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Recommending a six-month extension of the United Nations peace-monitoring force's mandate in the so-called Blue Line between Israel and Lebanon, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says two incidents in January decisively shattered a period of relative calm over the past six months.

A United Nations team is making a two-day field visit to the area of Costa Rica most affected by the floods earlier this month that killed four people and displaced 6,000 others, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

The latest developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the deployment of Palestinian security forces in northern Gaza are "very encouraging," a United Nations spokesman said today, after days of concern that a fresh upsurge of violence could abort renewed hopes for progress.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today appointed five experts to monitor sanctions against Liberia's timber and diamond industries, as well as the arms embargo against the West African country following its 14-year civil war, and to advise on socio-economic and humanitarian issues.

With the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005 just two months old, a blue-ribbon group is holding a major symposium Saturday at UN Headquarters in New York to highlight changes in the use of the small loans to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of halving extreme poverty by 2015.

The United Nations today launched comprehensive plans for a global early warning system to reduce the deadly toll of natural hazards, combining speedy transmission of data with training of populations at risk in a strategy that experts say could have saved scores of thousands of lives in the recent Indian Ocean tsunami.

With emergency relief now reaching nearly all affected communities in the Indonesian province of Aceh, the area most ravaged by last month’s Indian Ocean tsunami, United Nations agencies are looking to mitigate the longer term impact of a disaster that killed at least 165,000 in a dozen countries and deprived up to 5 million more of basic services.

In a joint move against the threats of drugs, organized crime and terrorism, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has teamed up with the European Commission (EC) to fight the three-fold scourge on a wide front, ranging from the Balkans and Central Asia to Latin America and Africa.

The United Nations refugee agency has voiced its deep concern at Japan’s “unprecedented” decision to deport a Turkish Kurd and his adult son to Turkey even though they had been recognized as refugees, after the agency had warned the move would breach international law.

Exports from developing countries could increase by as much as $175 billion if current international talks on liberalizing trade in industrial products are successful, according to a study released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).