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A strong partnership between the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the world’s largest humanitarian agency and China, and the world’s most populous country, could have enormous bearing on the fight against global hunger, the agency’s chief said today.

With the Côte d’Ivoire still split in half between the Government and rebel forces, the United Nations Security Council today renewed for another year the arms embargo and the travel and financial restrictions applied to those deemed to threaten peace there, while also deciding to ban imports of rough diamonds from the country.

The United Nations General Assembly today set up an emergency fund, expected to total $500 million, to bring immediate relief in natural and man-made disasters and save thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost to delay.

Critizing the emphasis on commerce and politics at the November world summit on information technology in Tunis, a United Nations expert on freedom of expression said today that human rights should take priority in any future discussions of information technology and development.

As 290 of the remaining peacekeepers of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) departed today, two weeks short of the end of their mandate to cement the peace after a brutal civil war, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he viewed mission’s accomplishments “with a deep sense of satisfaction.”

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today appointed former United States President George Herbert Walker Bush as his Special Envoy for the South Asian Earthquake Disaster, representing the UN system in the national and international response to the destruction of 8 October.

Major upgrading projects and funding needs were identified today for the United Nations-backed 140,000-kilometre Asian Highway Network that will link the vast region from St. Petersburg to Singapore and Seoul to Istanbul, facilitating trade and tourism and opening up landlocked countries.

The January peace agreement in Southern Sudan has opened up the region to humanitarian aid after 21 years of war, but with an almost total lack of infrastructure, little Government ability to deliver services and other problems, it was critical for the international community to maintain assistance to avert a humanitarian crisis, a United Nations Relief Official said today.

Voicing “extreme concern” that Syria has not yet provided full and unconditional cooperation to the United Nations inquiry into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the Security Council today unanimously demanded that the Syrian Government respond “unambiguously and immediately” in all necessary areas of the probe.

The apparent momentum earlier this year to bring two of the most notorious fugitives from the Balkan wars of the 1990s before the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has ebbed, and there is no serious attempt now to seize them, the court’s Chief Prosecutor told the Security Council today.