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Changes in weather patterns and extreme weather events due to climate change will have the greatest impact on the world's poorest people, the head of the leading scientific panel on the issue told the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in New York today.

Affirming that the United Nations and the Jewish community have moved closer together in recent years, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today voiced hope for a deeper partnership in the struggle for human rights and peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, as he addressed a major American Jewish organization that he said had longstanding ties to the world body.

From the deadly front line of the war in Iraq to the subtler trenches of the battle against poverty, the United Nations marked World Press Freedom Day today with awards, exhibitions, and clarion calls for the protection of journalists after a year that saw a record number of media professionals killed or injured in the line of duty.

More than 3,300 years after Alexander the Great ate a banana in India, liked it and introduced it to the wider world, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) voiced concern today at the shrinking number of wild bananas in their original home, with the consequent loss of gene sources needed to combat pests and disease in the fruit.

Facing an employment deficit of 126 million jobs in the coming decade, Latin America must not only increase its business competitiveness, but also move towards more “employment-rich” growth of the economy, the head of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) said today.

Arab media professionals, human rights organizations, academia and United Nations agencies have begun meeting in Dubai to hammer out ways to improve girls’ access to quality education, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said today, highlighting that while there have been advances in the Arab world, out of 70 million illiterates an estimated two-thirds of these are women and girls.

With severe malnutrition threatening 1.5 million children under five in five sub-Saharan countries, where 300,000 children already die each year from the scourge, the United Nations is voicing deep concern at an 85 per cent shortfall in the emergency appeal launched five weeks ago to feed one of the world’s poorest regions.

Around 250 Somali Members of Parliament will start a six-day United Nations training seminar today to prepare the ground for a new federal constitution in the East African Country, which has lacked a working government ever since the collapse of President Muhammad Siad Barre’s regime 15 years ago.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour today raised her concerns with senior Sudanese Government officials over a new law restricting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as the effects of a pervasive presence of officials of the State’s security and intelligence services, especially in strife-torn Darfur.

A long-serving Lebanese official with the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) was today named as Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Deputy Special Representative for Iraq, focusing on humanitarian relief, reconstruction and development in the war-ravaged country.