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Continuing his regional consultations ahead of United Nations-facilitated talks on resolving the crisis in Syria, UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura had a useful meeting today in Damascus with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates of the Syrian Arab Republic, Walid Mouallem.

Expressing deep concern about current developments adversely affecting Nepal's humanitarian situation, economic performance and reconstruction efforts, the top United Nations political official today encouraged the country's leaders to overcome their differences on constitutional arrangements through inclusive dialogue and parliamentary process.

Strongly condemning yesterday’s terrorist attack on a security training centre in Zliten, Libya, and in the wake of that deadly incident and the recent attacks on the country’s oil infrastructure, the United Nations Security Council has urged all Libyan parties to joint together to combat terrorist threats by implementing the recent agreement on a unity government.

With nearly 200,000 people in Chad in need of urgent aid – 50,000 of them uprooted by Boko Haram terrorists from Nigeria – the United Nations emergency fund today announced a $7 million grant, the second in five months, and called on international donors to provide much more.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today said he is “deeply concerned” about the intensification of Saudi-led coalition airstrikes and ground fighting and shelling in Yemen, despite repeated calls for a renewed cessation of hostilities.

Following his appointment by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Robert Glasser, an experienced leader and thinker on development issues, took up his new role this week as head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).

As the United Nations and its partners struggled today to gain humanitarian access to the Government-beseiged Syrian city of Madaya, amid reports of people starving to death or being killed while trying to leave, UN officials called the situation “horrendous…ghastly,” and a potential war crime.

Faced with a global shortage of oral cholera vaccines (OCV), the United Nations health agency announced today that supply should double this year to six million doses, with further increases later, after it approved a third producer to fight a disease that kills up to 142,000 people annually.

Fighting between armed groups and Government soldiers and an apparent breakdown in law and order in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, with hundreds of houses burned down or looted, has uprooted 15,000 people over the past five weeks, and 500 a day are now pouring into Uganda, the United Nations refugee agency reported today.

The United Nations human rights chief today urged the Government of Yemen to reverse its decision to declare his Representative in the strife-torn country persona non grata [unwelcomed person], saying that it was “unwarranted, counter-productive and damaging to the reputation of the Government and its coalition partners.”