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Thousands of rural households in northern Tunisia will be helped by a new $15.5 million loan from the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) that is part of a larger project aimed at improving the livelihoods of poor farmers and wage-workers.

Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, is urging tens of thousands of her compatriots who fled brutal civil war in their country to consider returning now to join in rebuilding it, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

The new United Nations Ethics Office, hotly debated in the final hours of December’s prolonged budget negotiations, is already supporting the Organization’s new whistleblower protection and financial disclosure policies by answering questions from staff members about their responsibilities to comply.

Leaders from more than 150 trade unions representing millions of workers around the globe agreed today to wrap environmental rights – such as access to water and energy – into their definition of traditional workers’ rights at a meeting hosted in Nairobi by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The results of last month’s elections in Iraq topped the agenda of talks today between senior United Nations envoy Ashraf Qazi and the country’s President and Prime Minister, a spokesman for the world body said.

Two Jordanian peacekeepers with the United Nations mission in Haiti were killed, and another wounded, in the dangerous Cité Soleil neighbourhood of the country’s capital Port-au-Prince this morning.

Welcoming a donation by pharmaceutical group Roche of an additional 2 million courses of antiviral bird flu treatment the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) today said the medicine would be used when needed in countries that are unable to afford it.

Breaking with a recent trend of arresting human rights activists, Cambodia has released four detainees, including the President of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights ? a move that was immediately hailed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

A United Nations police office was firebombed in a Côte d’Ivoire’s San Pedro town and protesters gathered for a second day outside UN premises in the economic capital, Abidjan, prompting Secretary-General Kofi Annan today to demand an immediate halt to anti-UN violence in the divided West African country.

After meeting with survivors of the Pakistan earthquake, the United Nations Special Envoy for the South Asian Earthquake Disaster, former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, said in Islamabad today that it was crucial to keep supply lines open to deliver relief goods during the harsh winter weather.