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Reacting to a humanitarian crisis which has driven hundreds of thousands of Congolese from their homes in the volatile North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the United Nations refugee agency today announced a new drive to transfer the displaced to safer shelter.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has entered a protocol agreement with the Central African Republic (CAR) setting out the cooperation and protection that the Government will provide to court officials investigating whether war crimes have taken place in the impoverished country since 2002.

The new United Nations envoy for Iraq will travel to the country in two weeks for talks on a broader role for the world body there, a senior UN official told the Security Council today.

Ahead of their first operational deployment to Chad, the inaugural class of the United Nations’ Standing Police Capacity (SPC) has completed two weeks of intensive training in policies, doctrine, project management, team-building, transitional justice and other aspects of modern peacekeeping at the United Kingdom’s top police leadership centre.

Citing the need to make up for lost time and move ahead with renovating the United Nations Headquarters complex in New York, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has proposed a revised strategy that is “less risky, less expensive and faster” in the long run than the current seven-year, $1.9 billion plan.

About 600 students will benefit from technical and vocational skills training at a new resource centre equipped with computers, sewing machines and a library, courtesy of Pakistani peacekeepers serving with the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL).

Drug trafficking and organized crime are threatening to undermine the efforts of Guinea-Bissau to develop the rule of law, democracy and transparent governance and they are also destabilizing the wider West African region, the Security Council said today.

Humanitarian workers in Somalia – where the local head of the United Nations food agency was abducted earlier this week by Government forces – are impeded in their efforts to deliver aid and operate in a climate of “suspicion,” a world body official said today.

More than 1,500 children in one of the most troubled neighbourhoods of Haiti’s capital are attending classes again after soldiers serving with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) helped to renovate a school building that had been left unusable by the violent activities of armed gangs.

The concerns of the world’s most vulnerable countries, including climate change and the need to reach global anti-poverty targets, top the agenda of the current session of the General Assembly, its president said today.