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Hailing the “long and proud” history of United Nations peacekeeping – with over one million “blue helmets” having served in more than 70 operations on four continents since 1948 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon led the Organization today in honouring those men and women who lost their lives in the past year, while looking to the future, envisioning a modern, global force that can effectively tackle emerging peace and security challenges.

In the Security Council’s first meeting on Ukraine since the presidential election there, United Nations political chief Jeffrey Feltman said violence in the country’s east has dramatically increased and reiterated Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call on President-elect Petro Poroshenko to steer the country away from instability.

The Haitian Prime Minister, the UN Special Representative to Haiti and the UN Senior Coordinator for cholera response vowed to press on with intensified efforts to eliminate the disease from the island as reports from the first months of 2014 reflected the lowest number of cases and cholera-related deaths since the beginning of the epidemic.

In hopes of ebbing the ‘cultural haemorrhage’ in Syria, the United Nations cultural agency today announced that it will establish an observatory to monitor and access the state of Syria’s cultural heritage which is ‘reaching the point of no return.’

Even as the death toll from Syria’s three-year civil war continues to rise, the country’s human development has also suffered immense collateral damage – the economy has been gutted, the healthcare system is in ruins, and education facilities are “teetering” – according to a new joint United Nations report out today.

The head of the United Nations agency tasked with defending press freedom today voiced deep concern over the killing of newspaper editor Meftah Bouzid in Libya earlier this week.

It is time to talk about open defecation, the United Nations declared today, launching a new campaign to end the practice and improve access to toilets and latrines for the 2.5 billion people worldwide without basic sanitation.

The United Nations human rights chief today strongly condemned the killing of a 25-year-old pregnant woman, who was stoned to death by her family as she approached a Pakistani court on Tuesday, and urged the Government to do much more to prevent such killings.

A new series of guides released today by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will make it easier for fishers to identify deep-sea sharks, as well as improve reporting on catches and make deep-sea fisheries more sustainable.

Despite a slower pace recently on implanting the aims of the European Union-led political dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council today the two sides have “narrowed their remaining differences,” and that he hopes once elections are complete in Kosovo, the dialogue will resume without delay.