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A team from the United Nations mission in East Timor has held "very successful" meetings with thousands of refugees in camps in West Timor, Indonesia, to inform the East Timorese of the situation in their home territory and encourage their repatriation, the UN peacekeeping operation said today in Dili.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, has set up a centre in Benin to assist the children who are aboard an alleged slave ship that has not been seen in four days since it was turned away by authorities in Gabon and Cameroon, a UN spokesman said today in New York.

Poverty, urbanization, AIDS and other threats to human security will feature high on the agenda as representatives from throughout the Asia-Pacific region gather at the United Nations centre in Bangkok this week, the UN announced today.

The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has become mainly about access by foreign armies to the country's rich mineral resources, according to a United Nations report released today in New York.

A United Nations committee which aims to foster security and development in Central Africa opened a week-long session in Bujumbura, Burundi, today.

Ways to meet the world's increasing energy needs while protecting the global environment will be among the issues topping the agenda of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, which opened today its two-week session in New York.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) today welcomed the recent detention of an alleged leader of the 1995 massacre against Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica.

Recent improvements in the political climate of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea have not yet had a significant impact on the country's humanitarian situation, which is still critical following a prolonged period of economic decline and a series of natural disasters, the United Nations said today.

A United Nations expert on internally displaced persons said today that country visits were "critical" to his work, and urged the Organization to find a way of engaging those governmental authorities who refuse visits by UN investigators to change their minds.

On the day marking two landmarks in the history of space exploration -- the fortieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight and the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the first space shuttle -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan said space exploration should advance the "twin objectives" of maintaining international peace and security and promoting international cooperation.