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With more than a million refugees worldwide threatened with hunger and malnutrition in the New Year due to food shortages, the United Nations today launched an urgent appeal for international aid, especially for Africa where some woman have resorted to prostitution to feed their children.

The number of countries where iodine deficiency, a significant cause of mental development problems in children, is prevalent has halved over the past decade due mainly to a strategy of universal salt iodization, but 54 nations are still deficient, according to a new United Nations health agency report released today.

Seeking to put behind a difficult 12 months of controversy surrounding the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today looked ahead towards 2005 as a year of opportunity to bring peace to several hotspots around the world.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, met today in Baghdad with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss the role of the United Nations in elections planned for 30 January 2005 in the turbulent country.

Having received an expert report citing failures in Liberia's management of its major natural resources and saying it still feared that proceeds from those resources might fuel conflicts, the United Nations Security Council today renewed sanctions against the West African country's diamond and timber industries and re-imposed bans on weapons importing and travel by certain former officials.

Facing a serious degradation in security and relief operations in Sudan's Darfur region which it has already called the world's worst humanitarian crisis, the United Nations today moved on both the political and aid fronts to halt the resurgence of violence and prepare for a possible new flood of refugees.

Indonesia and Timor-Leste today informed United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan that their Governments have reached agreement on a joint commission to look into the violence surrounding the 1999 popular consultation that set Timor-Leste on a path to independence from its neighbour.

Stressing the importance of demarcating a final acceptable border between two Horn of Africa countries, the United Nations Security Council today said it was encouraged by Ethiopia's announcement that it has a new peace plan and by Eritrea's continued acceptance of an independent Boundary Commission's decision on the frontier as binding.

In a bid to facilitate the delivery of relief aid, United Nations peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have set up a temporary buffer zone in the country's troubled east, where recent factional fighting threatened to exacerbate an already grim humanitarian situation.

Drought, invasions by crop-devouring locusts and civil conflicts have seriously affected food security in sub-Saharan Africa, with 23 countries facing emergencies, aid deliveries way below the previous period and needs increasing in the coming year, according to the latest United Nations report on the region released today.