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Health workers fanned out across Liberia today to vaccinate children against polio as the third round of a synchronized regional immunization campaign aimed at eradication the paralyzing disease in West Africa began, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported.

Amelia Shaw lost colleagues and friends in an instant on 12 January when an earthquake toppled the headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti. Now she and other UN staffers are completing an ambitious project that they hope will go some way to memorializing the event – both the calamity itself, and the heroic efforts in the days and nights that followed.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has voiced its concern about the prosecution of Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr – who was arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 for crimes he is alleged to have committed at the age of 15 – saying it sets a dangerous precedent for child victims of recruitment in armed conflicts.

Ahead of the kick-off of next month’s soccer World Cup in South Africa, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is hoping to empower millions of young people to protect themselves from exploitation.

Colombia, long buffeted by armed conflict and serious human rights violations, has made efforts to reduce extrajudicial killings, but the country’s security forces have continued to be been implicated in many murders, a United Nations independent human rights expert said today.

The Security Council today voted to extend for one month the United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI), and the French forces supporting it, while the 15-member body continues to consider possible revisions to the mission’s mandate.

With the recent wave of natural hazards – from the devastating January earthquake in Haiti to volcanic eruptions in Iceland wreaking havoc with air travel in Europe – exposing the need for cities to implement disaster reduction plans, the United Nations is launching a campaign to boost the resiliency of urban areas.

United Nations humanitarian agencies and their partners are striving to continue providing assistance to more than 320,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in conflict-affected areas of Yemen despite limited funding and access difficulties due to insecurity, a UN office reported today.

The top United Nations humanitarian official arrived today in southern Sudan and expressed alarm at the threats to vulnerable people in the area posed by food insecurity, displacements and inter-tribal violence, which he called a “recipe for disaster.”

The United Nations food relief agency and the Italian capital, Rome, today signed a partnership agreement under which the city – where the agency’s headquarters are located – will co-sponsor global efforts to combat hunger and malnutrition, scourges that afflict more than a billion people across the world every day.