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The conflict in Iraq may be over but children continue to be killed and maimed at a steady pace by the remnants of war - coalition cluster bombs looking like toys, thousands of tons of Iraqi munitions abandoned in residential areas and leaking missiles lying around Baghdad - the United Nations children's agency said today.

The top United Nations Middle East envoy today denied a report in an Israeli newspaper about his meeting with Syrian President Bashir al Assad with regard to the whereabouts of missing Israelis and to the United States.

Hailed as an "unsung hero" in the global fight against hunger, Catherine Bertini, United Nations Under Secretary-General for Management and former head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), has been awarded the 2003 World Food Prize.

A United Nations expert on the independence of judges and lawyers expressed "grave concern" today over the decision of Guatemala's Constitutional Court to allow a former President accused of committing serious human rights crimes during his tenure to run in presidential elections in November.

The chief of the United Nations agency for urban settlements today welcomed the invitation by the African Union to collaborate in fighting the urbanization of poverty, condemning millions to unemployment, food insecurity and other problems generated by squalid living conditions.

With beleaguered Monrovia "simply not safe enough for relief agencies to save the lives that need to be saved," the newly-appointed United Nations envoy for Liberia stressed today that the early deployment of West African troops to the capital was an absolutely essential step that would allow humanitarian aid distribution to resume.

Uranium compounds dispersed in the reported looting of nuclear and radioactive material at the Tuwaitha complex in Iraq pose no danger from the point of view of proliferation, the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency has determined.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to find a peaceful way out of the dispute arising out of Pyongyang’s decision to produce nuclear weapons.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today signed a $2,260,000 agreement to help seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe to control the spread of the western corn rootworm, a major threat to corn production in the region.

Turning the tide on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria is a priority second to none, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today in a message to government ministers gathered in Paris for an international meeting in support of a global fund to fight the devastating illnesses.