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Seeking to keep pace with the emerging challenges of today’s world, the United Nations General Assembly has updated its decade-old programme of action for youth by adding measures to address globalization, information technology, HIV/AIDS infections, armed conflict and pressing intergenerational issues in an increasingly aging society.

A helicopter flight ban imposed by Eritrea against the United Nations peacekeeping operation (UNMEE) has forced the world body to suspend its lifesaving mine clearance activities in the country.

United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei today said receiving the Nobel Peace Prize along with his agency "strengthens our resolve at a time when we have a hard road ahead of us" in leading the global struggle against nuclear proliferation.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today talks should now begin on the final status of ethnically-divided Kosovo, which the United Nations has run ever since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) drove out Yugoslav troops amid grave human rights abuses in fighting between the province’s Albanians and Serbs in 1999.

With more than 10 per cent of the elderly worldwide living on less that $1 per day, and 80 per cent with no regular income, United Nations officials have urged civil society representatives to press their respective governments to give priority attention to the needs of this growing population group.

Investing in justice for victims of the Balkans wars will bring dividends by discouraging revenge, obliging the region's countries to improve their governance and replacing myths with facts in the collective memory, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) says.

Reviewing the landmark Mexico Plan of Action to safeguard refugees in Latin America, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres said it is the world’s most sophisticated instrument to protect and help those fleeing their homes and their countries.

United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette heads today to Australia where she will speak about achieving global poverty and literacy goals at the opening session of a philanthropy conference.

Reporting a sharp rise in violations of the arms embargo against Somalia, a UN monitoring group is recommending that the Security Council tighten the noose to cut funding available to former warlords in the war-ravaged country.

Stressing that crime is both the cause and consequence of poverty, insecurity and underdevelopment, a senior United Nations official today called for stringent measures to counteract drug trafficking and violence.