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The United Nations Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa has questioned the results of the recent G8 Summit when it came to addressing the AIDS pandemic and he has called for the creation of an international women’s agency.

Persistent customs and traditions have kept women in inferior positions in the countries which recently submitted national reports, the United Nations committee reviewing progress on complying with the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women says.

The hunger crisis currently devastating Niger has also had an impact throughout the Sahel region, affecting at least some 2.5 million more people in neighbouring Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that in a discussion with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe he stressed that the southern African country's housing and market evictions must be stopped and those made homeless, estimated in a UN report at 700,000, must be adequately housed.

With elections in Côte d'Ivoire barely three months away, the United Nations 6,500-strong force has been put on alert and is sending military units to help restore calm after an attack by unidentified assailants on a Gendarme brigade and police station in Anyama, north of Abidjan, the strife-torn West African country's major city.

Libya has discounted jet fuel for the United Nations World Food Programme's (WFP) airlifting of food for more than 3 million people in western Sudan's Darfur region, making it possible for the programme to be continued.

After a powerful earthquake shook India's Andaman and Nicobar islands yesterday, former United States President Bill Clinton, the United Nations Special Envoy overseeing recovery efforts from last December's devastating tsunami in the region, renewed his call on governments in and around the Indian Ocean to step up their efforts to create an effective early warning system.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has formally kicked off its new partnership with the regional soccer federation for the Americas, with youngsters escorting players onto the field for the finals of a three-week long 10-country tournament highlighting education, fighting HIV/AIDS, child protection and conflict resolution.

Reacting with “sorrow and anger” to the news of the multiple car bombings in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today restated his condemnation of all terror attacks in a month marred by repeated use of the tactic.

Facing a dramatic increase in the number of Congolese returning on their own from camps in Tanzania to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the United Nations refugee agency said today it was considering facilitating such returns by providing transportation although it still did not consider conditions suitable.