A new campaign to save lives and prevent drug resistance by driving the price of the best malaria medicine down to as little as 20 cents was announced Friday by international health agencies and European governments.

The subsidy program, unveiled in Norway, will have an initial budget of $225 million and will be run by a new partnership called the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria.

Hoping to challenge Gilead Sciences, the leader in H.I.V. drugs, the pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer said Thursday that they would form a specialty company to research, develop and market treatments for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

Clean water policy is in a terrible muddle, and the country has the Supreme Court to thank for it.

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President Obama on Thursday highlighted his ambition for the development of high-speed passenger rail lines in at least 10 regions, expressing confidence in the future of train travel even as he acknowledged that the American rail network, compared with the rest of the world

Hundreds of farmers, farm workers and local elected officials walked along dusty roads in the Central Valley on Thursday, part of a four-day march to protest federal cutbacks in water supplies.

For at least 3,000 years, a drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world

Clipboard in hand, Debra Anderson spent three hours one recent sunny morning trooping through a field of romaine lettuce looking for trouble.

Workers harvest romaine lettuce at a Church Brothers field in Huron, Calif. Increasingly, auditors below the federal level are inspecting produce fields and other farms.

The Environmental Protection Agency said it would order the manufacturers of 67 pesticides to test whether their products disrupt the hormonal system of humans or animals. Congress passed a bill mandating such tests in 1996, but the agency took years to develop them and ensure their validity, officials said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said Wednesday that he was preparing a new proposal to resolve disputes with the West over Iran