Colombian rebels trade guns for shovels ahead of peace meeting - Reuters

Julia Symmes Cobb

Hundreds of FARC rebels are converging on a camp in southern Colombia to pour cement, shore up dirt roads and set up communications ahead of the group's congress this week, where delegates will ratify a peace deal to end 52 years of war.

Representatives from each unit of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) will debate and vote on the accord reached last month after years of talks with the government.

As many as 1,000 delegates and media are expected at the 10th congress from Saturday, where rebels will discuss the five-point accord and their imminent entry into politics. Historically secretive, this congress is the first one open to civilians.

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Colombia's coffee growers, reeling from drought, brace for La Niña rains - Reuters

Jairo Ciro is just getting back on his feet after more than a third of his coffee crop withered earlier this year because of Colombia's devastating El Niño drought.

But now something even worse is on its way - torrential rains and roya leaf rust, a fungus that attacks coffee trees and prevents them from producing beans.

Julia Symmes Cobb

Ciro, a father of seven who grows coffee on the steep hillsides of Colombia's western Tolima province, fears he may again lose 30 percent of his harvest - and his income - to the rains, forecast to come into full force by year-end.

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Colombia declares end to Zika epidemic inside country - Reuters

Colombian health officials declared on Monday that the worst of a Zika outbreak in the Andean nation had passed just 10 months after its arrival, raising questions about how the virus is affecting parts of Latin America differently.

Vice Health Minister Fernando Ruiz told journalists that the number of infections in Colombia has been falling by 600 cases a week. While Zika is still circulating in the country, Colombia considers the drop-off sufficient to say it has moved into an endemic phase from the epidemic phase.

"We can declare that the epidemic is ended. Colombia is the first country on the American continent to declare an end to the epidemic," Ruiz said.

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Colombia and FARC rebels reach historic ceasefire deal - Reuters

Colombia's government and leftist FARC rebels said on Wednesday they had agreed to end hostilities with a definitive ceasefire that leaves the two sides just a step away from resolving the longest-running conflict in the Western Hemisphere.

After more than three years of fraught talks in Havana, the agreement brings into sight an end to a conflict that began as a 1960s peasant revolt before exploding into a cocaine-fuelled war that has killed at least 220,000 people and displaced millions.

The accord will be signed on Thursday in Havana by President Juan Manuel Santos and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel leader Rodrigo Londono, better known by his nom de guerre Timochenko.

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Deal still possible in Colombia-Novartis cancer drug talks: minister - Reuters

The door remains open for Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis to reach a deal with Colombia to lower the cost of cancer drug imatinib and prevent the Andean country from allowing generic production of the medication, the health minister said.

Colombia asked Novartis to lower the price of imatinib, which is used to treat leukemia and other cancers, in an effort to save costs for the country's beleaguered healthcare system but negotiations broke down and prompted the country to announce it may declare a compulsory license.

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