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Recalling the unimaginable horror unleashed with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged a gathering of mayors in Japan to use their unique community-level perspectives to turn back new threats and help revitalize the United Nations’ long-term vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

From education programmes on the importance of breastfeeding to cereal banks, the United Nations is looking to longer-term solutions on the front line of the war against hunger in Niger as it grapples with both the immediate food crisis and the groundwork for preventing a recurrence.

With Niger's hunger crisis worsening due to poor initial donor response, the United Nations today raised its emergency flash appeal to almost $81 million to feed 2.7 million of the most vulnerable people affected by drought and the worst invasion of crop-devouring locusts in 15 years in the world's second poorest country.

A humanitarian appeal to provide shelter for the 300,000 people worst affected by Government evictions in Zimbabwe will be launched next week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) today reported calm in the capital, Khartoum, and in the south following three days of unrest sparked by the death in helicopter crash last Saturday of first Vice-President and former southern rebel leader John Garang.

United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti freed a kidnap victim this week, bringing the total to five persons whose release they have forced in six weeks, the mission said.

The top rights official in the United Nations mission in Burundi today painted a gloomy picture of the human rights situation in the tiny central African country that is just now beginning to take tentative steps towards stability after decades of ethnic strife.

Even though individual countries including Syria and Egypt have achieved over 50 per cent breastfeeding rates for infants, the lack of continued support for exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life has led to a recent decline in the practice in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

A 32-year veteran of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), E.J.R. "Dick" Heyward, has died in Long Island, New York, after a long illness, the agency said today. He was 90.

United Nations agencies today more than doubled their emergency appeals for Niger’s escalating food crisis to nearly $75 million, warning the international community that more aid would be needed to save 3.5 million people from extreme hunger and malnutrition.