Activists have cautioned that the Gates Foundation funded study, released today in The Lancet and showing welcome progress on reducing maternal mortality globally, also reveals one catastrophic exception. They said that current global AIDS programmes were reminiscent of the Victorian era, casting pregnant women as potential vectors of disease, and ignoring their health in the single-minded rush to achieve a 2010 goal of preventing the transmission of HIV to their babies.

Asylum seekers are being thrown out of some countries because of a rise in xenophobia and political campaigns that use foreigners as scapegoats, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) chief said. Asylum and immigration are sensitive issues in many countries, such as Italy and Greece, which say they cannot cope with hundreds of thousands of people arriving as potential illegal migrants, often on rickety boats from Africa.

Rwanda and the World Bank on Friday signed two grants totalling $121.6 million to support the land-locked nation's budget as it recovers from the global downturn and aid reforms. Mimi Ladipo, the World Bank's country manager in Rwanda said $115.6 was earmarked to bolster the 2009/10 budget, a little higher than the previous fiscal year because it included almost $30 million to help mitigate the impact of the global downturn.

Nine people were killed, including a member of President Omar al-Beshir's National Congress Party, as violence broke out on Thursday that was unrelated to nationwide elections, according to the southern Sudan army. The country held its first national election in 24 years.

Malawi and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has signed a formulation phase project document for managing climate change in the country to be implemented to a tune of $4.2 million