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Increasing international assistance is arriving in Yogayakarta, Indonesia, following last Friday's earthquake, which has claimed more than 5,000 lives and injured more than 8,000 people, the United Nations said today as its agencies rushed food, medicine, other supplies and cash to the area.

Confronting the rapid spread and growing variety of smoked and smokeless tobacco products and their increasing use by young people, the United Nations health agency today called for urgent and broader regulation of what is the leading preventable cause of death globally, killing 5 million people each year.

Food rations that were recently reduced by half for more than 3 million people in Sudan will be increased to 84 per cent of minimum daily requirements from June to September in the war-torn Darfur region thanks to new donations to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) emergency operation, but more aid is still urgently needed.

Expressing new alarm at the impact of more than four decades of conflict on Colombia’s civilians, the United Nations refugee agency today voiced “extreme concern” at increasing violence over the past two weeks in the south of the Andean country, where 15 people have been killed, some of them in fighting between irregular armed

Amendments to Kyrgyzstan’s refugee law could violate the 1951 Refugee Convention, which the Central Asian country has ratified, if they deny access of illegal foreigners to refugee status determination procedures, the relevant United Nations agency said today.

Accelerating the process of electing a new head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) following last week’s sudden death of Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook, the Agency’s Executive Board today set a November timetable for the selection.

The head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today condemned the assassination of a senior Iraqi Education Ministry official and denounced the growing number of attacks against educators in the country while also deploring the killing two CBS television crew members, the latest media professionals to die while covering the war.

In a message to participants at an Asian media summit in Malaysia, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged governments to reaffirm their commitment to press freedom while calling on media professionals to exercise their rights responsibly.

United Nations human rights experts today called for a halt to evictions of up to several thousand families in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, as part of a plan to redevelop land claimed to be the property of a private company, where hundreds of families have already been rendered homeless.

A group of 25 Liberian corrections officers have been certified after completing a year of training, bringing to 49 the total number prepared by the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and the Government to uphold human rights while dealing with prisoners.