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The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) plans to add $3 million to its primary education efforts in Burundi with the goal of doubling the number of children attending school there by next March.

In the wake of devastating flooding and volcanic eruptions in Central America, the United Nations is rushing assistance to El Salvador and Costa Rica, while Secretary-General Kofi Annan today pledged to mobilize international support for relief efforts in the region.

United Nations experts just back from examining a natural dam in Cameroon’s Northwest province today warned that it could collapse within the next five years unless urgent preventive action is taken.

The United Nations and its peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have nine months to accomplish crucial objectives in the country’s political transition – organizing credible elections, maintaining peace and security and addressing the devastation wrought by war, senior UN envoy William Lacy Swing said today.

Warning that Eritrea’s restrictions on United Nations helicopter flights are hampering peace operations, a senior UN envoy in the Horn of Africa today called for an immediate end to the measures and a breakthrough in the political stalemate gripping that country and its neighbour, Ethiopia, as they seek to settle their differences.

With only 10 days to go before Iraqis go to the polls in a constitutional referendum, the United Nations is revving up its efforts to distribute copies of the document throughout the violence-wracked country.

Beyond specific commitments ranging from strengthening humanitarian mechanisms to reforming UN management, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today hailed a global mind-change at last month's United Nations World Summit that linked security, development and human rights.

Ten years after adopting the World Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and Beyond, the United Nations General Assembly gathered young representatives from across the world to evaluate how the plan has fared.

Among the hundreds of thousands who were exposed to radiation during the Chernobyl disaster 20 years ago, only about 4,000 people will die from acute radiation and cancer, but many more suffer from the lingering effects of poverty, and lack of information on how to live in the contaminated areas and on how to regain their livelihoods, according to a new United Nations report.

With a global epidemic of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes killing some 17 million people prematurely each year, the United Nations health agency today called for global action that could save the lives of 36 million people who would otherwise be dead by 2015.