News headlines in March 2010, page 17

Despite the fact that the United States spends more on maternal health than any other country in the world, deaths in childbirth among U.S. women are on the rise and already surpass the morbidity rates in most developed countries.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's decision to appoint a 19-member, all-male high-level advisory group on Climate Change Financing (CCF) has triggered strong protests from women's groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) outraged by the composition of the panel.

Aid organisations perpetuate humanitarian disasters. That is one of the conclusions made by war correspondent Linda Polman in her latest book as she describes the world of humanitarian aid.

Bad water kills more people than wars or earthquakes, declares Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

A priest who is touring the country in his bid to run for president next year, at the head of a leftist movement, was indefinitely suspended by the Catholic Church for getting involved in politics.

Norma Tolsa-Garcia is a U.S. citizen but she fears new proposed laws in Arizona might force her and her family to move away from the state she grew up in because her husband is an undocumented immigrant.

Propaganda networks that conduct 'psychological warfare' for the Pentagon have been in vogue for a long time. Mike Furlong, a senior Pentagon official who is now being investigated for running a covert network of contractors to supply information for drone strikes and assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, had a long history of working in this field.

Employees at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) may have cause to fear for their jobs after Yukiko Omura was appointed vice president of the United Nations' rural poverty agency in February.

He has worked this land for half of 64 years and is known among his fellow farmers in Kien Giang province here in the Mekong Delta as ‘lao nong’, or the old master of rice.

Bomb attacks and threats to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have brought development work to a virtual halt in the lawless, volatile environment that is the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), located near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.