International aid agencies and governments mobilized on Sunday to respond to the earthquake in Nepal, saying they faced challenges in getting assistance to the country and distributing it amid the widespread devastation there. In the aftermath of the disaster, which has killed more than 2,400 people, injured 5,900 and left many more homeless, development workers said that continued aftershocks, a crippled transport network and the loss of power in parts of the country had made it tough to search for survivors and distribute much-needed supplies.

A senior Iranian official says Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen and its prevention of the delivery of the Islamic Republic’s humanitarian aid to the war-wracked country will not go unanswered. “We consider all options for helping the Yemeni people and immediate dispatch of humanitarian aid and transfer of the injured,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Sunday.

International aid groups and governments have escalated efforts to dispatch rescuers and supplies to earthquake-hit Nepal, but severed communications and landslides in the Himalayan nation posed formidable challenges to the relief effort.

Israel will be sending a search and rescue team to Nepal, including medical staff, in the wake of Saturday's massive earthquake, sources in the Prime Minister's Office have said. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman also said that Israel plans to send an aircraft to evacuate any Israelis who want to return home from site of the disaster.

As the country's five-decade war winds down, how the government disarms female fighters could define the coming truce. After 50-plus years, 222,000 deaths, $9 billion in U.S. aid, and 34 rounds of negotiations, one of the world’s longest civil wars might finally be nearing its end. Colombia’s president wants an agreement signed within months. Still to be resolved, however, is the question of how to return over 8,000 FARC fighters to civilian life, often within communities that bore the brunt of the violence.

Britain is paying professional aid staff up to £1,000 a day to work in developing countries as part of a spending "frenzy" to meet a government target, a new report suggestst. Spending on consultants has doubled in the past four years to £1.4bn with the bill for outside help now eating up more than 10 per cent of the aid budget. The figures prompted anger among MPs, who described the practice as a "grotesque waste".

The people who took part in the Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History campaigns are still there. They haven’t gone away. The calculation, however, is that there are no votes in development - which is why, when the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank meet in Washington later this week, the talks will not impinge on the election campaign. George Osborne and Ed Balls will be looking to see how they can exploit what the IMF says about the health of the UK economy for domestic political reasons, but that’s about it.

According to the Development Cooperation Report 2013-14, nearly one-sixth of all the  foreign assistance that comes to Nepal is received through international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), a government report said.