Latest News

A United Nations-sponsored international meeting aimed at advancing Middle East peace wrapped up its sessions last night with a call to Israel to halt its invasion of Gaza, withdraw from the Strip and stop escalating the current crisis. It also called on the Palestinians to end their rocket attacks on Israel.

A United Nations commission that is the highest international body on food standards is set next week to adopt a number of important proposals to improve protection of consumers from disease-causing organisms and substances, such as lead and cancer-causing toxins, by reducing their contamination of foods.

As the United Nations prepares for next month’s elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest and most challenging it has ever helped organize, the UN mission there is training thousands of police to provide security for a vote that is meant to cement the vast country’s transition from a disastrous civil war.

With thousands of demonstrators milling around in the Timor-Leste capital of Dili, United Nations envoys today stepped up their efforts to calm tensions and plan for a possible expanded UN police force in the small South-East Asian nation that the world body shepherded to independence from Indonesia just four years ago.

With tens of thousands of illiterate and unskilled former child soldiers in Afghanistan providing a tempting target for recruitment by one of the war-torn country’s numerous armed groups, United Nations agencies need additional funds to continue training projects to reintegrate them as members of a peaceful society.

Avowing that no cause can justify acts of terror, the United Nations Security Council today condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the killing of four Russian envoys in Iraq following their abduction earlier this month.

Developing countries of Asia and the Pacific need bold new domestic policies in order to benefit from free trade, and industrialized economies should back fairer trade rules giving poorer nations the chance to compete in the global marketplace, according to a new United Nations report that lays out an eight-point strategy for development.

The first meeting on the details of transferring authority in West Africa’s Bakassi Peninsula from Nigeria to Cameroon, as agreed in a recent pact signed under United Nations auspices in New York, will take place in Geneva during the first week of July, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has told the Security Council.

Voicing deep concern over developments in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today called on both sides to take measures to defuse the tension.

One of ten detained Eritrean staff members of the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) has been released by the Eritrean Government, mission officials said today.