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A United Nations-led campaign against the tsetse fly, which transmits a disease that devastates livestock, in the Niayes area near Senegal’s capital, Dakar, has made giant strides towards eradicating the pest’s population.

With the Security Council renewing its call on all parties in strife-torn South Sudan to end the violence, protect civilians and ease access for relief workers, the wider United Nations organization today continued its efforts help alleviate the “extremely volatile” situation by moving to reinforce peacekeepers and scale up its humanitarian response.

With the humanitarian situation in war-torn Syria “getting more difficult every day”, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is urging the international community to continue supporting the wide-scale relief effort underway, and calling for increased access so aid workers can deliver basic supplies to families trapped in areas of heavy fighting.

Timor-Leste, Asia-Pacific’s youngest country, today became the region’s first to launch a national campaign under the United Nations Zero Hunger Challenge, which seeks to ensure universal access to food in the face of looming threats such as climate change.

For the second consecutive month, the cost of food worldwide remained nearly unchanged in December, with overall global food prices for 2013 among the highest on record, the United Nations food agency today reported.

While the United Nations has released $15 million from its rapid response fund for immediate humanitarian operations in war-torn South Sudan, even amid “very substantial progress”, it could take up to eight weeks before the full 5,500-strong surge in UN peacekeepers and equipment is deployed on the ground.

There is a real danger of further upheaval along religious lines in the Central African Republic (CAR), Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today warned a regional gathering in Chad, stressing that the past year’s events have profoundly damaged the relationship between Muslim and Christian communities and pose a long-term danger to the country.

The top United Nations official in Somalia today hailed the election of a new president of the semi-autonomous region of Puntland as the harbinger of a peaceful, federal solution for the entire Horn of Africa country, which has been wracked by civil war, factional fighting and Islamist extremism for over two decades.

A United Nations human rights expert today called for urgent protection and increased assistance to the growing number of persons displaced by violence in the Central African Republic.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the General Assembly President John Ashe, today urged the bloc of developing countries known as the “Group of 77 and China” to work collectively towards reaching the anti-poverty targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the 2015 deadline.