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Despite calls from the sides in Cyprus for a renewal of his diplomacy, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in a new report that there has been no evolution in their positions and recommends a six-month extension in the mandate of the United Nations mission (UNFICYP) which has been deployed on the island for over four decades.

The head of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) will embark on a four-day visit to China by the end of this month to discuss the country’s initiatives on strengthening rural women’s role in fighting environmental degradation, the Rome-based agency said today.

United Nations agencies moved on two fronts today to combat the threat of a bird flu pandemic, bringing forward the introduction of new public health provisions and providing wide-ranging guidelines for preventing the spread of the virus by people working closely with poultry such as farmers, sellers and even sporting bird owners.

Foreign Ministers from West and Central Africa meeting in Madrid today agreed on a political declaration and a plan of action to improve terrorism prevention, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which helped to organize the gathering, said.

In the run-up to the elections scheduled for 30 July in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), United Nations peacekeepers have been backing the national armed forces as they have fought to expel irregular armed groups from Ituri district and the two Kivu provinces over the past week, the UN mission there said.

As the world reaches a fork in the road over nuclear weapons, it is up to the new generation to develop an alternative system of collective security based not on the build-up of armaments but on addressing root causes of insecurity ranging from poverty and repression to unresolved conflicts, according to the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Côte d’Ivoire’s rival armed factions have taken an encouraging first step towards disarmament by starting to assemble their fighters, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Representative to the divided West African country has said in Abidjan.

At the end of a major United Nations meeting held in New York, indigenous leaders today urged the world’s developed countries to take into account the concerns of indigenous communities living within their borders while implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Reacting to reported plans by the Government of Pakistan to demolish thousands of dwellings and evict their inhabitants as part of a massive construction project, a United Nations human rights expert today called for a halt to operations as well as stepped-up efforts to avert homelessness as a result of the initiative.

A senior United Nations official in Kosovo today strongly condemned an attack on two Serbian members of a defence team accredited to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY).