Newborn Resuscitation Innovation Breeds Additional Innnovation: In a USAID “Impact” blog post, Lily Kak, USAID senior maternal and newborn health advisor, writes about the the Global Development Alliance, which represents a “new way of doing business in the field of newborn health and has now become a key USAID strategy…

“President Barack Obama is quietly but strategically stepping up his outreach to Africa, using this year to increase his engagement with a continent that is personally meaningful to him and important to U.S. interests,” the Associated Press writes in a story looking at how the Obama administration might engage with African countries in the upcoming year.

The Problem With A ‘Robo Budget’: In a post on “The Hill’s Congress Blog,” Senator Patrick Leahy, (D-Vt.), writes about the recent defeat of the omnibus bill, calling the passage of a continuing resolution a “robo budget” that is a “disservice.” According to Leahy: “The Omnibus would have funded global…

“Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come,” the New York Times writes in an article that examines the factors contributing to a growing interest in such land among investors.

“The Vatican on Tuesday issued its most authoritative clarification on Pope Benedict XVI’s recent remarks that condoms could sometimes be used for disease prevention, saying that the pope in no way justified their use to prevent pregnancy,” the New York Times reports (Donadio, 12/21).

Here is a sampling of blog posts analyzing the  Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) after it was released on Wednesday: Council on Foreign Relations: Weighing an Ambitious QDDR (Garrett et al., 12/16); CGD’s “Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog”: The QDDR: Whew, It’s Done (Or Is It?) (Veillette, 12/16); State Department’s…

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria Board of Directors on Wednesday approved 79 grants with a two-year commitment of “$1.7 billion dollars for projects against the diseases, amid warnings that some hard-hit African countries were being left out,” Agence France-Presse reports. The commitment, according to Ethiopian Health Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who chair’s the Global Fund’s board, “shows that even in hard economic times, we can continue to expand the fight against the three diseases” (12/15).

The 26th Annual Meeting of the Food Crisis Prevention Network , “which serves as the platform for deliberation on food production and food security in Africa,” opened on Tuesday in Accra, Ghana, the Ghana News Agency reports. The three-day forum will examine “the agricultural and food situation for the 2010/2011 cropping season and come out with measures on tackling food crises,” according to the news service. Food security officials from the Sahel and West Africa are attending the forum, in addition to representatives from international groups, including the Economic Community Of West African States, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, Oxfam, UNICEF and the World Food Program.

“Africa is struggling to turn local discoveries into drugs and other health care inventions,” according to studies published in Science and BMC International Health and Human Rights, Nature News reports (Nordling, 12/12).

Haiti’s Water Needs: Though “cholera epidemics of the 19th century forged the way for the revolution in sanitation and the provision of safe sources of public water, … more than 1 billion people … have little access to safe sources of water,” write the authors of a Lancet Comment that reflects…