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With outbreaks of poliovirus threatening the goal of eliminating the paralyzing and sometimes fatal disease by the end of this year, African countries are launching a massive synchronized immunization campaign aimed at vaccinating 63 million children over the next few days, the United Nations announced today.

With an average of two indigenous languages dying out every month, the United Nations cultural agency has called for national education systems to teach children in mother tongues from the earliest age as a means both of stimulating learning ability and preserving the world’s rich heritage of linguistic diversity.

The United Nations refugee agency today voiced concern about displaced Chechens in neighbouring Ingushetia following week-old cuts in heating gas to 10 temporary settlements with over 2,000 people who also face the threatened suspension of water and electricity supplies.

Western Saharan families divided for nearly three decades since the outbreak of war on Spain’s withdrawal from the area will be able to embrace and talk to each other again under a United Nations-sponsored family visit air shuttle programme scheduled to start in the coming weeks.

Efforts to relocate thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan are set to move into higher gear tomorrow with the opening of a third transfer route away from the volatile border area to safer camps further inside Chad, the United Nations announced today.

Louise Arbour, a Canadian Supreme Court Justice and ex-prosecutor of United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, will be named the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights - succeeding Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in a terrorist attack in Baghdad last August.

Talks continued in Cyprus today on a plan by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to reunify the island nation before its entry into the European Union on 1 May.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan intends to name a Special Adviser for Haiti to establish high-level contacts with the mediating regional organizations during the Caribbean country’s political crisis and to advise him on possible future United Nations work there, a senior UN official said today.

With just 4 per cent of humanitarian funds needed to help the Central African Republic (CAR) collected, a United Nations humanitarian coordinator will visit the country next week to raise awareness of the complex conditions there, a UN spokesman said today.

While Timor-Leste has progressed impressively since gaining independence, the fragility of its national security means that the United Nations should maintain a presence there for a year beyond the end of its mission’s mandate in May, a senior UN peacekeeping official said today.