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Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today welcomed the agreement reached between the Government of Myanmar and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), calling it a first step towards reconciliation in the country.

The United Nations human rights office today said that Papua New Guinea had taken “a step backwards” with legislative action towards resuming the use of the death penalty.

The United Nations today urged Governments to ban all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship to help curb the global health threat which kills some 6 million people a year.

United Nations agencies and their partners are carrying out an intensive vaccination campaign to contain a polio outbreak in the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab complex in north-eastern Kenya.

One day after an independent United Nations human rights expert said he was extremely concerned for the protection of nine defectors from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the group has apparently been returned to the country.

Ahead of the oncoming rainy season in South Sudan, the United Nations refugee agency today said it nearly completed prepositioning aid supplies for more than 230,000 people in Unity and Upper Nile States in the north of the country.

Warning that conditions are deteriorating in areas of western Syria, the United Nations refugee agency today said it is assisting hundreds of families who have fled the fighting in the city of Al-Qusair.

An independent United Nations human rights expert today urged the Government of Myanmar to respond unequivocally to the revival of a local order limiting the number of children Rohingya Muslims can have to two, stressing that this is a clear violation of their human rights.

The global scourge of human trafficking is being fuelled by demand for sexual exploitation, cheap labour, human organs, illegal adoption and forced marriages, says a new report by an independent United Nations human rights expert.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has appointed career diplomat Sandra Honoré of Trinidad and Tobago as the new head of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, it was announced today.