Over the four years that researcher Xi Li has watched Syria’s civil war unfold through nighttime satellite imagery, he has seen the pinpricks of light that dotted the north and east fade and the Mediterranean coast darken until 83% of the country’s lights have gone out.

The civil war in Syria has forced a record three million people out of the country and more than a million fled in the past year, the UN refugee agency says.

The Government has announced €1m in funding to tackle violence against women and girls during conflicts or natural disasters.

The most realistic threat to Ireland from Britain’s growing Euroscepticism is that it remains part of the EU but in a much weakened state, which undermines the common interests of both countries, according to outgoing Labour MP David Miliband.

SOMALIA, already blighted by drought and famine, is at a “turning point” as conditions decline with hundreds of thousands more people likely to die in coming months, 20 aid agencies warned yesterday.

ONLY 11 days ago, Minhaj Gedi Farah was too weak to cry and his skin crumpled liked thin leather under the pressure of his mother’s hands.

MIHAG GEDI FARAH is seven-months-old and weighs as little as a newborn with the weathered skin of an old man.

Artillery hit the residence of France’s ambassador to Ivory Coast for the second time in two days, the French embassy said, a possible show of defiance from the country’s strongman who has resisted international pressure to emerge from a bunker and cede power.

A SOUTH AFRICAN outdoors expert is feared dead after a crocodile snatched him from his kayak while he led an American expedition from the source of the White Nile into the heart of Congo.

A British aid worker killed in Afghanistan when her vehicle was ambushed was tonight named as Dr Jacqueline Kirk, the International Rescue Committee said.

MILITANTS brandishing assault rifles ambushed a US relief organisation’s vehicle south of Kabul, killing three Western aid workers and their Afghan driver and leaving their white SUV riddled with hundreds of bullets, officials said.

An Islamic militant ambush near Kabul on a US aid organisation’s vehicle killed three women, an American, a Canadian-British national and a Trinidadian, officials said.

An Irish national has reportedly been shot dead during an attack on a group of female aid workers in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid agencies urged Burma's junta today urgently to clarify rules for operating in the country's cyclone-devastated areas, after the regime promised to open its doors to the international community.

FRANCE and the Netherlands reacted swiftly on Saturday to a newly signed peace accord in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with the latter announcing millions of euro in aid to help stabilise the troubled east.

Hollywood pals Ben Affleck and Matt Damon teamed up with a host of celebrities for a charity poker game in Las Vegas.

A controversial new study contends that nearly 655,000 have died because of the Iraq conflict, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.

INTERNATIONAL aid agencies warned yesterday that the humanitarian situation in war-torn Darfur was deteriorating as attacks on aid workers increased.

War-ravaged Congo is suffering the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis, with 38,000 people dying each month mostly from easily treatable diseases, according to a study in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal.

MORE than 1,000 Congolese civilians a day are dying, nearly all from disease and malnutrition, due to a festering conflict that has killed 3.8 million people, an aid agency said yesterday.

SECURITY in Sudan’s Darfur region is a “farce” with the government engaged in ethnic cleansing and rebel groups looting and abducting civilians in violation of an April cease-fire, a rights group said yesterday.

THE displaced of Darfur are hard pressed to find space for their dead or enough water for Muslims’ ritual washing of the body.

Kidnappers seized 13 foreign hostages and threatened to burn three Japanese captives alive if Tokyo did not withdraw its troops from Iraq as fighting in Fallujah raged today between insurgents and US forces.

About 3.3 million people have died in Congo since civil war broke out four years ago in Africa’s third-largest nation, most from war-induced malnutrition and disease, the International Rescue Committee said today.

The FBI is questioning as many as 50,000 Iraqis living in the US in a search for potential terrorist cells, spies or people who might provide information helpful to a US war effort.