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West Africa is facing a worsening locust crisis as more swarms of the crop-devouring insects arrive in Mauritania, Mali and Niger, with the threat of serious damage hanging over several other countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today.

The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) has brought its efforts to restore peace to the very region where the country’s prolonged civil war first began 15 years ago, launching its latest disarmament and demobilization programme in the strife-torn and remote Nimba county.

In the ongoing battle against the threat of terrorism on the high seas and in the world's ports, a new and more rigorous biometric identity verification system which could potentially be used by 1.2 million global maritime workers has received the necessary ratifications to go into force by February, the United Nations labour agency has announced.

Condemning continuing violations of the 12-year-old arms embargo against Somalia, the Security Council today called for a six-month extension of the latest mandate of an expert group monitoring the sanctions.

With nearly 11 million children dying before the age of five every year, most from preventable causes, the world's paediatricians must champion action that reaches beyond traditional health initiatives to underlying factors such as poverty, discrimination, and minority marginalization, according to the United Nations' top children's advocate.

The United Nations refugee agency has temporarily suspended its convoys for Iraqis wishing to return from neighbouring Iran because of the fighting raging in the south of the country and a housing shortage in the north.

United Nations agencies today stepped up operations in Burundi after last week's apparently ethnic massacre of more than 150 Congolese, reinforcing helicopter patrols along the border, increasing security in refugee camps and accelerating the transfer of survivors to safer sites far from the frontier area.

Extremist violence, factionalism and the illicit drug industry are on the rise in Afghanistan, threatening lasting peace as the country prepares for elections, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in a report on the country released today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan today welcomed the peaceful conduct of Venezuela's recent recall referendum on President Hugo Chávez's mandate and called for the country's people to move forward in a constructive spirit of dialogue.

As civilians flee fighting between government troops and separatist forces in the South Ossetia region of Georgia, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is helping to provide rapid emergency assistance to those in need.