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The United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA), established in 2001 to promote peace, security and development and assist regional organizations, has been given a more detailed mandate over the next three years, according to an exchange of letters between Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Security Council.

Nearly three weeks after a massive tsunami devastated a dozen Indian Ocean countries, top United Nations officials today said relief operations were going reasonably well, called reports of child exploitation exaggerated, and hammered home the urgent need for an early warning system to save thousands of lives in the future.

The Indian Ocean tsunami disaster that came from the sea exacted an inordinate toll from those that live from the sea beyond its deadly haul of 160,000 lives, destroying tens of thousands of fishing boats and other equipment that were the only source of income for many, according to United Nations figures released today.

The United Nations plans to have an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system, which experts say could have saved tens of thousands of lives in the current disaster, up and running by June 2006, with a global system operational a year after that.

The head of the United Nations refugee agency is in Afghanistan holding talks with members of the new Government in the capital, Kabul, and visiting his agency’s operations in the provinces as part of an effort to solve the problem of an estimated 3 million Afghans still living in exile in Pakistan and Iran.

Having toured some of the countries hardest-hit by the powerful and fatal December tsunami, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called today for a worldwide warning system for several natural disasters, as well as for rising sea levels likely to be caused by global warming.

For the second straight month the head of the United Nations Political Affairs office today presented a modestly optimistic picture of the “enormous potential” for progress towards settling the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in contrast to the gloomy forebodings of much of the past year.

A United Nations police officer in Kosovo was killed today in a bomb explosion, leading the chief UN envoy for the ethnically-divided province to condemn the attack as a "despicable act that would certainly be repudiated by the people of Kosovo."

Secretary-General Kofi Annan today appointed his personal envoy focusing on containing tensions along the line marking the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon to be his Deputy Special Representative for Iraq.

A veteran of Britain's famed Scotland Yard police department who calls himself "a practical counter-terrorist" was today named United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security at a time when the world body has seen itself become a direct target of terrorism with the 2003 attack on its headquarters in Iraq.