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With three quarters of the world's 852 million men and women who suffer from hunger depending on farming for survival, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has invited Latin American leaders to a conference next week aimed at forging strategies to help lift millions out of their grinding poverty.

In the second military operation this week of its kind, some 300 United Nations peacekeepers, backed by helicopter gunships, are helping the army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) dislodge militia said to have been looting and enslaving locals in the eastern region of the vast country.

Although countries devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami have much to be proud of in their respect of the basic rights to shelter, health services and education of victims, the United Nations envoy to the region today urged more be done to protect such rights.

The United Nations Mission in Côte d’Ivoire today hailed the first meeting of the main political and military leaders on Ivorian soil since the 2002 civil war as “a significant step on the road to national reconciliation” in the divided country.

The senior United Nations legal official has held three days of talks at United Nations Headquarters in New York with a Lebanese Government delegation on the establishment of a tribunal of an international character to try those charged with the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and others.

United Nations human rights officials have accused the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Popular Army (FARC-EP) of committing new war crimes in the recent massacres of nine bus passengers and nine members of a local municipal council.

Environmental leaders from Northern Europe, Central America and South Asia are on short list of candidates to head the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as selected by Secretary-General Kofi Annan and announced today in advance of the 1 April 2006 end of the long-running tenure of Klaus Toepfer.

Calling on Member States to transcend their national positions and forge global solutions, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson said today that it was crucial to get speedy agreement on setting up a new United Nations Human Rights Council, the body put forward to replace the much-criticized Commission on Human Rights.