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Thousands of refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have returned to their North Kivu villages from Uganda, but urgent help is needed for the 3,000 who remain near Lake Edward, as well as for thousands of refugees from the DRC's Ituri province, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

The evil that killed 6 million Jews and others in the Nazi death camps 60 years ago still threatens the world, and the global community must ensure that such horror never occurs again, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today ahead of next week's special session of the General Assembly to commemorate the camps' liberation.

Calling the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) one of the most advanced sub-regional groups in the developing world, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it has strengthened its capacity for conflict management and prevention, but faces daunting security and economic challenges.

The United Nations envoy for Sudan is heading to neighbouring Ethiopia for talks with the African Union after wrapping up a two-day visit to southern Sudan where he discussed with former rebels the continuing preparations for the deployment of a future UN peace support mission there.

The Security Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) meeting later this month in Kazakhstan will allow the United Nations to expand the global anti-terror network, especially in an area haunted by terrorist activity, the Permanent Representative of Russia, who chairs the committee, and the committee's Executive Director said today.

Three weeks after a devastating Indian Ocean tsunami killed at least 160,000 people, the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR) opened today in Kobe, Japan – site of a disastrous earthquake that claimed 40,000 lives 10 years ago – with a clarion call for better measures to mitigate the effects of natural hazards.

After droughts and delayed rains, some 2.3 million people in Eritrea will need more than quarter of a million tons in food aid this year to supplement the inadequate harvest they have produced, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said today.

A host of specialized United Nations agencies today rallied behind a new strategy report for reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of slashing the world’s ills by 2015, pledging their specific expertise in sectors ranging from feeding the hungry to treating the sick to empowering the rural poor.

Promising “results not rhetoric, benefits not banalities” in the search for solutions to the enormous plight of children around the world, the incoming head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) vowed today to tap a “a vast reservoir” of international goodwill in the war against hunger, illiteracy and disease.

Calling on the European Union to harmonize the asylum policies of its members, the United Nations refugee agency today criticized Malta’s policies, the strictest in the EU, and condemned what it said were deliberate attacks by Maltese soldiers on asylum-seekers demonstrating peacefully in a detention centre.