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With two major multilateral African organizations having called for a summit to boost organic and inorganic fertilizer use on the continent, a five-day high-level meeting will start tomorrow in Nigeria, one of the co-sponsors, the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) said.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that European Union-led talks with Iran over its nuclear ambitions had got off to a “reasonably good start” and appeared to be moving forward.

With polio infecting 34 people in Namibia within a two-week period after a 10-year absence, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is seeking urgent funding for a mass vaccination campaign to immunize the entire population of some 1.8 million in the southern African country against the often paralyzing and sometimes fatal disease.

Some 1,300 refugees have so far returned home to southern Sudan from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya as the United Nations expands its efforts to voluntarily repatriate 350,000 Sudanese who fled two decades of civil war that formally ended in early 2005 with a peace agreement between the Government and rebels.

The Legal Counsel to the Royal Family of Bahrain, pioneering lawyer Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa, has been elected President of the 61st General Assembly session, becoming only the third woman who will hold that post and the first one elected since 1969.

Members of the United Nations Security Council met senior southern Sudan officials in their main town, Juba, today for talks on the peace agreement concluded last year to bring an end to over two decades of civil strife in that part of Africa’s largest country, a UN spokesman said.

Reacting to intensifying violence in Somalia, where Islamic forces were recently reported to have taken control of the capital, Mogadishu, after fierce battles with other groups, the United Nations Security Council today called on all concerned to comply with the arms embargo and avoid any further destabilization.

The Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Timor-Leste met the country’s President today for talks focusing on political and humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the country out of its current crisis, as United Nations agencies stepped up efforts to provide relief assistance to the more than 100,000 people internally displaced by the recent violence.

Senior United Nations officials today stressed the mutual benefits to countries of international migration, emphasized the importance of the high-level dialogue to take place in September examining the links between migration and development, and strongly backed the findings of the Secretary-General’s report issued earlier this week focusing on the global phenomenon.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has honoured Abdulaziz Arrukban, the first Saudi citizen to have volunteered to work with the agency to raise awareness about hunger issues and funds to help alleviate it.