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The United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator is meeting with Sudanese officials today to seek his support for a visit by an assessment team to pave the way for a UN force to help stem the suffering in Darfur, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said this afternoon.

Internationally renown oscar-winning actor and screenwriter Matt Damon has just returned from Zambia, where he visited United Nations anti-poverty project as part of a “listening and learning” trip sponsored by the advocacy group founded by U2 front-man and actvist Bono, the UN Volunteers Programme (UNV) said today.

With children under 15 accounting for one in every six global AIDS-related death and an estimated 15 million children worldwide made orphans by HIV/AIDS, parliamentarians should unite to protect children from the global scourge and ensure legislation guaranteeing their healthcare, protection and support are in place, the United Nations and the Interparliamentary Union (IPU) said today.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today expressed hope that intensified Security Council attention to Iran’s nuclear programme will lead to a diplomatic resolution of the matter, and advised Tehran to pursue dialogue on the issue.

With donors still balking at funding a Hamas-led Palestinian Government that has yet to renounce violence, and with conditions in the West Bank and Gaza deteriorating, key international partners in the Middle East peace process meeting at the United Nations today endorsed a temporary mechanism to funnel assistance directly to the Palestinian people.

In yet another grim episode of asylum-seekers and migrants dying while trying to cross the Gulf of Aden from Somalia to Yemen, people-smugglers forced some 140 Ethiopians and Somalis at gunpoint to jump overboard, drowning at least 39 of them, the United Nations refugee agency has reported.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is scheduled to begin repatriating around 850 Congolese from South Sudan today to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), from where they fled more than 40 years ago, despite poor conditions and insufficient funds for reintegration assistance because the elderly group wants to return home.

Twelve months after its launch, the world’s first humanitarian video game – a United Nations-produced virtual world of planes launching food airdrops over crisis zones and emergency trucks struggling up treacherous roads under rebel threat with emergency supplies to combat hunger – was celebrated today as an unprecedented success story.

Marginalized fishing communities need better educational programmes to build on their existing literacy skills and give them the means to navigate by satellite, understand microfinance, use digital technologies, diversify their businesses and cope with official documents, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says in a new report.

Although United Nations-sponsored airdrops into the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) violence-wracked Katanga province have provided enough food for some 34,700 displaced people, a severe lack of funds is preventing a quarter of a million others from being reached, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) reported today.