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Banditry is hindering the delivery of vital food aid on the ground in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region, but limited funding could ground the air transport service run by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the agency warned today.

The head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has urged measures to address the “image problem” of global drug control efforts, which he says tend to focus more on the criminality of the problem and not enough on health-related issues.

The Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Myanmar has concluded his latest mission to spur democratic change in the South-East Asian nation, meeting today for the second time during his visit with detained pro-democracy leader and Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Iraqi parliamentarians have concluded a weeklong United Nations-backed tour to meet with their counterparts in Northern Ireland to discuss issues including conflict resolution and consensus building.

Ministers and educational experts from nine countries that contain half the world’s people and are plagued by illiteracy convened today to strategize on ways to more quickly achieve universal education, according to the United Nations cultural agency.

The political transition in strife-torn Afghanistan continues to face a number of serious challenges, including terrorism and a booming drug industry, according to a new United Nations report, which urges an integrated approach among all international partners to stabilize the fledgling democracy.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged scaled-up action – including raising agricultural productivity across Africa – so that the continent can meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the target date of 2015.

Major actors in the worldwide struggle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic will share experiences of how partnerships can expand the reach of their programmes at a meeting co-sponsored by the United Nations this June in Uganda, where the infection rate has been slowed and around half those infected reached by treatment.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called on the Israeli Government to halt the expansion of settlements after it approved the resumption of the construction of 750 housing units in Givat Zeev in the West Bank.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today applauded the outcome of this weekend’s Rio Group Summit, which ended with the further resolution of tensions between Colombia and Ecuador.