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Calling on donors “to open their hearts at this most critical time,” a top United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) official has warned that a vital window is closing fast for 12 million people in Southern Africa to receive urgent help, including 5 million in Malawi facing the toughest ‘hunger season’ in more than a decade.

A second boatload of United Nations food aid for 78,000 of the most vulnerable people in Somalia has been hijacked, less than two weeks after pirates released a ship with 850 tons of rice that they had seized three months earlier.

With 1.4 million people worldwide falling seriously ill at any time due to health care-associated infections, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it is launching a major campaign to reduce hand-spread infections, including major pandemic diseases such as the avian flu.

Despite claims that extensive deforestation was to blame for this month’s flooding in Central America by causing excessive runoffs from heavy rains, there is no scientific evidence of a link, and this holds true for recent floods in China, Thailand and Vietnam as well, according to a new United Nations report released today.

Tens of thousands of poor farmers and households headed by women living in the most isolated villages of the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan will benefit from a new $20-million agricultural development programme supported by the United Nations.

Just two days before Iraqis vote on referendum for a new constitution, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today called for peace and quiet on all sides in the strife-torn country so that the voice of the people can be heard.

With potentially poisonous arsenic in drinking water being both a natural phenomena and a toxic by-product of mining, mineral extraction and coal-burning electricity production, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today unveiled a low-cost filter, made from an industrial waste product that is designed to remove the harmful substance.

Middle-income countries like Russia, China, Egypt and Peru have seen a major increase in higher level educational enrolment in recent years, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan's new Personal Envoy for Western Sahara, Peter van Walsum, on his first visit trip to the region today met with King Mohammed VI of Morocco at the start of a visit seeking to overcome the impasse blocking a 2003 peace plan for a referendum on self-determination.

With a Government of National Unity in place in Sudan, many of the 4 million southern Sudanese displaced during the armed conflict hope to return to their homes soon but are hesitating in the face of the volatile security situation and the absence of solid state structures in the area, a senior United Nations official said today.