Hollywood stars Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat are headlining a string of Hong Kong celebrity donations to earthquake and tsunami relief efforts in southern Asia.

Paramedics today began vaccinating more than 65,000 refugees in the south of India as authorities rushed aid to survivors of the tsunami that killed at least 4,400 people in India and left 8,000 missing, many of them feared dead, officials said.

One in four children in Sierra Leone dies before the age of five, and one in 10 in Iraq.

The annual world death rate from AIDS would wipe out the population of Ireland in a year and a half, a senior UN official warned today.

A NIGERIAN delegation to a conference on the trafficking of women and children yesterday criticised gardaí after they snubbed the event.

Grammy Award-winning musician Shakira has been appointed a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency.

Malaria kills 3,000 African children every day and drains billions of pounds from the continent’s economy each year – even though its spread can be easily controlled, a UN agency said today.

A KUWAITI hospital was last night preparing to receive an Iraqi boy whose arms were blown off in a coalition air raid.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened the first UN children’s summit today with a stinging rebuke to ‘‘the grown-ups’’ of the world for failing ‘‘deplorably’’ to uphold the right of every child to grow up free of poverty and war and to receive a quality education.