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The United Nations global telecommunications agency, whose roots go back 80 years before the world body was founded, today joined the United States Constitution as one of the world's top 10 most enduring institutions selected by a panel of distinguished scholars from US universities.

A United Nations legal expert has welcomed Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi's veto of a judicial reform bill, seen as "a worrying limitation" of the independence of the judiciary.

With emergency United Nations funding for Guinea-Bissau running out by the end of this month and despite a military mutiny in October, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is appealing for continued political, financial and technical assistance to the West African country so that it can be stabilized and carry out sustainable development plans.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan today pledged anew full United Nations support for the Iraqi people in holding elections following yesterday's terror attacks that killed over 60 people, including three election workers, while in Baghdad his top envoy took the symbolic step of determining which parties would head the ballot list.

Global rice production this year almost hit the 1999 record, but was inadequate for projected consumption and left little available for trade, the United Nations agricultural agency says.

In a yet another effort to implement a ceasefire in Sudan's western Darfur region, the United Nations and its partners have called on both the Government and rebels to cease hostilities in the latest deterioration in a conflict that the UN has termed the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Following a two-day offensive by Israeli forces into the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, the main United Nations agency helping Palestinian refugees has opened one of its schools to provide temporary accommodation to 600 families displaced by the fighting.

Fighting last week that caused tens of thousands people in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to flee their homes appears to have stopped, the United Nations peacekeeping mission there said today.

Faced with a large-scale influx into Chad of refugees from the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region and the prospect of new waves fleeing across the border, the United Nations is calling for nearly $183 million to cater for a whole list of urgent needs in 2005, a 10 per cent increase over this year.

United Nations peacekeepers took less than an hour last Friday to move an armed group of demobilized soldiers who were squatting in the house of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a UN spokesman said today.