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As rain and snow pelted the areas of Pakistan devastated by last October’s massive earthquake, aid workers are working to help survivors cope with dipping temperatures, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today condemned the suicide bombing that took place in Iraq during a funeral service in Miqdadiya, where over 30 people were killed and many others wounded.

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations-managed Convention on Biological Diversity has called for all people to unite in preserving the planet’s many species and ecosystems.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights today expressed “deep regret” over the Cambodian Government’s arrest of two more human rights activists and warned this trend threatens to undo efforts to build a just society in the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today mourned the death and paid tribute to the legacy of Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai, one of the seven sheikdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates for which Sheikh Maktoum also served as Prime Minister and Vice-President.

A United Nations-backed treaty meant to conserve a vast area of forests, streams and mountains in the heart of Europe sprang to life today as Hungary became the fourth nation – along with the Slovak Republic, Ukraine and the Czech Republic – to ratify it.

While keeping a close watch on the Haitian elections, the crisis in the Horn of Africa and other hotspots around the world, the United Nations Security Council plans to hold a ministerial-level meeting on Africa’s Great Lakes region as a high point of its January agenda, the body’s President for the month said today.

Laws aimed at protecting Afghanistan’s wildlife, waterways and forests, believed to be the first legal conservation tools in the country, have been developed by the Government with assistance from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the agency announced today.

The United Nations-backed body that oversees a global treaty governing trade in endangered species announced today that it will not approve the 2006 export quotas for caviar and other sturgeon products until the exporting countries provide more data on the long-term survival of their sturgeon catch.

The situation between Ethiopia and Eritrea has reached a dangerous stalemate, warns Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a new report to the Security Council, holding out the possibility of withdrawing the United Nations mission (UNMEE) deployed to keep a five-year truce between the two countries.