Thousands of new UN peacekeeping troops should arrive in Congo within weeks, it was announced today.

The United Nations and aid groups say children in cyclone-devastated Burma may be forced to attend damaged schools when classes resume tomorrow, while victims in camps may be more vulnerable to disease because of inadequate aid.

Burma’s isolationist government blocked United Nations efforts today to airlift urgently needed food aid to survivors of a cyclone which may have killed more than 100,000 people, UN officials said.

Burma’s isolationist military regime gave the go-ahead for the first major airlift of international aid into the country today, while dragging its feet on urgently requested visas by foreign agencies several days after a devastating cyclone.

A NEWBORN in Sierra Leone has the lowest chance in the world of surviving until age five, and the prospects are almost as bad for children in Angola and Afghanistan, according to a UN report released last night.

Iraqi children are caught in a rapidly-worsening tragedy as violence tightens its grip on their homeland, the UN Children’s Fund said today.

The United Nations is to audit all its operations in North Korea, where the US claims that money from at least one UN programme could be ending up illegally in the hands of the communist regime.

Children are particularly at risk from the aftermath of war in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, the UN Children’s Fund said today.

The US and Britain pressed Sudan’s government and Darfur rebels to meet today’s deadline for a peace deal, even as ground units stepped up fighting that has killed at least 180,000 people and left millions more homeless.

PAKISTAN and India made an unprecedented agreement yesterday to open their heavily militarised border in disputed Kashmir to aid the flow of relief goods and reunite divided families in the aftermath of South Asia’s colossal earthquake.

THE UN’s top relief official has warned that the aid shortfall for Pakistan’s earthquake victims has led to a logistical nightmare and made the situation worse than after the Indian Ocean tsunami last year.

MILLIONS of children around the globe are being trafficked annually in an illegal industry worth €8 billion a year, rivalling the trade in illicit drugs and arms, the UN said yesterday.

The suffering of Zimbabwean children is being forgotten in a stand-off over politics and aid, the UN Children’s Fund said today.

TENS of millions of people die and 20 million children are born mentally impaired every year because of a lack of vitamins and minerals in their diet — a problem that could be solved at the cost of a few cent per person, the UN Children’s Fund said yesterday.

Aids has already orphaned more than 11 million African children under the age of 15, and “the worst is yet to come,” a report issued by the UN Children’s Fund warned today.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell urged the Red Cross and other relief organisations to stay in Iraq following a wave of suicide car bombings in Baghdad that killed around 40 people.

The first sizeable relief convoy set out for Iraq in a biting sandstorm today as allied forces struggled to clear the way for more aid shipments, using dolphins to remove mines from waterways and hunting Iraqi fighters around the port of Umm Qasr.

The UN Children’s Fund said a spate of attacks on aid workers highlighted deteriorating security in Afghanistan and further hampered badly needed aid delivery.

A ship at the centre of a frantic search in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea was involved in child trafficking, officials confirmed today.

A top British Government official has said that a ship that was believed to have left Benin with children destined for slavery did not contain any unaccompanied minors and had been confused with a second ship, whose current location was unknown.