Beirut - Lack of funds is threatening the work of teams working with the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) in southern Lebanon to clear Israeli cluster bombs which were dropped over the area in the July 2006 war.

UNMACC spokeswoman Dayla Farran said some of the teams "will have to stop because the donors have failed to come up with a promised 4.7 million dollars needed to fund the program in 2008."

"A large number of the clearance teams will be stopping by the end of this month if funds are not ready before that," she said.

Yangon  - Ibrahim Gambari, UN special envoy to Myanmar, visited the compound of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi Friday but she did not come out to greet him, witnesses said.

Gambari, who arrived in Yangon Monday, went to Suu Kyi's Yangon home at 7:30 am (0100 GMT) and waited at the front gate for an hour but the Nobel Peace Prize laureate did not come out, witnesses said.

The road outside Suu Kyi's compound has been heavily barricaded since Thursday evening with four police officers posted outside its front gate.

Stockholm - Three agencies including the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said on Thursday that reducing food waste was a means to improve global water conservation and shore up future food production.

The call was made during World Water Week, currently taking place in Stockholm, where scores of experts and policy makers have gathered to discuss water and sanitation related issues.

A British researcher was to receive the 150,000-dollar Stockholm Water Prize, administered by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), on Thursday for launching the concept of "virtual water" - a system that measures the amount of water used to produce and trade goods.

The Hague  - The trial against former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic will be presided over by a new judge, the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) located in The Hague said on Thursday.

In a press statement ICTY president Judge Fausto Pocar said the trial was originally assigned to trial chamber one because of its assumed connection with the proceedings against Momcilo Perisic, one of the most senior generals under late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

The prosecution had originally planned to combine the two cases, the ICTY said, which justified the cases being brought before the same chamber.

Seoul  - An acute food shortage in North Korea has led the World Food Programme to appeal to Seoul to send food aid to the impoverished communist country, officials said Thursday.

The UN agency asked South Korea for a 60-million-dollar donation to its new emergency relief programme to provide sustenance for 6.2 million hungry children, women and elderly in North Korea, a South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman said.

"The government will decide whether to accept the appeal or not based on public opinion," the spokesman said.

"We don't link humanitarian aid to political issues, such as the nuclear issue," he said in reference to North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

Yangon  - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon plans to visit Myanmar in December to discuss the country's political stalemate, his special envoy to Myanmar Ibrahim Gambari disclosed Wednesday.

"Ban Ki-moon plans to come to Myanmar in the last week of December but this time the trip will be focused on politics," said Nyan Win, the spokesman for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD).