Geneva  - Swiss voters on Sunday rejected a proposition to decriminalize cannabis for personal consumption but voted by a large majority to extend a government programme that gives heroin to hard- core addicts.

In a surprise, voters chose to remove the statute of limitations on acts of paedophilia, despite government opposition to the proposal, which was put forward by parents' groups.

This put sexual offenses against children on equal footing with genocide and war crimes, the only other crimes that have no statute of limitations under to Swiss law.

Geneva  - The death toll from the recent outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe has risen to 389, the United Nations said Friday, with a total of 9,463 cases reported.

In the least three days, 76 new deaths were reported, the UN's Children's Fund UNICEF said. The disease has also spread to more areas.

"The disease is preventable and curable," said Fadila Chaib of the World Health Organization.

The UN and its partners were bringing in more supplies, including water, fuel, hygiene kits and body bags.

Geneva - Climate change and its effects are occurring at a faster rate than scientists previously thought, a conservation group said Thursday, calling for governments to take action at an upcoming United Nations conference in Poland.

"We are now seeing devastating consequences of warming that were not expected to hit for decades," Kim Carstensen from the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) said.

Geneva - The United Nations' Human Rights Council announced Wednesday it is to hold a special session Friday on the situation in the eastern section of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Humanitarian aid organizations and other groups working in Congo have accused fighters in the Kivu region of having committed severe rights abuses, including sexual violence against women.

Geneva - The International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned Tuesday that millions of workers worldwide would likely see an erosion of their wages in 2009 due to the global financial crisis.

In industrialized countries, wages would likely decline by 0.5 per cent. That compares to growth of 0.8 per cent in 2008.

Adding to the bad news, the ILO reported that wages fall at a faster rate than gross domestic product (GDP) contraction in bad economic years, but grow at a slower rate than GDP in good years. Indeed, for every 1 percentage point of GDP growth, salaries only increased by 0.75 percentage point.

Geneva  - About 75 million children globally, over half of them girls, do not receive education, including one third of primary school age children in sub-Saharan Africa, the UN's education, science and culture agency said Tuesday.

The lack of education and inequalities in schooling systems caused poverty and diminished opportunity, according to UNESCO's Global Monitoring Report which said governments had to take action to make improvements.

In general, children from poor countries are three times less likely to attend primary school than children from rich nations, and the education they do receive will probably be of lower quality.