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Voicing concern over increased friction between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which have hit a stalemate in efforts to resolve their border dispute, the United Nations Security Council today called on both Horn of Africa countries to refrain from violence.

Some 200 media professionals from around the world have adopted a declaration laying the ground for a wide range of measures to improve the safety of journalists and punish crimes against them at a meeting convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Climate change is no longer a matter for scientific debate, but has become a question to be solved at the international political level, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s three new Special Envoys on the issue said today, pledging to use their experience from previous posts and their contacts with national leaders and other senior figures to galvanize more concerted environmental action.

The head of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has paid tribute to Judge Claude Jorda of France, whose permanent ill-health has forced him to resign from the body set up under an international treaty to hear trials of individuals charged with acts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed since 2002.

Amid growing global concern about climate change, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged experts meeting in Geneva to address the need for warning systems to mitigate the damage from extreme weather.

South Africa has made great efforts to redress housing inequality but desperate living conditions persist, according to a United Nations human rights expert who today called on the country’s Government to boost social services and take other measures to improve all settlements.

Staff members of the main United Nations agency caring for Palestinian refugees have raised $125,000 to aid anguished families in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, where a six-day Israeli siege in November 2006 took the lives of 82 Palestinians and injured 26 others.

Reporting that some 44,000 people have been returned to Afghanistan from Iran as illegal immigrants since 21 April, the United Nations Assistance Mission in the country (UNAMA) today called on the Governments of the two countries concerned to make sure that humanitarian considerations are taken into account.

A 17-truck convoy carrying over 600 refugees, including a newborn baby, completed a three-day journey to southern Sudan, marking the end of the United Nations refugee agency’s repatriation programme from Ethiopian camps before the rainy season begins.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today voiced deep concern over yesterday’s violent clash outside a school in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in which one person was killed and eight others – including two schoolchildren – were injured in an intra-Palestinian clash.