Pakistan is to send over 4,000 soldiers to join the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), UN deputy spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said on Thursday in New York. "The details of their deployment, including discussions on equipment, logistics and transportation requirements, are still being worked out," he reported.

The Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Louise Frecheet, who is on a visit to Sierra Leone, has met President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah at his Hill Station Lodge in Freetown. Ms Frechete told president Kabbah that the UN would closely work with government and non-governmental organisations to pursue peace and development in the country.

National Development Party leader Raila Odinga yesterday scoffed at attempts to extend President Moi's term of office beyond the year 2002. Such attempts were not only inconsequential but time-wasting, Mr Odinga said.

President Sam Nujoma yesterday said Government would immediately deport homosexuals who try to enter the country through Hosea Kutako International Airport. Speaking at the opening of an Agricultural Development Centre at Erwee in the Kunene region, Nujoma expressed his disgust at the recent weddings of gay and lesbian couples in the Netherlands.

The government of Niger has sent out and urgent appeal for emergency aid of some 60,000 tonnes of cereals for May-August to avert the wave of famine in the country.

States cannot ignore their human rights obligations when they negotiate trade agreements is the message sent today by Rights & Democracy to trade ministers meeting in Buenos Aires in Argentina, to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Civic groups in Zimbabwe are willing and able to take on the government over a new constitution, Thoko Matshe head of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) told IRIN on Tuesday. "We're talking mass action and civil disobedience on a wide scale if government ignores the people," Matshe said.

Louise Arbour, the former chief prosecutor of the international Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, predicted today that in spite of United States opposition, the International Criminal Court will become a reality because the question of personal accountability of leaders is an irreversible movement.

The President of Malawi Bakili Muluzi has said he is disappointed by the slow international response to the devastating floods that hit the country last month.

Zimbabwe plans to pull out 5,000 troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the "immediate future" - halving its military presence in the mineral-rich country - in a move a defence spokesman on Thursday described as a vote of confidence in the peace process.

The Senegalese President, Abdoulaye Wade, has said the former President of Chad, Hissene Habre, must leave the country. "We have given him 30 days to leave Senegal," President Wade told Sud FM radio in Dakar, the Senegalese capital. But he said Senegal had not been given sufficient evidence by the Chadian Government for the courts to prosecute Mr Habre for alleged crimes against humanity.

UN special report on children and armed conflict.

Thousands of children, some as young as 10, are serving with armed groups in the Middle East and North Africa, an international conference on the plight of child soldiers has been told.

Yousif Kuwa, the teacher who turned to armed struggle to get recognition for the Nuba people of central Sudan, has died at the age of 56 after a year-long battle with bone cancer. His death strips the Sudan People's Liberation Army of a man who was the very embodiment of the "New Sudan" it is pledged to create.

Amnesty International today called for a vigorous international presence in Guinea to protect hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees and Guinean civilians caught in a vicious six-month old insurgency in Guinea.

Roundtable on the Demography of Forced Migration, Committee on Population,
Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely, Editors, U.S. National Research Council,
2001. Millions of people uprooted by war, famine or natural disasters are on the
move in countries across the world, seeking shelter, food and other necessities of life. Using case studies from Cambodia, Kosovo, North Korea and Rwanda, a new collection of papers from the National Research Council examines mortality patterns during recent forced migrations and suggests how these patterns may change during this century.

Non-governmental organizations speaking before the Commission on Human Rights have pressed such issues as debt relief for poor nations, rural land reform, and greater efforts to reduce extreme poverty as they commented on the status of economic, social and cultural rights around the world.

The Chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, Leandro Despouy, this morning informed the Commission of the decision made by Mary Robinson, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, to accept the extension of her mandate by one year.

The Tutsi-dominated army fought Hutu rebels on Sunday in a southern suburb of Burundi's capital where officials said 37 combatants were killed in clashes last week.

South African Players Football Union, a COSATU affiliates, condemns with strongest terms the manner in which soccer, in particular, is being treated by the Cape Town Unicity Council.