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With Burundi's just-completed round of elections marking another positive step along its road to stability after decades of ethnic strife, the five-year-old United Nations-backed panel set up to oversee the peace process has wrapped up its work and pledged to support the nascent Government through the end of the electoral process next September.

The United Nations will act vigorously to ensure there are no more “bad apples” in its procurement department, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today, pledging that the corruption outlined yesterday in the latest report from the investigative panel probing the Iraq Oil-for-Food-programme “will not happen again.”

With heavy rains worsening already critical flooding in Bulgaria and prompting the evacuation of 12,000 more people, United Nations agencies are mobilizing help for the second time in three weeks, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

With another harvest in Ethiopia affected by poor rains and half a million children dying in the country every year from malnutrition and disease, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) appealed today for an additional $35.93 million for its water, sanitation and child-survival outreach assistance.

While the Caribbean region's transportation and infrastructure have improved, it must strengthen public health delivery services by upgrading the information and needs-identification systems which have depreciated over the past four decades, the director of the United Nations regional public health agency said today.

The global community must move from words to action to protect the rights of its indigenous peoples, from their lives to their livelihoods and their lands to their languages, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today in a message marking the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

Warning that its emergency operation feeding 6.5 million particularly vulnerable people in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is severely under-funded, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today appealed urgently for new donations to carry it through until the end of the year.

With funding finally coming in for Niger’s hungry millions after initial appeals fell on deaf ears, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) today reported the start of large-scale distribution that will feed 2.5 million people in the next two months.

Despite positive government programmes and continuing improvements in water, electricity, sanitation and roads, good housing in Iran is often not affordable, with ethnic minorities, women and the rural poor often lacking most services, according to a United Nations human rights report released today.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, conducting a security search in the Caribbean country’s capital, has released a kidnap victim, bringing the total freed to six persons in about seven weeks.