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The United Nations refugee agency has helped more than 300,000 Afghans return home from Pakistan and Iran so far this year, but the rate is far below last year’s unprecedented flow, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said today.

Surrounded by aspiring young soccer stars, players from football powerhouse Manchester United led a clinic today at United Nations Headquarters in New York to celebrate its partnership with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to end child exploitation.

The first convoy of refugees returning to Iraq since the fall of the previous government left Saudi Arabia's Rafha camp today with more than 240 people in five buses, ending more than 12 years in exile, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported.

Media leaders and policy makers from around the globe will convene in a landmark meeting to be broadcast worldwide from Geneva this December to discuss the role of the media in the information society as well as in issues ranging from violence to development.

The challenge of respecting the rule of law while fighting terrorism, the urgency of combating poverty in order to promote basic human rights and the need to eliminate injustices against women are high on the agenda of a United Nations rights panel that opened its annual three-week meeting in Geneva today.

Twenty organizations from around the globe – including the African Union, Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), European Commission and League of Arab States – are expected to attend a meeting convened by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to examine the links between the United Nations and regional groups in confronting new challenges to international peace and security.

The United Nations Security Council today extended the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for another year, increased its military strength to 10,800 from 8,700, and instituted an arms embargo against all foreign and Congolese armed groups in the east of the country.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today demanded that a ceasefire be respected in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, which has come under lethal fire from rebels over the past week, and said one of the main insurgent groups was disqualifying itself from any leadership role in the future of the country.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan met today with the prosecutor for the United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda amid renewed discussions in the Security Council that the post would be more effective if there was one for each court.

Forty years after a massive earthquake struck Skopje and left 1,000 dead and three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants homeless, Secretary-General Kofi Annan recalled the resiliency of its people and the outpouring of international support that helped in the reconstruction of the capital of The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.