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From raging wildfires, devastating floods and towering tsunamis to roaring hurricanes and cataclysmic earthquakes, children can now learn how to respond to and mitigate disasters through a new internet video game launched today by the United Nations, the latest in a series of such UN web tools.

The United Nations refugee agency is seeking to solve a number of thorny issues in Europe, ranging from thousands of people who suddenly found themselves declared illegal in Slovenia to racial stereotyping by the Italian media.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called on the world’s younger generation to take better care of Planet Earth in the face of global warming than his own.

Pushing ahead with efforts to prevent countries that the United Nations has helped emerge from war from slipping back into conflict, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today made $35 million available for Sierra Leone from the world body’s new Peacebuilding Fund.

United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti have launched a new anti-gang operation, arresting seven more suspected criminals in their month-long crack-down on armed gangs in one of the violence-ridden country’s most dangerous areas, the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, the capital, bringing the total so far detained to nearly 70.

The main United Nations agency caring for Palestinian refugees and the European Union have signed a joint declaration on European Community (EC) support, with the EU pledging to contribute some €264 million (euros) over the next four years to the agency’s general fund, a 7 per cent increase over the previous period.

Mounting a hopefully final assault on polio, the United Nations health agency and its partners have pledged to raise within 12 months, and then sustain for as long as needed, vaccination levels in the last four endemic countries to those that stopped the sometimes paralysing and fatal disease altogether elsewhere in the world.

Encouraging Liberians to forever give up the battlefields of war for the playing fields of sport, a senior United Nations envoy arrived in the formerly strife-torn West African country today to launch an innovative Sports for Peace programme aimed at promoting reconciliation and development.

A United Nations-backed initiative to curb illegal trade in chemicals that damage the ozone layer, the naturally occurring gas that filters out cancer- and cataract-causing ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun, has reported it first promising results ahead of today’s start of its second phase.

More than 5,000 additional Timorese have fled to internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps over the past month or so because of the recent violence in the capital Dili, although this is now under control as more United Nations police are patrolling the streets, top UN officials said today.