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The United Nations refugee agency today launched a $60-million appeal to fund its work over the next year for hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) affected by the conflict in Iraq.

To learn first-hand of the obstacles to development facing Central America, the head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is on a ten-day tour of the region.

Security in the Central African Republic (CAR) has deteriorated over the past two months, especially in the north and along the borders with Chad and the Sudan, according to the latest United Nations report on the impoverished country where humanitarian agencies are struggling to reach up to 1 million people affected by violence.

Welcoming reports that Myanmar recently released dozens of political prisoners, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called for the freeing of all others, including democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 10 of the past 16 years.

The Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Darfur has embarked upon a mission to the war-torn Darfur region to push ahead with efforts to find a permanent solution to the conflict which has killed more than 200,000 people since 2003.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today told the Security Council that stepping up efforts to resolve the Darfur crisis is one of his top priorities, warning of an ever worsening humanitarian crisis in this strife-torn part of Sudan, as he also highlighted the Middle East and UN peacekeeping worldwide as other key challenges.

The United Nations envoy for Somalia today attended the Peace and Security Commission meeting in Addis Ababa of the African Union (AU), which is discussing responses to the situation in the troubled Horn of Africa country.

The United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) today condemned an attack on a checkpoint that left one policeman dead and another wounded, calling on the Government and Abkhaz separatists to prevent a further escalation of violence.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged the Government of Iraq to grant a stay of execution to those whose death sentences may be carried out in the near future.

United Nations agencies are helping to draw up an action plan to fight a new outbreak of Rift Valley Fever (RVF) in the Horn of Africa amid concerns that climate change with successive droughts and floods, some of it human-caused, could increase the 5-15 year cyclical frequency of the sometimes fatal viral haemorrhagic disease.