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With dozens of boats reaching Yemen this week, some of them bearing corpses and evidence of horrific struggles, the United Nations refugee agency today renewed its appeal for action to stem the flow of people who fall prey to smugglers in their flight from Somalia and Ethiopia.

The United Nations Refugee agency (UNHCR) said today that its staff in Sri Lanka reports a “trickle” of refugees fleeing to India in fishing boats, raising concerns about the deterioration of the security situation in Sri Lanka.

A UN poverty-fighting agency today in Rome signed off on a $19 million loan to the Ghanaian government that will strengthen the West African nation’s food security by helping its small farmers cultivate sweet potatoes, cassava and other roots and tubers.

Thousands of lives and billions of dollars lost in the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 could have been saved if disaster reduction strategies had been in place, United Nations tsunami envoy former United States President Bill Clinton said today, highlighting the urgent need to implement these measures.

Protesters left the streets outside United Nations and other international agency offices and calm was restored across Côte d’Ivoire after leaders inside and outside the West African country appealed for an end to four days of violence, which left western provincial UN offices looted and sometimes destroyed.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today welcomed the announcement by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) of the preliminary results of last month’s election.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan will travel to Europe this weekend to attend the World Economic Forum, and to deal with topics ranging from Afghanistan to sports, his spokesman announced today.

Recommending a six-month extension of the United Nations Force monitoring the line of withdrawal between Israel and Lebanon, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says that the political and security environment in the area continues to be fragile.

United Nations police officials said today that they hope a recent initiative in Georgia to set up the country’s first policewomen’s association will become a model for other post-conflict countries and allow policing to become more representative of wider society.

Despite hopes for peace following the successful elections in Central African Republic (CAR) last year, several thousand people have fled recent clashes between Government troops and local insurgents near the border with Chad, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.