Africa Action called on the U.S. Executive Directors to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to take decisive action on the critical issue of debt cancellation at the Annual Meetings this weekend. A progress report will be given at the meetings on the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). [click link for full article]

Diabetes UK is warning that up to 470,000 people with diabetes in England are at risk of needlessly going blind. This is because many Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) are not meeting government targets of offering free digital retinal screening to everyone with diabetes by the end of 2007. Retinal screening is used to spot signs of retinopathy, a complication of diabetes that can lead to blindness. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the UK working-age population. [click link for full article]

Summaries of several recent editorials and opinion pieces that examine the recent presidential veto of legislation to reauthorize and expand SCHIP appear below. Editorials Akron Beacon Journal: “Extending coverage to 5. [click link for full article]

“A Roadmap to Health Insurance for All: Principles for Reform,” [click link for full article]

Republican presidential candidate and former Sen. Fred Thompson (Tenn.) on Wednesday at a Club for Growth event in Washington, D.C., discussed the need to reduce the cost of Medicare and other entitlement programs, the [click link for full article]

House Democratic leaders’ decision to increase federal funding for abstinence-only sex education programs in order to attract Republican support for legislation (HR 976) that would reauthorize and expand [click link for full article]

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Tuesday during a speech at Villanova University’s School of Law said that his Catholic faith has “little effect” on his “work as a judge,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. [click link for full article]

Florida should hold off on expanding a Medicaid pilot program until problems with the program are fixed, according to a report by the state’s Medicaid inspector general, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports. The pilot program covers residents in five counties and was designed to save billions of dollars and provide better care for state’s 2. [click link for full article]

Alaska health officials on Monday released new guidelines on the amount of local fish women and girls of childbearing age, and young children should consume, the Anchorage Daily News reports. [click link for full article]

A coalition of consumer groups led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Consumers Union on Tuesday in a letter asked Congress not to intervene in a recent decision by CMS that will limit Medicare coverage for use of anemia medications — Aranesp, manufactured by [click link for full article]