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The Asia-Pacific region, by harnessing market forces and maintaining the world's highest savings rate, has become a global economic leader, but needs to tap the potential of its financial systems to benefit 800 million people struggling to survive on less than $1 a day, the head of the United Nations regional economic body said today.

With the Latin America and the Caribbean region overall showing significant progress in fighting hunger, officials from 33 countries are set to attend a United Nations conference in Guatemala beginning Monday in a bid to consolidate gains and remedy shortfalls as part of the global effort to halve hunger levels by 2015.

A United Nations human rights fact-finding mission has arrived in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, to look into allegations of ethnic cleansing of black Sudanese refugees who say Arab Sudanese militias committed atrocities and forced them to flee from their western Darfur homelands to neighbouring Chad.

The United Nations Security Council today welcomed Libya's decision to cooperate with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and abandon its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), along with the means to deliver them.

At a time when nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament face critical challenges, nearly 190 states will gather at United Nations Headquarters in New York next Monday for a two-week meeting to help prepare urgently needed measures to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The United Nations Security Council today condemned the recruitment of child soldiers and called on Secretary-General Kofi Annan to create a monitoring mechanism, preferably within three months, "to provide timely objective, accurate and reliable information on the recruitment and use of child soldiers in violation of applicable international law."

Congolese workers recently expelled from Angola, penniless and at minimum notice, have attacked Angolan refugees being sheltered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and cared for by United Nations agencies, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said today.

The head of the United Nations mission in Liberia, Jacques Paul Klein, and a UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassador, Liberian-born former international soccer star George Weah, today visited demobilized child soldiers at an interim care centre in the West African country and encouraged them to rejoin their families and go back to school.

The United Nations Security Council held an open debate today on the threat to international security posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), especially if they should pass through black markets and fall into private hands.

Addressing the people of Cyprus on the eve of Saturday's historic simultaneous referenda on his plan to establish a unified island, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today spelled out the benefits that would follow an affirmative vote.