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United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia today and reiterated his commitment to assist the South American country in reaching a negotiated solution to the decades-old conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 2 million more.

Continuing the annual high-level debate of the United Nations General Assembly, world leaders today called for the strengthening of the fight against terrorism, but underscored the centrality of multilateralism and peaceful dialogue in such efforts.

The United Nations has resumed work on an international treaty that would ban the cloning of human beings, tackling work that last year divided delegates, a spokesperson for the President of the UN General Assembly said today.

The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, the first legally binding treaty to fight crime on a worldwide scale, entered into force today, requiring Member States to cooperate on issues ranging from money laundering to human trafficking.

With 1.6 billion people worldwide relying on forests for their livelihoods and 12.4 million hectares of tropical forest being destroyed annually, a United Nations-backed international congress has called for a worldwide political commitment to reducing deforestation significantly over the next decades.

The civil and military groups in Guinea-Bissau “seem to have pulled back from the brink” but the country will need international assistance to ensure a successful transition to civilian rule following a coup d’état in that country earlier this month, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council today.

If the ever-increasing emission of greenhouse remains unchecked, the planet as we know it today could look very different by the end of this century, with many small islands gone and ecological life-support systems under stress as never before, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned today.

The terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 have been used by many countries as an excuse for a crackdown on religion, especially in Central Asia, and the media have sometimes incited hatred of certain religious groups, including Muslims, according to a new United Nations report released today.

To mark the official end of the mourning period in the Muslim tradition, exactly 40 days after the 19 August terrorist bombing on the UN compound in Baghdad, a group of young Iraqi artists opened an art show at the capital's exhibition centre today.

There are signs of a possible rebound in donor assistance following the decline in the 1990s, but aid is often undercut by trade policies and other constraints, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a message to over 20 African Heads of State gathered in Tokyo for a vital summit on the continent's development.