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Aiming to minimize risks associated with swimming pools, spas and other recreational bathing areas, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) today launched the world’s first-ever international guidelines on how to create safe places to swim and bathe.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Representative to Somalia today discussed the world body’s role in promoting peace and security in the country with the Chairman of the Union of Islamic Courts based in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that he is in contact with key leaders in the Middle East, urging restraint and pressing for the release of an Israeli soldier who was kidnapped earlier this week.

To seize the moment of opportunity that the Abuja peace deal offers for ending the suffering in Sudan’s Darfur region, African peacekeeping must immediately be bolstered in anticipation of a “substantial” United Nations force and dialogue must start quickly between the local parties, the world body’s top peacekeeping official said today.

Meeting at United Nations Headquarters with Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Motaki, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today reiterated his suggestion that the country speed up its response to recent international proposals on ending the impasse over its nuclear development programmes, while also discussing issues of regional importance.

The senior United Nations envoy in Iraq today pledged the world body’s support for Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s wide-ranging initiative to seek national reconciliation in the war-torn and faction-ridden country.

Cocaine consumption in Western Europe is reaching alarming levels while opium production in Afghanistan could rise again this year despite a welcome decline in 2005, but overall the world drug problem is being contained, according to a new United Nations report released today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy for Timor-Leste arrived on the ground today to assess the need for a possible increased United Nations presence after violence tore through the small South-East Asian nation that the UN shepherded to independence from Indonesia just four years ago.

While cruel and degrading treatment of fellow human beings has been unequivocally banned by international agreement, torture is now tolerated by governments around the globe and must end, United Nations officials asserted in statements marking an international day against the scourge today.

Describing the world as being “awash with small arms,” United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that every year an estimated $1 billion worth of these weapons are traded illicitly worldwide, exacerbating conflict, sparking refugee flows, undermining the rule of law and spawning a “culture of violence and impunity.”