News stories by Mirela Xanthaki

While most HIV-positive people in the Western world can gain decades of good health thanks to increasingly effective drug regimens, in the developing world, nearly a third of children born with HIV are still dying before their first birthday.

A two-day meeting in Washington of the 17 nations that collectively emit three-quarters of the world's greenhouse gases concluded Tuesday with optimism that it helped provide a springboard toward more comprehensive talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol at the end of the year.

While more men are taking advantage of paternity leave or even quitting their jobs entirely to raise small children while their wives go to work, the social stigma attached to fathers who take on roles traditionally viewed as female has been far slower to diminish.

'Dora', a young Mexican woman, was helped by another Mexican woman to cross the U.S. border in the promise of a good job there. She ended up in Texas, working in a sweatshop and not allowed to go out or even take a shower.

The United Nations is urgently appealing for 613 million dollars to aid more than a million desperate civilians in the ruins of Gaza, where schools, hospitals, houses, factories and even farmland were obliterated during the three-week assault by Israeli air and ground forces.