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Marking the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) presence in Viet Nam, a senior agency official today praised the country for reducing poverty by 40 per cent and transforming itself “from a food-hungry nation to the second largest rice exporter in the world.”

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has launched an emergency vaccination campaign against hepatitis B for two ethnic groups in a remote region of the Peruvian Amazon, whose existence could be threatened by a prolonged outbreak of the disease.

The main United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees today protested to Israel over its raid on a UN-run hospital in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, calling it a “serious breach” of international law and charging that Israeli troops made medical staff leave their patients and lie on the hospital floor.

A new set of European Union (EU) rules on family reunification may discriminate against certain categories of refugees and could keep families unnecessarily apart, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

The Security Council today appealed to all 191 United Nations Member States for input into further enhancing the world body’s efforts to establish justice and the rule of law as essential elements of its peacekeeping operations in countries recovering from the crimes and brutalities of civil war and violence.

In an effort to put the Middle East peace process back on track after weeks of attack and counter-attack by the Israeli and Palestinian sides, the so-called diplomatic Quartet of the United Nations, United States, Russia and European Union (EU) will meet on Friday at the principals level, a UN spokesman said today.

The primacy of the United Nations, Security Council reform, terrorism, poverty and development continued to dominate the General Assembly on the second day of its annual high-level meeting as Heads of State and Government mounted the rostrum to address the 191-member body's general debate.

Capitalizing on recent "positive developments" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for tomorrow a high-level meeting on the war-torn country.

The Acting United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Bertrand Ramcharan, today called on Eastern and Central European countries to combat extreme nationalism, intolerance and hate speech that he said contributed to bloody conflicts in the Balkans and elsewhere.

A top United Nations official today called for more investment in Africa's agricultural sector in order to boost food production and alleviate the chronic hunger that bedevils one in every three sub-Saharan Africans.