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Many of the quarter of a million deaths a year from cervical cancer worldwide could be avoided if women got affordable early screening and treatment of pre-cancerous lesions, according to a new manual endorsed by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).

Without a partnership between the industrialized and developing countries, otherwise known as the North and the South, the United Nations goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 will not be reached, “but deeper South-South cooperation is also vital,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on the first Day for South-South Cooperation today.

Fighting between armed groups and attacks against civilians have caused tens of thousands of civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to flee their homes in parts North-Kivu along the Rwandan border, where instability is preventing relief supplies from reaching those in need.

The tenth-anniversary United Nations Conference on Climate Change concluded today in Argentina after adopting a package of measures aimed at helping countries to prepare for climate change.

Noting that only 27 governments have acceded to or ratified the convention on migrant rights, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called on the other 164 United Nations Member States to ratify the international pact and to work with the committee recently established to monitor adherence.

A sophisticated bugging device has been found in a room used for high-level meetings at the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), the world body’s largest duty station outside its New York Headquarters, but it is not known who was responsible for this latest reported tapping of UN premises, a UN spokesperson said today.

Warning that hundreds of thousands of mainly Sudanese and Somali refugees in Kenya will go hungry without immediate donations of cash or food commodities, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today issued an urgent appeal for $9 million to tide them over for the next six months.

In a move that could curb the massive growth in opium production in Afghanistan, origin of much of the world’s heroin, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today announced plans to help the war-torn country to resume sugar production.

Thousands of people in an area of northwestern Colombia that was the site of a church massacre two years ago are living in fear and are at risk of displacement because of the growing number of irregular armed groups in the region, the United Nations refugee agency reported today in its latest update on the situation.

In the first sea movement of the United Nations refugee agency’s Liberian repatriation programme, nearly 400 people are on their way home from Ghana as part of an operation that is expected to see the eventual return of 340,000 exiles from all over West Africa now that peace is taking hold in their war-shattered country.