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With peace talks between the Sudanese Government and rebel factions based in the western Darfur region set to reopen on 15 September in Abuja, Nigeria, the United Nations Security Council today strongly urged the parties to quickly reach agreement to end the two-year civil war that has killed nearly 180,000 people and driven more than 2 million from their homes.

Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), after talks in Kabul, will seek official agreement on giving 3 million Afghan refugees nine more months in Pakistan before the agency’s voluntary repatriation programme closes down.

The United Nations Deputy Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery Eric Schwartz will travel to Sri Lanka and Indonesia tomorrow on a 10-day fact-finding mission to see the impact of last December’s tsunami on people’s lives and to gauge the progress of the recovery.

The devastation being wrought in the south-eastern United States by Hurricane Katrina and the recent deadly floods in Central Europe and Switzerland prove that “anyone can be affected, any day, anywhere” by natural disaster, said the head of the United Nations disaster-reduction body, calling for more systematic prevention and mitigation measures.

Ten years after the United Nations conference on women’s rights in Beijing and just weeks before a summit of world leaders at UN Headquarters in New York, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today called on the international community to turn their commitments into action to achieve full gender equality.

Reaching all those in need of assistance must remain the basic aim of the Ethiopian Government and its partners as it grapples with the problems posed by transition following a year of erratic rain and the lingering economic effects of a two-year war with Eritrea, a United Nations senior envoy said.

With Indonesia's largest recorded polio epidemic now threatening a broad swath of countries across Asia, more than 750,000 vaccinators will fan out across the vast archipelago tomorrow on a two-day campaign to immunize more than 24 million children under the age of five, the United Nations health agency reported today.

The United Nations human rights office in Colombia has condemned the massacre of 14 farm workers in the north-west of the country and warned leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Popular Army (FARC-EP) that they were incurring war and could be subject to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Government success at persuading farmers to voluntarily refrain from poppy cultivation, farmers’ apprehension that the official ban on opium cultivation could be enforced by eradication, and relatively low farm-gate prices have led to a 21 per cent decline in Afghan opium cultivation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said today.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he would begin sending Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) resources right away to help meet deadlines in the biggest and most expensive electoral process the world body has ever helped organize, even before the Security Council formally approves his recommendations.