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With recycled Australian pineapple cans containing an environmentally friendly pesticide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is helping the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu (nine coral islands, population 9,000) to fight an infestation of rats that threaten the country’s chief export crop - coconuts.

With world cereal production forecast to decrease slightly in 2006, 39 countries are in need of external food aid, the majority of them in drought-stricken affected and chronically food-short southern and eastern Africa, according to the latest United Nations update of the situation.

With cancer rates anticipated to increase in the Eastern Mediterranean by as much as 180 per cent in the next 15 years, the United Nations atomic watchdog agency - better known for its efforts to combat the spread of nuclear weapons - is teaming up with the UN World Health Organization (WHO) to fight the scourge on several fronts.

Pursuing the United Nations policy of zero tolerance of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by its staff, the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) has reported eight cases for investigation since the beginning of the year, one of which has been substantiated with the person involved immediately suspended. The other investigations are continuing.

More than 2 million Afghan children are currently being immunized in a United Nations-backed three-day polio eradication drive following a sixth reported case of the crippling and sometimes fatal disease in the south of the country this year.

Recruiting midwives, especially in developing countries, would save the lives of 5 million women and prevent 80 million illnesses from pregnancy or childbirth by 2015, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is advocating closer cooperation between the United Nations and national parliaments in ensuring the rule of democracy and the consequent furtherance of world peace.

Afghanistan’s Pul-i-Charkhi prison, once described by a newspaper as a “kind of Buchenwald,” has become a model for prison reform in the war-torn country, said officials of the United Nations, which is taking a lead role in the difficult task of improving the detention and legal system countrywide.

A United Nations war crimes court today sentenced a former Bosnian Croat militia commander to 12 years in jail for an attack a dozen years ago on a village in which 31 Muslim civilians were killed, including two elderly women burned in their house and a family of seven who perished in the flames of their shelter.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today condemned “in the strongest terms” the killing of a staff member of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) in a refugee camp in strife-torn Darfur after the visit of the UN’s top humanitarian official, along with other recent attacks on humanitarian organizations working in Darfur and Chad.