The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) are sending a team of experts to Kabul this week to begin its environmental assessment work.

Team leaders and scientist will begin arriving on Sunday. Four assessment teams will travel to various parts of the country looking into the illegal cutting of trees, the status of National Parks, water and desertification, and urban contamination which will focus on the cities of Herat, Kandahar, Mazar, Jalalabad and Kabul.

This is the first assessment of its kind

An Iranian border guard fired a warning shot into the air which landed less than three metres from a UNHCR staff member at the Zaranj camp at around 2:00 pm (0930 GMT), Maki Shinohara told AFP.

The border guard opened fire as a group of around 40 men started running towards the Iranian border. Chaos then

HERAT, Afghanistan, Sept 1 (AFP) - Suhaila Balkhi has hardly slept a wink for the past 10 days through worry about the young son and daughter whom she was forced to leave in Iran when she was deported to her Afghan homeland without warning.

The mother-of-five did not even have a chance to say goodbye to eight-year-old Sumila and her son Nawid, aged nine, after being arrested by police for being an illegal resident while shopping in the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

Balkhi said that she was then bundled

In one of the hardest-hit Longquanwan village, the people were still frightened to recall the night when the flood struck.

Chen Quanxiu, 86 was at home that fateful night. The water level rose to over 10 meters within four hours. To save her from drowning, her son carried her up the hill, away from the rising water.

Chen Quanxiu is now staying with her

The blast was the latest in a series of explosions which have raised new fears over security in the Afghan capital.

The blast occurred at 3:30 pm (1100 GMT) outside the former Soviet embassy on the Dahlaman road.

Local police official Major Gul Rahman told AFP at the scene that a man riding past on his bicycle suffered fatal injuries while an Afghan man and woman also suffered shrapnel wounds from

HEBRON, West Bank, Sept 1 (AFP) - Israeli forces killed five Palestinians Sunday, a day after five others died in a messy "targeted killing", prompting Palestinian officials to hit out at Washington for its silence in the face of the slaughter.

A senior Palestinian official accused Israel of "state terrorism" in the wake of the killings.

Two children aged six and 10 died in the Israeli helicopter strike late Saturday and witnesses said at least four of those killed Sunday were civilian workers.

Four Palestinian men in their twenties,

Margaret Hassan, who has worked for CARE since 1992, spoke about the continuing suffering of the Iraqi people. She described how a formerly prosperous nation - home to the world's second largest oil reserves, had been systematically reduced to poverty.

In 1990, after the invasion of Kuwait,

A statement by the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) said the Dutch UNMEE commander, General Patrick Cammaert, personally visited local army commanders in the border region last week.

"Following a spate of cattle rustling incidents in the Monoxito area during the past week, UNMEE has been visiting