the latest international player to announce its strategy to help achieve those goals by their 2015 deadline.

A weeklong international conference here has transmitted a strong political message to next week's U.N. summit meeting of world leaders: what good is the fight against poverty, hunger, maternal mortality and child deaths if water and sanitation are not given the high priority they deserve?

When a doctor instructs a patient to take one tablet three times a day, she often has no way to ensure the instructions are followed. Many stop taking their medication once they feel they have regained their strength — especially when the course of treatment lasts for months. When the medicine is for a highly infectious disease like tuberculosis, defaulting on treatment can have serious consequences...

Eleven members of the Chilean armed forces and three Uruguayan military officers were found guilty of the kidnap-murder of Chilean biochemist Eugenio Berríos, an intelligence agent of the 1973-1990 regime of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

More than a million people will need food aid in Zimbabwe this year. As the government looks to boost agriculture production, one rural community is leading the way by using irrigation schemes to improve food security and income.

Almost two years after the controversial and sweeping trade pact known as an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) was signed between the European Union and the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) countries, a new study says the impact of the EPA has proved to be, as its proponents claimed, relatively mild.

Most fruits and vegetables sold in Bulawayo are imported from South Africa, because farms immediately around Zimbabwe's second city cannot meet demand. Locals are paying high prices as a result.

At very different paces, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay advance down the path towards annulling or at least neutralising the laws that protected those responsible for human rights crimes committed under their dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

U.N. member states are expected to pass a resolution Monday that will grant the European Union unprecedented speaking rights during formal meetings of the General Assembly, of which the next session — it's 65th — begins Tuesday.

All eight of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are critical to development, but numbers four and five on child and maternal health are the real priority areas for this year. That was the main takeaway from a series of briefings with U.N., NGO and country officials in which IPS participated this week.