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With help from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Nigeria has finished gathering data in its first census in 15 years following a two-day extension to ensure universal coverage of the head count in the total tally.

United Nations peacekeepers have been redeployed to a western town in Côte d’Ivoire two months after they were withdrawn following violent anti-UN demonstrations.

The senior United Nations envoy to Kosovo today voiced deep regret at the stabbing of a Kosovo Serb juvenile in the northern part of Mitrovica this evening and urged all concerned to exercise restraint while the police investigate.

Access to HIV treatment in low- and middle-income countries has more than tripled to 1.3 million people in the past two years with the greatest progress in those regions most heavily affected by the epidemic but this welcome progress still falls short of the ambitious United Nations target, the world body said today in a new report.

United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland will begin a nine-day mission to East Africa on Thursday, visiting four countries that are suffering humanitarian crises due to conflict or natural causes.

The top United Nations legal expert is leading a mission of high-level UN officials to Burundi aimed at helping to set up a truth and reconciliation commission and a special tribunal for human rights abuses committed during the country’s 12-year long civil war.

Thousands of fishing boats built to replace those destroyed by the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 must meet minimum safety standards, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today, as it again urged authorities to ensure such standards were adhered to and warned that inferior boatbuilding was undermining the tsunami recovery effort.

Echoing the Security Council’s concern over the reported disappearance from Nigeria of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was indicted by a United Nations-backed court in Sierra Leone for war crimes, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for all countries in the region to refuse him refuge.

Language has the power to connect people or divide them, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today introducing the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and the Irish poet Paul Muldoon to speak on “The Use of Language in War and Peace,” as part of Mr. Annan’s lecture series at United Nations Headquarters in New York.

An estimated 200 experts, representing 22 linguistic or geographical divisions around the world, opened a session today at the United Nations Office in Vienna on advancing the development of more consistency and greater accuracy in the use of place names, and standardizing written forms of geographical names.