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The United Nations refugee agency today announced the successful conclusion of its 18-year operations in the Kissidougou region of Guinea during which it sheltered tens of thousands of Liberians and Sierra Leoneans fleeing vicious civil wars before assisting their return to their recently pacified homelands.

The Central African Republic (CAR) has agreed to allow the United Nations to use an air charter company to resume the voluntary repatriation of thousands of refugees to South Sudan and the operation, which had been suspended for security reasons, will start again in a few weeks.

With Somalis fleeing the conflict between Islamists and warlords pouring into neighbouring Kenya at the rate of 200 to 300 a day, most of them women and children, the United Nations refugee agency today appealed for additional supplies to tend to the influx, now topping 25,000 since the beginning of the year.

In a region still reeling from the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane season, the most active and destructive in history, United Nations disaster experts and partners meeting in the Caribbean have issued a roadmap on how to use information and communication technologies to improve search-and-rescue missions, medical care and emergency relief.

With military action against insurgents in southern and eastern Afghanistan uprooting civilians and worsening conditions for people already in chronic need of food, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) reported today that the “alarming” security situation is impeding its operations.

A board of inquiry into an Israeli attack in Lebanon that killed four United Nations military observers in July had no access to the commanders involved and was therefore unable to determine why the attacks were not halted despite repeated appeals from UN personnel, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s spokesman said today.

Evidence suggests that a young, male suicide bomber, probably non-Lebanese, detonated up to 1,800 kilograms of explosives inside a van to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut last year, the head of the United Nations investigation into the killing told the Security Council today.

Over $170 million have been committed for more than 250 projects in 26 countries in the seven months since the United Nations launched a new landmark disaster fund to jump-start relief operations in humanitarian crises and save thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost to delay under the previous under-funded mechanism.

The new United Nations Human Rights Council should make it a primary duty to protect civilians during armed conflict, an independent UN rights expert urged today, highlighting in particular the suffering of children caught up in warfare across the globe.

The dumping of toxic chemical waste in Côte d’Ivoire that has already killed eight people and led nearly 78,000 others to seek medical care is clearly a crime although who was responsible and the actual nature of the crime has yet to be determined, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) said today.