Two United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) conferences this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, gathered “international policymakers, government ministers, and lawmakers” to address the half a million maternal deaths annually, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports. Although the U.N. “hopes to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters between 1990 and 2015,” this Millennium Development Goal target “has seen the least progress in recent years,” the news organization writes.

Agence France-Presse examines a new U.S.-backed “12 million dollar family planning drive launched” Wednesday during a three-day conference on family planning in Kampala, Uganda. The project aims to “improve access to contraceptives for women in six African nations [including Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Kenya] as well as Indonesia and Pakistan,” the news service writes (Simon, 11/18).

‘Accompaniment’ Can Reform Health Care Around The World “We don’t need to start fresh to create patient-centered medical homes. We just need to look to community-based models of care that are effective but often go unrecognized,” according to a Boston Globe opinion piece by Heidi Behforouz, the director of the…

Oral Vaccine Alone Cannot Eradicate Polio “No one denies” that the oral polio vaccine “has considerable merits. It’s cheap to make. It’s easy to administer; you don’t need a trained nurse with a clean syringe [like the inactive vaccine needs], just a volunteer with a dropper. And it gives excellent immunity. ……

The Office of Management and Budget released a statement (.pdf) on Tuesday warning that President Barack Obama would “veto the continuing resolution [CR] funding bill now being debated in the House if it contains drastic cuts to national security, but it remains unclear if large cuts in diplomacy and foreign aid programs would be enough to force White House action,” Foreign Policy’s blog “The Cable” reports.

First Lady Michelle Obama joined Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to mark International Women’s Day on Tuesday by honoring recent gains in addressing global women’s issues while reflecting on the scope of the task of achieving gender equity in the future, the Associated Press reports.

Main Take-Aways From GHME: Reflections on last week’s Global Health Metrics & Evaluation (GHME) conference in Seattle, Washington appeared in several blogs and a Lancet column: Lancet: Offline: Where was Europe? (Horton, 3/26) Karen Grepin’s “Global Health Blog”: A trip to the inside of the Global Health Sausage Factory (3/22)…

“Congress late Friday narrowly averted a government shutdown after Democrats and Republicans agreed to cut” nearly $39 billion in spending over the next six months, Roll Call reports.

Heed Population Dynamics International population dynamics are a “ticking time bomb, which we cannot afford to neglect any longer,” George Tsereteli, president of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, writes in a New Europe opinion piece. “The strain that these burgeoning populations place on all the available natural and…

Russian AIDS Project: A UNAIDS article reports on the AIDS Competence project in Russia, which aims “to mobilize local responses to AIDS by promoting awareness within communities of their own strengths and capacities and facilitating the exchange of experiences within the communities” (5/10). Global Health Framework Agreement Needed: A PLoS…