Latest News

Unless this year's Consolidated Appeal for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) receives new pledges by May, countrywide cereal shortages will affect 3.8 million people, especially the 70,000 children who are already at risk of dying from severe malnutrition, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

The sixth annual summit on United Nations staff security will take place in New York on Thursday, working from a theme based on the devastating terrorist attack against UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August, which killed 22 people, including the top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The humanitarian and security conditions affecting a million people in the strife-torn Darfur area of Sudan have significantly worsened since September, the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Humanitarian Needs in Sudan said.

More than 30 donor countries today confirmed record pledges of $358 million for the United Nations refugee agency programmes in 2004, more than a third of the total target, but a senior official warned that the agency was still far from "out of the woods."

The United Nations Security Council today deplored the recent wave of terrorist attacks in Iraq against Iraqi and foreign nationals, and international and Coalition Provisional Authority personnel, which have left many people dead or injured.

Local authorities have a crucial role to play in bridging the digital divide between North and South and ensuring that the South fully participates in the information society, the United Nations-organized World Summit of Cities and Local Authorities has been told.

The United Nations General Assembly, at the resumption of its long-running tenth emergency special session on Palestine, adopted a resolution today asking the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel's construction of a separation barrier between itself and the West Bank.

Despite a serious incident at a high security prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an expert of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights will continue her visit to the country, the UN rights body said today.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan was "profoundly saddened" by reports that nine children were killed in Ghazni, Afghanistan, apparently as a result of an air strike carried out by coalition forces targeting a Taliban leader.

Hundreds of Liberian combatants turned out today to hand in their arms to United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) peacekeepers as the world body started its disarmament, demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration programme in the country.