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A group in Sudan that helps thousands of war-displaced illiterate women improve family welfare, a Spanish movement tending the educational needs of immigrants from Africa and eastern Europe, particularly women, and a Mozambican literacy programme aimed at empowering communities have won United Nations literacy prizes for 2005.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is calling for a major boost in improving the lives of the scores of millions of slum dwellers around the world, calling it an important step on the road to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of slashing extreme poverty and hunger in half by 2015.

After many years of hard work and compromise, the world is now on the threshold of a breakthrough in the pursuit of development and human dignity, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today, calling on rich nations to provide the funding and poor nations to affect the necessary reforms to clinch the global deal to "make poverty history."

As United Nations human rights experts expressed concern about human rights violations resulting from the Zimbabwean Government's eviction of dwellers, the chief of the UN programme on sustainable housing arrived in the southern African country to review the humanitarian aspects of the removals.

Freshly returned from his first mission as the head of the United Nations refugee organization, António Guterres appealed to the developed world not to confuse refugees with economic migrants or terrorists.

There is no military solution to the crisis in Iraq and everybody must be brought into a political settlement that could include talks between United States forces and insurgents, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today.

Amid mounting international concern over the forced deportation of Uzbek asylum-seekers who fled the recent military crackdown in their country to find safety in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, the assistant United Nations refugee chief today pledged to help the Kyrgyz Government protect the displaced during the search for durable solutions.

The United Nations refugee agency has been invited to return to Indonesia's Aceh province to assist in providing shelter as part of the longer-term effort to recover from the severe damage caused to settlements there by December's Indian Ocean tsunami, the Government of that country announced.

Wrapping up a five-day fact-finding visit to Haiti, United Nations peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guéhenno said the mandate the Security Council approved for the UN mission last week provided for tighter security in the Caribbean country in which several peacekeeping troops have recently been killed or wounded.

The United Nations' first meeting at a converted warehouse in Flushing, New York and Franklin D. Roosevelt meeting Winston Churchill aboard a British battleship are among the images at a 60th anniversary exhibit of rarely-seen photos of the UN's early years opening at the Organization's New York Headquarters today.