Latest News

The United Nations Security Council committee monitoring sanctions imposed against Usama bin Laden and his associates has added 17 individuals to the Al-Qaida section of its consolidated list of persons and entities subject to the measures, including the former President of Chechnya, Selimkhan Ahmedovic Yandarbiev.

Declaring that “the sad truth is that we have a long way to go in stamping out torture,” United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today called on all states to ratify the international agreements against the evil, to devise new strategies to combat it and to contribute generously to the UN fund to aid victims.

Talking openly about drugs and thus breaching the wall of “silence, stigma and exclusion” is crucial if the international community is to fight the problem seriously, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today.

A Bosnian Serb prison guard accused of torturing and killing detainees at the Keraterm camp has agreed to plead guilty to one count of crimes against humanity in exchange for having other charges against him dropped, the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said today.

The United Nations Security Council today extended through December the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force known as UNDOF, which was established in 1974 to monitor the disengagement of Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights.

The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency today warned that the number of cancer patients in the developing world will double to 10 million new cases annually by 2015, most of whom will have no access to the radiation therapy that could save or prolong their lives, and decrease their pain and suffering.

A new probable case of SARS has been reported in China’s Guangdong Province, which was removed from the list of areas with recent local transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome on 13 June, but the United Nations health agency said it was a reclassification of a suspect case and did not indicate a new transmission.

Deeply concerned over the continuation of hostilities in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in particular in the province of North Kivu, the Security Council today extended the United Nations mission in that country for another month.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan left London today for Geneva, where he will meet with senior UN officials as well as address the high-level segment of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) next week.

The top United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process, Terje Roed-Larsen, is set to leave tomorrow on a nine-day regional tour of Arab capitals to follow up on the latest meeting of the diplomatic Quartet.