This archive collects milestones and progress stories involving nations — countries and their governments — acting to improve lives, protect rights, or address shared challenges. From policy breakthroughs to international cooperation, these stories show what countries are doing right.
Malaysia has sent back 150 containers of plastic waste to 13 countries since the Q3 2019, with the environment minster warning that those who want to make the country a rubbish bin of the world can “dream on.”
The policy aims “to reduce and eliminate structural differences, gender gaps and inequalities, in order to build a more just and prosperous society.”
From Monday, same-sex couples will be able to register to marry, meaning the first ceremonies will take place in February.
The Taliba N’Diaye wind farm, West Africa’s largest, will be completed by mid this year and will supply 158MW of clean energy and increase the country’s energy supply by 15%.
Researchers from the University of California – San Diego found that tens of thousands of deaths had been avoided between 2005 and 2016 by replacing coal plants.
Cancer death rates in the U.S. have now fallen for 26 consecutive years, and the pace is quickening. The biggest force behind the trend is lung cancer, which kills more Americans each year than breast, colorectal, and prostate cancers combined — making its accelerating decline ripple across the entire cancer landscape. Decades of smoking-cessation policy, expanding screening, and faster treatment advances are all compounding at once. Yet fewer than 5% of eligible patients receive recommended lung cancer screenings, and Black patients face a 33% higher mortality risk than white patients. Progress is real — and unfinished.
The ban will be applied at 332 conservation sites along the river. It will be extended to cover the main river course and key tributaries by January 1 next year.
“The shift from paperless [electronic] machines to having individual paper ballots is a sea change,” said the policy director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. “It’s great, it’s huge, it was necessary.”
The drug Lynparza was developed by AstraZeneca and Merck as a maintenance treatment for patients with a specific gene mutation whose cancer spread beyond the pancreas.
While between 1990-1995 an average of more than 500 accidents took place every year, a decade later between 2013-2018 only an average of around 110 accidents took place every year.
