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A senior UN official met today with Sudanese Acting Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail and said the minister reacted positively to the idea of holding talks with the rebel Eastern Front, at a date to be determined, with the aim of finding a lasting solution to the eastern region’s problems.

With the informal sector providing the major employment for women worldwide, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) today called on Governments to improve the sector as they calculate progress towards the reduction of poverty in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

With the six-year-old United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone set to close its doors in January, the Security Council today authorized the establishment of a follow-on UN integrated office to help achieve long-term stability and sustainable development as the West African country continues to recover from a bloody civil war during the 1990s.

The head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) condemned the killing of Reuters engineer Walled Khaled in Baghdad on 28 August and the wounding of his colleague Haider Kadhem, and he urged authorities to remember that journalists should be allowed to operate freely.

The peace process in the Côte d’Ivoire has moved from globalization, with United Nations involvement, to Africanization, with African Union (AU) mediation, and now Ivorians must take responsibility for nationalizing the next steps, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the West African country said today.

In only two months, some 57,000 out-of-school children in northeast Somalia have been registered -- by youngsters their own age -- in a United Nations-sponsored initiative to get children in the war-torn country involved in the Back to School campaign.

A new film being shown at the 62nd Venice Biennale Film Festival puts the spotlight on the problems of illiteracy, hunger, exploitation and, sometimes, being caught up in wars now faced by the world’s millions of poor children, United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said today.

The United Nations today launched an $88 million ‘smart’ flash appeal for Malawi, where some 4.2 million people – 34 per cent of the population – face acute food shortages, in an unprecedented two-track approach to both address immediate needs and prevent a recurring crisis.

With large forest fires in South-East Asia, notably in Indonesia, causing serious health and environmental problems, including a choking haze, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today called for strict enforcement of the ban against using fires for agricultural purposes.

The last remaining Vietnamese refugee in Malaysia, out of more than 250,000 "boat people" who began landing there 30 years ago, has returned home, marking a significant milestone in the history of the exodus, the United Nations refugee agency reported today.