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The United Nations refugee agency has called on Germany, which takes over the European Union (EU) presidency for six months beginning 1 January, to take early measures on key refugee protection issues.

After a more than six-month suspension due to the rainy season, the United Nations refugee agency has resumed the assisted repatriation of Sudanese from Ethiopia with a first group of 500 leaving for their homeland earlier this week, the vanguard of more than 11,000 expected to return by the end of May.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has joined some of the most influential artists, intellectuals and business people of the Spanish-speaking world at the launch of the Latin America Solidarity Action Foundation (ALAS), an initiative of Latin Grammy Award winner Shakira to fund the fight against hunger and poverty.

The Security Council must send a message to Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic, the most notorious fugitives remaining from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, that, regardless of when they are arrested, they will face trial at the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Tribunal’s Chief Prosecutor said today.

Although Mozambique has posted impressive economic gains since the end of a brutal civil war in the early 1990s, nearly half of its children still live in extreme poverty, deprived of basic nutrition, health care, education or shelter, according to a United Nations report launched today.

The United Nations development agency is working towards bringing more focus to its efforts to reach global development goals, respond better to emergencies – based partly on lessons learned from the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami – and raise its transparency level up to wider UN standards, a senior official said today.

The United Nations today appealed for $46 million to meet urgent relief and early recovery needs over the next 12 months for the most vulnerable people in the Philippines among the millions affected by the four deadly typhoons that have hit the country since September, causing massive destruction through landslides and widespread flooding.

Voicing grave concern at the increased military activities of armed groups in eastern Chad, the Security Council said today it was particularly alarmed at the threat this posed for both the civilian population and the humanitarian workers trying to alleviate the suffering in the strife-torn region.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), United Nations officials and aid agencies have renewed an appeal for the remaining $19 million needed to help fund next year’s effort to rid the country of deadly landmines left over from the bloody six-year civil war, which kill innocent people and prevent whole areas of land from being developed.

The world has a collective responsibility to alleviate the plight of the poorest people, and to promote economic development and break the cycle that traps so many people in poverty by devising more innovative solutions, United Nations officials said today as they observed the first International Human Solidarity Day.