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The top United Nations refugee official is in Pakistan today where he is to meet with high-level officials and tour areas hosting refugees from neighbouring Afghanistan in a bid to improve the relief effort in the region.

A massive evacuation of Sierra Leonean refugees from an isolated and troubled area of Guinea is gaining momentum, according to a spokesman for the United Nations agency carrying out the task.

The Japanese Government has pledged $400,000 to extend a United Nations-implemented initiative to build confidence among ethnically divided young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite two previous United Nations conferences to tackle the problems facing the world's poorest States, the "least developed countries" continue to be marginalized with regard to development, the coordinator of the group of least developed countries (LDCs) at the UN told reporters in New York yesterday.

Tobacco poses a major obstacle to children's rights, infringing upon their basic health and welfare, and exposing them to child labour in many parts of the world, the lead United Nations health agency said today.

With the removal of the dues question as a "needless irritant," the United States and the United Nations can move forward on a new path of greater cooperation, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a group of former US Ambassadors in New York today.

Although the warring parties in Sierra Leone have virtually stopped fighting in recent months, both sides have been slow to implement elements of their ceasefire agreement, according to a review of the country's peace process.

The United Nations top refugee official continued today his mission in Afghanistan, pressing for a temporary ceasefire so that relief workers could reach civilians currently inaccessible in the war-ravaged country.

The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) today elected 14 new members to the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights, the major UN body working to promote and protect human rights.

A United Nations envoy in Lebanon today held "cordial and friendly" discussions with Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud, who received from the UN official a copy of the Secretary-General Kofi Annan's latest report on the UN mission in the country (UNIFIL).