Morning Briefing

Reaching the Millennium Development Goal of "[r]educing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015" likely will be reached, "but large numbers of people in the world's least developed regions will still not benefit," according to a report (.pdf) released Tuesday by UNICEF and the WHO, the U.N. News Centre reports (12/20). The report "found that between 1990 and 2008, the proportion of the world's population with access to improved drinking water sources increased from 77 percent to 87 percent," which means 1.8 billion more people have drinking water access, according to Medical Daily (Daley, 12/20).