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With women at least twice as likely to become infected with HIV as men when exposed to the virus that causes AIDS - and six times as vulnerable in parts of sub-Saharan Africa - HIV vaccine clinical trials must be geared towards meeting their needs, the United Nations health agency said today.

The head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today issued an urgent plea for the release of two French reporters held hostage in Iraq, vigourously condemning for the second time in a week the “shameful targeting” of journalists in the strife-torn country.

Morocco’s double Olympic gold medallist Hicham El Guerrouj will be using his popularity and fame on the track later this year to promote a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) early childhood development campaign targeting children in the critical toddler phase.

With landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO) continuing indiscriminately to maim and kill children across Southeast Asia, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is calling on regional governments to redouble their efforts to clean up the devastating waste from decades of war.

Reinforcing its commitment to a 2003 peace pact that ended Côte d'Ivoire's fierce civil war, the Government has followed through on pledges made last month at a summit co-hosted by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan by transferring sweeping powers from the President to the Prime Minister, a group set up to monitor progress says in a report released today.

Voicing his condemnation of the gruesome murder of a dozen Nepalese civilian hostages in Iraq, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today he was especially concerned by the cruel use of the killings as a public spectacle.

A Costa Rican professor and adviser with a long record of advocating for the protection of human rights has been selected by the United Nations to serve as the world body's Special Rapporteur on the right to education.

Expressing his dismay at "yet another terrorist attack in the Russian Federation," Secretary-General Kofi Annan denounced today's deadly bombing outside an underground railway station in Moscow.

Developing countries have made tremendous strides in improving reproductive health and tackling women's rights issues, but rich nations have provided only $3.1 billion of the $6.1 billion they pledged for these goals a decade ago at a watershed United Nations population conference, a senior United Nations official said today.

Some 10,000 people who fled the fighting in the northwest Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and sought refuge in the Central African Republic (CAR) up to two years ago could return home by the end of December under a new agreement between the two governments and the United Nations refugee agency.