A judge known for jailing pirates and Islamists has been shot dead in Somalia’s northern Puntland region.

Poor child nutrition still causes major problems in the developing world - despite some progress, experts say.

Somali pirates have attacked an oil tanker some 1,000 nautical miles (1,850km) off the coast, the EU’s anti-piracy mission says.

Hundreds of people in Somalia have been forced to watch Islamist militants executing two people accused of spying.

The Ethiopian government has asked the international community for emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.

Targets to cut the number of hungry people in the world will not be met without greater international effort, UN food agencies have warned.

Oxfam has launched an emergency appeal for £9.5m ($15m) to reach millions of people threatened by hunger in Ethiopia and other East African countries.

Desert Flower, which has premiered at the Venice Film Festival, tells the incredible journey of Waris Dirie, the model-turned-campaigner against female genital mutilation.

The UN has warned that it has run out of food to provide for nine million Ethiopians who rely on its assistance.

Somalia is facing its worst drought for at least a decade, says the UN.

The captain of a US container ship taken hostage by Somali pirates has been released, the US Navy has said.

Pirates have seized two European-owned tankers off the coast of Somalia in the past day, officials have said.

More than a million people in Darfur will go without food rations by May unless new aid agencies are deployed, a joint Sudanese-UN assessment says.

Despite the launch of “one of the largest anti-piracy flotillas in modern history,” the clan-organized taking of vessels off the coast of Somalia will only cease when order is restored to the Horn of Africa nation, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in a report released here on Wednesday.

The United Nations agencies said more than 14,000 new Somali refugees have been registered in Kenya in January, adding to a refugee population which already far exceeds the capacity of existing camps and support mechanisms.

Five months ago the son of a WFP food aid monitor was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Without any warning, on March 16, the boy hobbled onto the airstrip in Dungu where his father was working.

The World Food Programme (WFP) will now feed 3.5 million people hit by drought and high food prices. Many families are struggling to find food for one meal a day, it said.

The World Food Programme is helping The Gambia fight hunger with programs like Food for Education.

Zam Zam Camp, Sudan [...] International aid groups and the United Nations are scrambling to fill the gaps left by the expulsion of the 13 foreign aid groups, including several of the largest providers of food, clean water, education and healthcare to Darfur’s displacement camps.

Reports on climate change are like the persistent drip of a leaky faucet getting louder and more frequent. The dire consequences forecast for planet Earth are becoming less a trickle and more a torrent. The global recession is the latest factor to complicate the equation.

Food prices are down from the record highs of 2008 but they are still out of reach for most in the developing world, WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran told British parliamentarians this week.

Three foreign staff of Medecins Sans Frontieres’ Belgian branch have been kidnapped in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are acidifying the oceans and threaten a mass extinction of sea life, a top ocean scientist warns.

The U.N. World Food Programme plans to launch a global fund that will allow it to secure food stocks in advance rather than panic-buying when crises hit, the agency’s chief said on Tuesday.

US President Barack Obama has described as “unacceptable” the expulsion of foreign aid workers from the Sudanese region of Darfur last week.

There was a shadow over the meeting of African finance ministers called by the International Monetary Fund even before it started.

The tough economic climate should not mean food assistance programmes get cut, said Oxford University Professor Paul Collier as he and other experts met in London to debate the future of international development.

In an attempt to mitigate rising food insecurity and malnutrition, the Zambian government and the World Food Programme (WFP) have started to hand out food vouchers to the country’s urban poor.

The world’s progress towards the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could be pushed back by at least three years by the “financial tsunami” sweeping across the world, Douglas Alexander, international development secretary, warns today.

While much of the publicity surrounding the global recession has focused on people losing their jobs or retirement savings, the nightmare is even more immediate for hundreds of millions of others who live at the edge of survival. They go to bed hungry.

Britain will contribute to a new World Bank fund for the poorest countries, Gordon Brown is expected to confirm on Monday.

The first gauntlet thrown at President Obama didn’t come from Iran, Russia or China. Rather, it came from Sudan, in its decision to expel aid groups that are a lifeline keeping more than a million people alive in Darfur.

Following the expulsion of 13 international non-governmental organisations by the Sudanese government, WFP is doing all it can to bridge the newly opened chasm in the provision of humanitarian assistance.

Three months after aid deliveries to the south Somali coastal town of Merka stopped, several thousand displaced people are facing a food and water crisis, sources said. “What little food we had is gone; we have had no help in almost three months,” Zeinab Sheikh Hassan told IRIN.

Families who fled their homes in the face of government assaults in Darfur face a new emergency. Having fled to the safety of aid camps in search of shelter, food and water, they find the charities that supported them are being locked out by the very regime responsible for much of the region’s slaughter.

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) in Mozambique is seeking $5.5 million to feed about 100,000 people in the northwestern province of Tete, spokesman Peter Transburg said on Friday. Transburg said the WFP had helped 54,000 of the 97,000 in the region needing food.

The global financial crisis sweeping through Wall Street and the European banking sector will touch the lives of the world’s most vulnerable, pushing millions into deeper poverty and leading to the deaths of thousands of children, according to a new United Nations study.

The UN secretary general has urged Sudan to rethink its decision to expel aid groups from its Darfur region.

NEW YORK – Not On Our Watch, the international advocacy and aid organization founded by actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, producer Jerry Weintraub, and human rights lawyer David Pressman, today announced grants totalling $500,000 to programmes reaching tens of thousands of vulnerable citizens living in Myanmar.

OUAGADOUGOU – WFP today launched its first food voucher operation in Africa, deploying a new tool to address hunger in an urban environment where food is available, but beyond the reach of many because of the impact of high food prices.

JOHANNESBURG – WFP bought a record 552,000 metric tons of food in southern Africa in 2008 – the equivalent of providing nearly 2.75 million hungry people with a full food basket for an entire year.