News stories by Aprille Muscara, page 4

Ahead of a key bilateral summit between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Hu Jintao, which begins here Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a sweeping China-U.S. policy speech Friday, setting the tone for next week's meet.

A Wikileaked January 2009 diplomatic cable from the United States' Beijing embassy forecasting the next three decades of U.S.-China relations warned of the Asian giant's 'rapid military modernisation'.

In one of U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower's most remembered speeches, he warned against 'the acquisition of unwarranted influence' resulting from the close brotherhood between the country's defence agencies, Capitol Hill and private business interests.

When Francisca arrived at the historic Curicó Hospital — a staple in the Chilean central valley for nearly one and a half centuries — for the birth of her first child, she didn't know it would be her only one.

The 11.7 billion dollars pledged Tuesday to replenish the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the coming three years falls significantly short of the 20 billion dollars hoped for, threatening to undo the progress made in the fight against these diseases - the three largest infectious killers in the world.

At the U.N.'s annual weeklong cacophony of back-to-back speeches held to open its new General Assembly session, certain things can be counted on: the flouting of time limits, offensive rants (and subsequent walkouts by insulted parties) and, for longer than the last third of the world body's existence, the mention of Security Council reform.

Following U.S. President Barack Obama's introduction of his long-awaited Global Development Policy on Wednesday, exactly one year after he told member states that he would return with a plan to make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) a reality, questions remain over how it will be executed.

While officials meeting in Montreal, Canada failed to finalise a key protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Tuesday, biodiversity is scheduled to be at the top of Wednesday's agenda of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

As world leaders convened Monday for the first day of a summit dedicated to resuscitate efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the question of how to finance countries' acceleration efforts looms large.

South-South cooperation is set to be a key issue during the three-day summit beginning today that will bring together some 140 world leaders to reaffirm their commitment to achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.