Geneva  - World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy said Friday he would not call trade ministers to Geneva for a meeting on the Doha Round of negotiations before the end of the year.

He said he had been in intense talks with ministers but concluded that given the gaps in positions between member states on industrial sectors and agricultural issues, as well as cotton trade, it would not be possible to move forward on the trade talks.

Geneva  - For the 700,000 commuters who cross the borders between European Union countries and Switzerland every day, life is set to get just a little bit easier after Thursday.

When the clock strikes midnight, Switzerland will officially join the Schengen agreement, meaning passports will no longer be checked at the border crossings between the confederation and the rest of Europe.

"Schengen means" there will be "no systematic control of the borders anymore," Michaela Rickenbacker, the chief of the Swiss border police, told local radio.

However, she admitted, most systematic checks have already been removed. People will feel the difference, but only slightly. Border checks will remain in place for custom issues.

Geneva - Only Sweden, out of the world's developed countries, managed to meet all of the UN's Children's Fund's 10 benchmarks for early childhood care and education, a report on Thursday showed.

A look at the 24 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Slovenia, ranked the five Nordic countries and France at the top of the list.

They were the only ones to have allotted a full 1 per cent of GDP to early childhood services.

Geneva - Injury and violence were responsible for 900,000 children's deaths each year, 90 per cent of which were accidental, a United Nations report released Wednesday said.

The leading cause of death resulting from an injury was road traffic accidents, followed by drowning and fires or burns.

War made up only 2.3 per cent of child-injury deaths, according to the World Health Organization and the UN's Children Fund, UNICEF.

The first UN report on the subject said millions of children suffered lifelong disabilities due to injuries, and that the poor were at an increased risk.

In 2004, some 260,000 children died in road accidents, but only 7 per cent of them were in the most developed countries.

Geneva/Harare - The death toll in Zimbabwe's cholera outbreak shot up to 746, the United Nations reported Wednesday.

The figure released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva, which reflects the situation as of Tuesday, marks a sharp increase from the 589 that had died by the weekend.

The increase is likely due to the fact that the latest figures include 256 people who have died outside health clinics in their communities.

The total number of suspected cases has also galloped ahead to 15,572, OCHA said.

Geneva  - At least 134 children were separated from their parents during the recent outbreak of violence in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Tuesday.

So far, 15 children have been reunited with their families, in the one week since the international aid agency started a reunification programme.

The ICRC said it was working with the local Congolese Red Cross to register the children and find their families.