Latest News

The United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has opened a new regional office in Qalat, Zabul, in the south of the country, where a growing insurgency threatens stability, as part of its efforts to work with Afghans to boost development and monitor human rights.

The top United Nations envoy in Afghanistan today condemned the death penalty as reports emerged that Iranian authorities recently executed an Afghan national living in Iran.

United Nations agencies backed a wide-ranging multimillion dollar action plan today to tackle up to 15,000 tonnes of fuel oil that spewed into the Mediterranean Sea, killing marine life and affecting around 150 kilometres of Lebanese and Syrian coastline, after a power utility was damaged last month during the fighting between Israel and Hizbollah.

As a first step toward helping Timor-Leste hold free and fair elections next year, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative in that country today convened a meeting of the major political parties to negotiate a new law that would govern those elections.

Continuing his campaign to draw the world’s attention to threats against freedom of the press, the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today condemned the killing of the editor of a Mexican magazine.

Laboratory results show that a recent wave of bird flu in poultry in Thailand and Laos was the result of both old and new strains of the H5N1 virus, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today, calling for vigorous implementation of control measures to prevent further spread of the disease.

A United Nations human rights expert joined her voice today to the growing alarm about the Sudanese authorities’ demolition yesterday – without warning – of the homes of 12,000 long-term internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in a camp south of the capital Khartoum.

The tens of thousands of people returning to the war-ravaged southern suburbs of Beirut desperately need clean drinking water, medicine and other essentials, the United Nations said today, as it dispatched more aid convoys to others in need in the devastated towns and cities in the south of the country.

As part of an effort to highlight some of the most outstanding and least recognized participants in the frontline response to HIV and AIDS, the first-ever Red Ribbon Awards were handed out to five local community groups at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto last night.

The Sudanese Government seems to be determined to pursue a major military offensive in strife-torn Darfur, building up its armed forces in the region as the situation there deteriorates, the Security Council heard today.