Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday announced several new development- and health-related aid projects for Pakistan worth more than $500 million, Reuters reports (Quinn, 7/19).

Marking the six month anniversary of Haiti’s major earthquake, President Barack Obama thanked Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez on Monday for his country’s help, Agence France-Presse reports.

Aid agencies providing sanitation and water services in Haiti are stretched to their capacities and cannot help indefinitely, the British Red Cross said in a report Wednesday,” according to the Associated Press/Taiwan News. Meanwhile, Caricom says that the U.N. should step in to coordinate the relief programs.

UNAIDS Praises Namibia For Lifting HIV Travel Ban “Namibia received praise Thursday from the United Nations joint programme on AIDS after the south-west African nation lifted restrictions on the movement of people infected with the disease,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur/M & C writes. According to U.N. data, the news agency writes, “51…

USAID Program To Prevent Spread Of Bird Flu In Bangladesh Expands  All Headline News reports on a USAID-funded initiative to prevent the spread of bird flu in Bangladesh. The STOP AI (Stamping Out Pandemic and Avian Influenza) Bangladesh initiative includes the “renovation of the water supply, addition of a bio-gas facility for…

“African nations led by Somalia, Mauritania and Sudan have the most precarious water supplies in the world while Iceland has the best,” according to a report released Thursday, Reuters reports.

Efforts to curb poverty worldwide have been slowed by the global economic situation, but the developing world is still on track to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people living on less than $1 per day by 2015 – according to an annual U.N. report (.pdf) on the MDGs, which this year shows a “mixed picture” on reaching all eight targets – the Associated Press reports (Lederer, 6/23).

An accountability report, prepared by officials in G8 member countries’ foreign affairs departments, acknowledges that G8 “countries are $10 billion behind the five-year, $50-billion commitment they made at their 2005 summit in Scotland,” the Canadian Press/CTV News reports (6/20).

The U.N. Development Program (UNDP) on Thursday released a report (.pdf) outlining “an eight-pronged strategy it hopes can help poor nations advance sustainable development, considerably reduce poverty and essentially drive the attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the next five years,” BusinessDay reports (Nwachukwu, 6/18).

The draft conclusions for the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit in September were distributed to governments last week and call upon world leaders to follow through on promises of aid money to help countries reach the benchmarks established in 2000 , Reuters reports.