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As the United Nations General Assembly held a plenary session in New York today on the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, teams in the field painted a "truly staggering" picture of "enormous devastation" and the "enormous extent of human suffering" in Sumatra, Indonesia, the area the most ravaged by last month's disaster.

Although 2.2 million children are living with AIDS, at least two-thirds of them in Africa, anti-retroviral formulations for children are not available and the youngsters are just being left to die, a United Nations special envoy battling HIV/AIDS on the continent said today.

Seeking to ensure that the United Nations International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) can complete trying all defendants before it by 2008, the Security Council today extended the mandates of several short-term judges whose tenure were to expire before the end of the trials they were conducting.

The United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) will hold a meeting of representatives from international and regional organizations in Kazakhstan later this month to strengthen the global anti-terrorism network and will make its first visit to a Member State during the quarter, the panel's chairman told the Security Council today.

Cholera has broken out in some of the most densely populated suburbs of Burundi's capital, Bujumbura, and more than 50 cases have been reported to public health facilities, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says.

The establishment of a tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean, which experts say could have saved scores of thousands of lives in the recent catastrophe, moves into sharper focus this week as United Nations agencies continue to grapple with relief efforts for the present and preventive measures for the future.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today appealed for immediate food aid for 400,000 people in Mauritania, where locusts and drought have obliterated agricultural production, the cornerstone of families’ survival.

Addressing a part of his mission that is perhaps as important as – even if less headline-grabbing – than the fight to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, the head of the United Nations atomic watchdog agency is visiting West Africa see to how nuclear science can help in battling cancer, increasing crop yields and treating malaria.

The United Nations agricultural agency will hold a special meeting later this year in Rome to address the priorities that the small island developing States (SIDS) will set to expand their agriculture, forestry and fisheries “in light of the importance of nutrition and food security needs.”

Hundreds of thousands of the estimated 3 million Afghans still living in exile in Pakistan and Iran will likely return home this year but the pace of repatriation to their war-ravaged country should not be speeded up, according to the head of the United Nations refugee agency.