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Openness and market access are sometimes not enough to allow developing countries to benefit from economic globalization because they lack the knowledge and infrastructure to produce goods and services and need increased foreign aid and investment, a top United Nations trade official said today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame today to learn how the small central African country is moving beyond the 1994 massacres that claimed of up 800,000 lives.

Criticizing violations of human rights and humanitarian law by both Israel and Hizbollah in the recent 34-day conflict in Lebanon, four independent United Nations rights experts today called for further investigations to determine whether war crimes were committed.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced today that he plans to appoint Nigeria’s Shola Omoregie as his new representative in Guinea-Bissau and as head of the United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office to the West African country (UNOGBIS).

The United Nations’ Department of Political Affairs (DPA) has created an innovative new website to give diplomats, politicians, mediators and other officials critical advice and background information to help them resolve violent conflicts around the world.

Half of the United Nations refugee agency’s 116 country offices said they had to confront attempts to forcibly return refugees or asylum-seekers to situations where they could face danger, challenging the international system’s “most fundamental protection,” the agency's top protection official said today.

United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon have the authority to use force against hostile activity of any kind, whether in self-defence, to ensure their area of operations is not used for hostile activities or to resist attempts by force to prevent them from discharging their duties, according to guidelines published today.

The United Nations refugee agency today voiced concern about the increasing number of people internally displaced in southern Afghanistan as a result of hostilities between government forces, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and insurgents, with 15,000 families uprooted since July.

This year’s hole in the Antarctic ozone layer is the worst on record, not only matching that of the year 2000 in surface area but registering the largest depletion ever measured of the naturally occurring gas that filters out cancer- and cataract-causing ultraviolet (UV) rays, the United Nations meteorological agency reported today.

Despite various setbacks this year in global security, including failures to comply with non-proliferation commitments, growing terrorist threats, and new dangers in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula, the United Nations top disarmament official has said the world must realize it is not powerless in the face of such challenges.