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An estimated 250,000 Pakistanis still face a critical humanitarian situation, more than two months after a cyclone and torrential rains brought floods to the South Asian country, United Nations aid agencies warned today as they urged donors to contribute more to their emergency appeal.

A United Nations climate change conference, preparing the way for a major December summit in Bali, wrapped up in Vienna today, with countries reaching agreement that a global approach is crucial in tackling the issue.

Almost 40 per cent of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure, which limits Palestinians’ ability to move freely and fragments their communities from each other, according to a new report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.

United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) experts have arrived in the centre of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where there has been an outbreak of an unknown but highly deadly illness that is proving to be particularly harmful for young children.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has sent in reinforcement troops and stepped up the diplomatic pressure on both sides of the opposing factions of the armed forces in the volatile far east of the country in a bid to stop the fighting there that has forced thousands of Congolese to flee their homes.

A United Nations official today warned that the humanitarian situation is worsening in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region, with more people being displaced, increased security risks to aid workers and potentially rising malnutrition rates.

Peacekeepers serving with the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) have rebuilt a key bridge linking the capital, Monrovia, with the western part of the country and neighbouring Sierra Leone that collapsed just days ago, leaving thousands of commuters stranded.

The United Nations is using text messaging on mobile phones to alert more than 33,000 vulnerable Iraqi refugees in the Syrian capital, Damascus, of the launch of the first food distribution programme for them tomorrow.

While welcoming last night’s final release of South Korean hostages in Afghanistan, the top United Nations envoy in the country said the Taliban rebels who took them captive and killed two of them should be ashamed of themselves for attacking civilians.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has launched an immediate internal investigation backed by outside expertise to determine how potentially hazardous material removed by United Nations arms inspectors from Iraq in 1996 ended up in a UN office instead of a properly equipped laboratory and remained there undetected for the past 11 years.