Five Boko Haram commanders have been released in exchange for the freedom of 82 Chibok schoolgirls, a Nigerian government official said.

A Nigerian Air Force fighter jet on a mission against Boko Haram extremists has mistakenly bombed a refugee camp, killing more than 100 refugees and wounding aid workers, a state official said.

Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, is synonymous with Christmas, but it is menaced by the concrete divide that encroaches on Palestine territory, says Eoin O’Driscoll.

A deal to evacuate trapped civilians and fighters in war-ravaged east Aleppo and two Syrian villages has been thrown into doubt after assailants torched six buses assigned to the operation.

Some 21 of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamic extremists more than two years ago have been freed in negotiations, officials said.

The top US military officer has told a Senate committee he believes Russia bombed the humanitarian aid convoy in Syria on Monday, calling it an "unacceptable atrocity".

A 23-lorry convoy has delivered humanitarian aid to a Damascus suburb besieged by government forces, as the UN resumes its aid deliveries to Syria's opposition areas.

The United States has blamed Russia for an overnight attack on an aid convoy that killed 20 civilians, as the United Nations announced it was suspending overland deliveries in Syria, jeopardising food and medical security for millions of besieged and hard-to-reach civilians.

A Save the Children-backed maternity hospital in an opposition-held area of northern Syria has been bombed, with casualties reported, the charity has said.

Government had prohibited help for opposition-held Daraya.

The Government has announced an additional €5m in aid for people affected by the wars in Syria and Yemen.

The Syrian al Qaida branch and allied fighters from ultraconservative rebel factions have seized a village of President Bashar Assad's minority Alawite sect in central Syria.

Convoys are delivering aid for the second time this week to three besieged communities in Syria in an effort to alleviate civilian suffering in cut-off areas.

Amnesty says warplanes have left ‘bloody trail of civilian death’.

At least six Irish citizens known to be in Nepal during the earthquake remain unaccounted for.

A Wexford man has told how his mother narrowly escaped when a temple collapsed in an aftershock in Nepal at the weekend.

Russia has announced plans to send a second aid convoy to rebel-held eastern Ukraine, where months of fighting have left many residential buildings in ruins.

Russia’s sending of a massive aid convoy into Ukraine without Kiev’s agreement is a “direct invasion”, Ukraine’s Security Service chief has said.

Ukraine has claimed that rebels in the east of the country fired rockets and mortars on civilians trying to flee from the region’s intense fighting.

Separatists have shot down a Ukrainian fighter plane amid fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian government forces in the eastern part of the country.

The White House has accused Russia of stepping up its destabilising activity in Ukraine in an “extremely dangerous and provocative” way.

Armies of Terminator-like warriors fan out across the battlefield, destroying everything in their path, as swarms of fellow robots rain fire from the skies.

Rescuers are facing blocked roads and damaged airports as they struggle to deliver desperately needed aid to the typhoon-devastated Philippines.

Haiyan has made landfall in northern Vietnam as a tropical storm today, after leaving massive destruction in the Philippines.

Four of the seven hostages from the International Committee of the Red Cross kidnapped in Syria have been freed.

Seven Red Cross workers have been kidnapped in northern Syria, a spokesman for the aid agency has said.

Air strikes on Syria could have “catastrophic effects” on the desperate humanitarian crisis in the region, a charity has warned.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was still seeking a formal Syrian response to its request for urgent access to the besieged town of Qusair after a minister said aid efforts should wait until the fighting was over.

Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison boiled over into a clash between guards and detainees as the military closed a communal section of the jail and moved inmates into single cells.

Red Cross chief Peter Maurer has launched a mercy mission in Syria to seek greater protection for civilians, as opposition activists said rebel-held areas of second city Aleppo faced severe food shortages under a government offensive.

Government warplanes bombed a town in northern Syria today, killing at least 18 people, activists said, while the new UN envoy to the country acknowledged that brokering an end to the nation’s civil war will be a “very, very difficult” task.

The Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Joe Costello is travelling to Jordan today to assess the humanitarian situation at the country's border with Syria.

A British charity has suspended plans to deliver aid to Syria because of the worsening violence in Lebanon.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is moving some of its foreign staff out of the Syrian capital to neighbouring Lebanon.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has said it now considers the conflict in Syria a civil war, meaning international humanitarian law applies throughout the country.

A French staff member of the international Red Cross who was kidnapped in Yemen almost three months ago has been freed.

Libyan protesters and militiamen stormed the headquarters of the election commission in the eastern city of Benghazi, setting voting slips on fire, a militia commander said, a week before the country holds its first general election in nearly five decades.

Former UN peacekeeper Col Colm Doyle says investigative journalist Ed Vulliamy’s anger is palpable in his remarkable book on the Bosnian conflict

A first aider with the Red Crescent has been shot dead in eastern Syria.

Aid teams will try to evacuate wounded and sick civilians and those who want to leave rebel-held areas in the embattled Syrian city of Homs today, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has revealed three aid workers suffered minor injuries in Syria when an explosion hit their convoy.

UN monitors entered the Syrian hamlet of Mazraat al-Qubeir yesterday, where opposition activists say at least 78 people were killed, a UN source said.

Explosions echoed over Damascus today as Syrian troops clashed with rebels in some of the heaviest fighting yet in the capital in the 15-month uprising against President Bashar Assad.