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With the mandate of 11 permanent judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda set to expire next May, but with the trials expected to continue well beyond that time, the United Nations Security Council today extended these judges’ terms of office until the end of 2008, the deadline for the completion of all the Tribunal proceedings.

The special committee of the United Nations General Assembly that deals with decolonization issues today adopted a text calling for an expedited process in Puerto Rico to determine what kind of relationship the territory’s population would prefer to have with the United States.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has been chosen as the 2008 World Book Capital, in the eighth annual literary-geographical competition sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) along with the three main international organizations representing the book industry.

A visiting United Nations Security Council delegation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has expressed satisfaction at the country’s preparations for landmark elections in July, but has called on all candidates and their supporters to refrain from xenophobic rhetoric, a UN spokesman said today.

Children should be at the top of the development agenda and sound social policies should encourage investment in their education, health and provision of other services, officials from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) stressed today at the opening of a Central Asian education forum in Turkmenistan.

The top United Nations envoy in Kosovo, Søren Jessen-Petersen, today announced that he will be leaving his post at the end of this month, saying his time in the province had given him “a great deal of hope for the future of Kosovo.”

A Bosnian Serb military police sub-commander accused of a range of war crimes, including gang rape and torture of women, has been brought before the United Nations criminal tribunal on the Balkan violence of the early 1990’s after ten years on the run.

The United Nations today launched an appeal for some $18.9 million in humanitarian assistance to Timor-Leste, the tiny nation shepherded to independence by the world organization where an estimated 133,000 people have been displaced by recent violence centred in the capital, Dili.

As part of an effort to ensure the democratic character of the upcoming presidential and legislative elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a delegation from the United Nations Security Council is visiting the country’s capital, Kinshasa today, as part of a regional tour of peacekeeping operations.

The presidents of Nigeria and Cameroon today signed an agreement settling a decades-old, sometimes violent, border dispute over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula following intensive mediation over the weekend by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, seeking to avert a potential crisis flashpoint in already troubled West Africa.