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GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. Children's Fund says the number of children who die before the age of five has declined by 27% over the last two decades. UNICEF spokeswoman Miranda Eeles says increased breast feeding, Vitamin A supplements, measles vaccines, mosquito nets against malaria and HIV/AIDS prevention have been mainly responsible for the progress. She told reporters on Friday that about 9.2 million children under five died last year around the world. But improvements have been made in all regions including sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the fatalities occur. Save the Children UK says the new figures are good news. Chief Executive Jasmine Whitbread warns however that high food prices and climate change could reverse the gains.

BAGHDAD — Iraq is poised to receive a flood of foreign investment, thanks to improved security. More than $74 billion in projects have been submitted for government approval in just the past five months, according to Iraq's state investment regulator. The investors include companies from the U.S., Europe, and Gulf Arab states. Their proposals all involve sectors other than oil, including a $13 billion new port for the southern city of Basra, several hotels and thousands of housing units nationwide, says Ahmed Ridha, the chairman of Iraq's National Investment Commission. The biggest project, submitted by investors from Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, calls for an entirely new city to be built just outside the holy Shiite city of Najaf at a cost of $38 billion. Only one of the projects has broken ground, while most others are still awaiting government approval, which has been difficult to obtain. The scale of the proposals — which, combined, equal almost as much foreign investment as China receives in a year — has drawn skeptics who say the final amount spent will be much smaller.

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ASSIST News Serice reports that Juria Bardhan, Gospel for Asia's state leader in Orissa, India, has seen dozens of churches burned to the ground in the last two weeks. He has seen missionaries and Christians beaten and killed. But during all these horrific attacks, Juria has had one thought. "We know the Lord is in control," Juria said in an interview Thursday. Juria's comments may sound naïve to Western ears, but to Christians in volatile parts of Asia, they ring true. They expect persecution rather than peace. They know that to follow Christ means choosing to bring more trouble into their lives. They also know that Christians standing strong in the face of such trials encourages others to follow Christ. "The encouraging thing is that the attackers themselves acknowledge that Orissa used to be only 2 percent Christian, and now it's 28 percent Christian," Juria said. "They don't understand that by doing this, the church will grow by leaps and bounds, and this will cause thousands to come to Christ."

RABAT, Morocco (AP) — Once, he was one of America's most feared bogeymen: a Mideast thug who unleashed terrorist goons on U.S. interests around the world. Now, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is breaking bread with the secretary of state in his kitchen and plying her with gifts. In the 1980s, Libyan terrorists were staple villains in the movies and on TV. It was hard for many Americans to imagine a greater evil than the strongman blamed for a string of anti-U.S. attacks, most notoriously the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. But after abandoning his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and renouncing terrorism in 2003, Gadhafi completed a remarkable five-year rehabilitation last week, transforming himself from a mysterious and reviled enemy of the United States to a partner of known quantity.

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BAGHDAD — The U.S. military turned over control of Iraq's Anbar province, once the country's most dangerous, to the Iraqi government Monday in a landmark step toward the withdrawal of more American troops. President Bush declared in a statement that al-Qaeda had been defeated in the western desert province, which was on the brink of collapse to the Islamic militant group two years ago. The approximately 25,000 U.S. Marines stationed in Anbar will remain for now, but they will run fewer patrols and function largely in a supporting role for Iraqi security forces. U.S. Marine Corps commandant James Conway said last week that improvements in Anbar would allow more Marines to be deployed instead to Afghanistan, where the United States faces a "stiffer fight" from Taliban insurgents.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — The Irish Republican Army is fading away in Northern Ireland and poses no security threat to the British territory, international experts concluded Wednesday in another landmark for peacemaking. The governments of Britain and Ireland heralded the findings of the Independent Monitoring Commission as the effective death of the IRA — and appealed to Protestant leaders to respond by deepening their cooperation with Catholics in the province's 16-month-old partnership government. It has failed to meet for the past three months amid rising tensions and warnings that the coalition could unravel. The report from the four fact-finders — including former directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Scotland Yard's anti-terror unit — has eliminated the IRA as a diplomatic barrier. "This report demonstrates not only that PIRA has gone away, but that it won't be coming back," said Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, using the outlawed group's full formal name of Provisional IRA.

NEW ORLEANS — A three-year effort to repair and strengthen New Orleans' levees — combined with some good luck — allowed the Big Easy to escape serious flooding from Hurricane Gustav, according to the government and outside experts. But the glancing blow from the Category 2 hurricane exposed the city's vulnerability, they say. Even as the storm weakened, its surge came within a foot of exceeding the walls on the city's Industrial Canal, one of the most vulnerable areas of the levee system. Despite some anxiety as wind-whipped waves crested over the top of one 12-foot high wall, the levees held fast.

Hurricane Gustav packed less of an economic punch than expected, leading analysts to estimate insured damage at between $2 billion and $10 billion. Even if insured losses from Gustav were to reach as high as $10 billion — the upper limits of projections from risk-modeling firms — that would amount to only a fraction of the $41 billion in devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Oil prices dipped to almost $108 a barrel Wednesday as the dollar continued to strengthen and attention shifted to concerns over slowing global demand for crude after Hurricane Gustav left oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico region largely undamaged. Virtually all oil and natural gas production remained shut down in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service. It was too soon to say when output might resume, though some oil companies were preparing to redeploy evacuated personnel as early as Wednesday. Without serious damage, oil and natural gas facilities should start up again in a day or two, while coastal refineries could take two to four days to resume production, depending on their size. In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita knocked out the region's offshore energy infrastructure for several weeks.

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A legal challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act in a California court has been dismissed, closing the last avenue of protest that a same-sex couple has been using since 2004 to try to get homosexual "marriage" declared a right under both federal and state constitutions. Federal District Court Judge David Carver dismissed the case against the state law Proposition 22 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), despite the May 2008 ruling in California's Supreme Court that same-sex marriage was constitutional in the state. This particular case – Smelt v. Orange County – was peculiar because, according to a Liberty Counsel press release, the same-sex couple who challenged DOMA "had no legal, same-sex union from any state." Mat Staver is dean of Liberty University School of Law and founder of Liberty Counsel, which intervened in the case for pro-family advocates in 2004. He says the good news is that Carver upheld the dismissal of the case by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006 – and another district court judge in 2005 – on the grounds that the couple involved did not have a valid same-sex marriage from another state and that there was no fundamental right to such a relationship in the Constitution.

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Heavy rains from Tropical Storm Fay are alleviating a drought that has bedeviled the Southeast for years, and another storm on the horizon could help even further, National Weather Service experts said Monday. Further relief could come from Tropical Storm Gustav, which was forecast to roll over Haiti today, Oravec said. Little rain has fallen during winter and spring across much of the South in the past three years. For two years, no tropical storms delivered rain in summer and fall to northern Georgia and the western Carolinas. Lakes went dry and streambeds dropped to 20% of normal levels.

This year, as gasoline climbed over $4 a gallon, the traffic death toll — according to one study — appears headed to the lowest levels since John F. Kennedy moved into the White House. The number of fatalities is being pulled down by a change in Americans' driving habits, which is fueled largely by record high gasoline prices, according to the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan. Over the previous 10 months, monthly fatalities declined an average of 4.2% compared to the previous year. Then, fatalities dropped 22.1% in March and 17.9% in April of this year. If the pattern continues for the rest of this year, it would lead to "an unheard of improvement" in motor vehicle fatalities.

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The argument for embryonic stem cells as the potential solution for a vast array of human diseases has taken another significant hit with the successful testing of an adult cell that can match tissues in the heart, lung, liver, pancreas, blood vessels, brain, muscle, bone and fat. The San Francisco research and development company Medistem Inc. says its newest tests reveal the cell can regenerate failed blood vessels, allowing a restoration of health in limbs once given no alternative but amputation. Many medical researchers long have cited their desire for embryonic stem cells to study as a possible solution to myriad human diseases, although few results actually have been documented. Now officials with Medistem Laboratories have confirmed their Endometrial Regenerative Cell has treated an advanced form of peripheral artery disease known as critical limb ischemia successfully. In a peer reviewed publication, the team supported by Medistem said the administration of ERC "preserved leg function and viability in animals induced to mimic the human condition of critical limb ischemia."

Japanese scientists said Friday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the ethical controversy of using embryos. Researchers at the government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl. "This is significant in two ways," team leader Hajime Ogushi told AFP. "One is that we can avoid the ethical issues of stem cells because wisdom teeth are destined to be thrown away anyway. "Also, we used teeth that had been extracted three years ago and had been preserved in a freezer. That means that it's easy for us to stock this source of stem cells."

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Traffic deaths in the USA last year dropped to the lowest level since 1994 and deaths per 100 million miles traveled are the lowest on record, the government said Thursday. In 2007 there were 41,059 highway fatalities overall, which is 1,649 fewer deaths than the previous year. The traffic fatality rate dropped to 1.37 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, said Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. Peters said 2.49 million people were injured last year in traffic crashes, 84,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest total since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began compiling injury data in 1988.

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A California court Friday reversed its previous ruling and decided that most forms of home schooling are legal. The state appeals court says parents without teaching credentials may home school their children. Last February, the California Court of Appeal ruled in a juvenile court case that public school enrollment is generally required unless a child is tutored by a credentialed person or enrolled in a full-time private school. In the new ruling, the court determined that while original education laws seemed to prohibit home schools in the definition of private school, later laws could be interpreted differently. "The most logical interpretation of subsequent legislative enactments and regulatory provisions supports the conclusion that a home school can, in fact, fall within the private school exception to the general compulsory education law," the court concluded. But the court added that "an order requiring a dependent child to attend school outside the home in order to protect that child's safety" is constitutional.

According to The Christian Post, the son of a top Hamas leader has converted to Christianity, an Israeli newspaper reported. Masab Yousef, son of West Bank Hamas leader Sheik Hassan Yousef, revealed in an exclusive interview with Haaretz newspaper that he has left Islam and is now a Christian. Yousef's family previously did not know of his faith. "[T]his interview will open many people's eyes, it will shake Islam from the roots, and I'm not exaggerating," Yousef, 30, said. Yousef is now living in the United States. "I was about to become one of those homeless people [in the U.S.]," he confessed, "but people from the church are helping me. I'm dependent on them." He also dreams that someday he can return to his homeland and prays his family will someday accept Jesus Christ as their savior.

Balkans at Peace

BELGRADE, Serbia — A United Nations report released Thursday says the Balkans, a region once known as a hotbed of crime and violence, has become one of the safest zones in Europe. "The vicious circle of political instability leading to crime, and vice versa, that plagued the Balkans in the 1990s has been broken," said Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which compiled the report. However, Costa warned in the report's summary that the region remains vulnerable because of enduring connections between business, politics and organized crime. The region includes 10 countries: Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in January. The bloody breakup of former Yugoslavia -- the worst carnage in Europe since World War II -- left the entire region in turmoil throughout the 1990s.