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With 115,000 refugees in Chad and 50,700 in the Central African Republic (CAR), a senior United Nations refugee agency official begins a six-day tour of refugee camps tomorrow to try to remove impediments to repatriation.

As government ministers warned that climate change remains the most important global challenge to humanity, a United Nations climate convention ended its annual meeting today with expressions of support for the Kyoto protocol, renewed pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars to developing countries, and adoption of a host of legal decisions.

The first phase of a United Nations-backed global summit on information and communications technologies (ICT) ended today with the unanimous adoption of a declaration on the values of an "information society," one that protects the freedom of the press, strives for universal access to technological progress and respects multilingual and diverse content, as well as a plan of action emphasizing cooperation and partnerships between governments, the private business sector and civil society.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Serbian politician Vojislav Seselj, standing trial before the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, can no longer use telephones or personal visits to contact the media because they are candidates in Serbia's parliamentary elections this month.

Stability, good governance and development remain out of reach for four West African countries because of inadequate United Nations peacekeeping troop strength, the possible repatriation of ex-combatants, the cross-border movements of foreign fighters and a lack of urgent financial assistance.

The universal values enshrined in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than half a century ago - such as peace, freedom, social progress, equal rights and human dignity - are more important now than ever as they come under attack in a backlash against globalization, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today.

Actor Sean Connery, probably best known for his roles as James Bond "licensed to kill," hopes to save lives in the Christmas season with an appeal for support for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and its goal of feeding 800 million chronically hungry people.

A young woman who endures prolonged, obstructed labour can develop a hole, or fistula, that allows constant leakage of urine or excrement, a condition that plagues hundreds of thousands of girls and women in South Asia, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said this week.

The Security Council today issued its support for a set of written standards launched this week to prepare United Nations-administered Kosovo for final status, including free, fair and regular elections, free media and a sound and impartial legal system.

Warning that lack of funding threatened millions of hungry people, many of them children, in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), United Nations agencies today appealed to the international community for nearly $175 million to feed 6.5 million of those most at risk in the chronically food-short country.