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A high-level panel appointed last year by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is poised to officially release its report on threats to international peace and security in the twenty-first century and recommendations on how to deal with them, including two proposals for expanding the membership of the Security Council.

As preparations for Wednesday's observance of World AIDS Day gather steam, a United Nations official today stressed that HIV-prevention programmes targeting peacekeepers can help stop the epidemic's spread in areas where the UN is operating.

In a further effort to protect the world’s ozone layer, which filters out ultraviolet solar rays that cause skin cancer and other ills, parties to a United Nations-sponsored environmental treaty have agreed to carry out a survey on the use of a key ozone-damaging pesticide in food shipments.

Although security has improved significantly in Kosovo since March's deadly violence, the worst in the five years since the United Nations took over administering the ethnically-divided province, much work remains to be done to achieve the goals needed to settle its final status, the top UN envoy there said today.

Repeating his call for restraint, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged all parties in Ukraine to avoid worsening the tumult over the disputed presidential elections in that country.

The top United Nations envoy for Iraq is heading to Iran for a meeting of interior ministers from Iraq and its neighbours, a UN spokesman said today.

Thousands of soldiers from India and Pakistan are heading to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to bolster the United Nations peacekeeping operation there.

The United Nations agency entrusted with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons today welcomed Iran's decision to suspend all uranium enrichment activities and called on it to grant the access needed to provide "credible assurances" that is has not engaged in any undeclared nuclear activities.

The situation in Côte d’Ivoire was reported calm and small numbers of Ivorian refugees have been returning home from neighbouring Liberia as tensions eased in the West African country following an upsurge in fighting between the rebels and the Government earlier this month, the United Nations mission said today.

After a week of considerable insecurity, fighting has subsided in most locations in Sudan where 300,000 displaced people have been cut off from all aid by the latest violence, the United Nations mission in Africa’s largest country reported today.