Unicef

LONDON - Governments are failing the children of the world, with more than 1 billion living in a state of severe threat from hunger, disease, exploitation or lack of security, the United Nations children's agency said yesterday. In a distressing indictment, UNICEF said that in spite of some pockets of progress this year, "we've failed to deliver on the promise of childhood." "Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood," UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said as she unveiled the agency's annual State of the World's Children report.

KABUL, Afghanistan - As hundreds of girls stepped across a muddy street and through the steel gates of Sherino High School yesterday, they entered a world forbidden to them just a few months ago - and one still out of reach for millions of other Afghan children. Yesterday marked the start of the school year in Afghanistan and the first official day of classes for girls here since the Taliban banished women from work and schools in 1996. But they weren't the only children deprived of a chance for an education.

Peter Ustinov, who died Sunday at his home in Switzerland at age 82, resembled a cross between an English bulldog and a teddy bear - imposing, but adorable; refined, but mischievious. In the annals of great British actors, he'll go down as Shakespearean, with a touch of Monty Python. "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious," Ustinov was reported to have once said, offering a wry and typically dexterous summation of his life and career. The actor, whose movie career spanned more than 60 years, from 1942's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing to 2003's Luther, died of heart failure at a Swiss clinic near his home in Bursins.

An American support group for UNICEF, the United Nations children's fund, announced yesterday that it has received its largest donation ever, a grant of $26 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation earmarked for the elimination of tetanus among mothers and babies in the poorest nations.Nearly 250,000 people, most of them infants, died of tetanus in the developing world in 1998, according to the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, the American support group and the oldest of UNICEF's 37 national support committees.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Gunmen believed to be Muslim militants opened fire yesterday on United Nations aid officials and their police escort on a road in southern Egypt, killing five people.The attack, the deadliest attributed to militants since March, came as the U.N. officials and four police officers were traveling north from Luxor in separate cars to open a clinic near the town of Qena. Both cars were hit, and the four officers and an Egyptian worker for UNICEF were killed.UNICEF was withholding the name of the slain staff worker, but the Interior Ministry identified him as cameraman Labib Ibrahim.

UNITED NATIONS -- Striking an upbeat note about its struggle to reduce infant mortality, UNICEF says "a final offensive" may now be under way against the biggest killers of small children in the world.Its annual report, "The State of the World's Children," notes that infant deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, tetanus and whooping cough are all in retreat and that severe malnutrition is being reduced despite a 20 percent rise in the number of children under 5 in the last decade."Through the lens of history rather than of news, what is now happening in the developing world may come to be seen as the beginning of a final offensive against some of the oldest and most common enemies of the world's children," UNICEF says.

I am in my 80s, and am limited as to how much walking I am able to do. Are there any tours geared to people with limitations? People who are mobile but have trouble walking fast or for long distances, often referred to as slow walkers, have many alternatives in and out of the United States. Access-Able Travel Source, accessable.com, provides practical information about travel for people with all types of disabilities. Carol Randall, who uses a wheelchair or scooter because of multiple sclerosis, organized the Web site with her husband, Bill, as a place to store what they have discovered either from their own journeys or from other travelers.

Someone stole more than $200 from St. Jane Francis School between 2 p.m. Sunday and 6 a.m. Monday, county police said.The school in the 8500 block of St. Jane Drive had staged a fund-raising festival and carnival from Friday through Sunday.Most of the money -- $146 -- was taken from a storage closet in a hallway leading to the principal's office. The burglars took another $50 from the bookstore, $3 from a secretary's desk and $2 from a UNICEF box in the principal's office.

London. -- A journalist once asked James Grant, the executive director of UNICEF who died two weeks ago, why the agency had spent eight times its allotted budget on the 1990 summit of world leaders that launched the Convention on the Rights of the Child.Mr. Grant began his reply, ''You have children, I have children, we all have children.''It was this single-mindedness -- detractors called it tunnel vision -- which, combined with extravagant goals and plain hard work, made UNICEF in many ways the most successful of all U.N. agencies.

PPE: It may sound like a utility company, but it's shorthand for poverty, population growth and environmental stress -- the formula for a downward spiral toward greater human misery for millions of people around the world. James Grant, director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), cites the "PPE spiral" in the fund's annual "State of the World's Children" report,released this week.In many ways, improving the lives of the world's children is too easy, simply because needs are so great that almost any positive effort can make a measurable difference.