Newly minted Secretary of State John Kerry would probably prefer his first few months on the job to be a little quieter. But – in addition to everything else – sequestration is bearing down on Washington this week, and the U.S. government is beginning to seriously take stock of what automated cuts might mean. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are not spared. Kerry sent a letter earlier this month to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) outlining the projected effects for his charges if the March 1^st deadline should pass without action.

“The world my father told me about 50 years ago was a divided world,” says Hans Rosling, famed Swedish statistician and development expert, in a new video. Standing in the middle of one of his trademark graphs of development indicators, his body neatly splitting the data, he gestures: “In many people’s minds, the world still looks like this: developing and developed.”

“But it’s a myth,” he continues, “because the world has improved immensely in the last 50 years.”

“We are in the midst of a silent revolution,” said Ann Pawliczko, a senior technical advisor in the population and development branch at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), quoting former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “It is a revolution that extends well beyond demographics, with major economic, social, cultural, psychological, and spiritual implications.”

To encourage a new generation of urban policymakers and promote early career research, the Wilson Center’s Comparative Urban Studies Project, USAID, the International Housing Coalition, the World Bank, and Cities Alliance are co-sponsoring a fourth annual paper competition for graduate- and PhD-level students focused on the challenges facing urban centers in the developing world.

“My income is just right to feed us three times a day,” Jason Bostero told Sam Eaton in the rural Philippine village of Humayhumay. “It’s really, really different when you have a small family.” Eaton traveled to the Philippines to report on the connections between food security and population for Homelands Productions, creating a short film and radio piece that ran on NewsHour and Marketplace as part the Food for Nine Billion series last year. [Video Below]

Stan Bernstein, a retired UNFPA senior policy adviser and former health adviser on the UN Millennium Project, recently attended the Seventh Annual Research Conference on Population, Reproductive Health, and Economic Development in Oslo, Norway. During the conference, Bernstein reflected on the presence of reproductive health and population issues among the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their indicators. He also commented on prospects for including relevant reproductive health and population goals or indicators in the development agenda beyond 2015. Bernstein hailed the role of research from the PopPov network in the past and its potential contributions to future development agendas. He answers some questions for PRB below.

Ten years ago, a study was conducted in Mozambique to determine the impact of a new medicine for pregnant women with malaria. Over 1,000 women participated in a controlled trial of intermittent preventative treatment with sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine – half received a placebo, the other half received the actual drug. All were given an insecticide-treated net.

The original version of this op-ed, by Sam Loewenberg, appeared in The New York Times.

Americans love success stories. Go to the web sites of the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or a plethora of global health and development organizations, and you’ll find articles, charts, and videos documenting their triumphs and innovations, with the promise of more on the way.