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Timor-Leste faces a 14,000-ton food deficit – a result of dropping harvests and below normal rainfall – leaving some 150,000 people in possible need of aid, according to a joint report released today by two United Nations relief agencies.

A United Nations Security Council mission to Central Africa this week will seek to launch a “solid political process,” without which there can be no solution to the region’s conflicts no matter how many UN emergency forces are deployed there, the delegation’s leader said today.

The United Nations health agency today reported the first day with no new SARS deaths in nearly 10 weeks – since 28 March when the cumulative totals stood at 1,485 cases and 53 deaths from the newly emergent Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has decided to appoint a Brigadier-General from Bangladesh to lead the United Nations military observer contingent in the new UN Mission in Côte d'Ivoire (MINUCI).

Praising the relatively small and severely overmatched United Nations military force on the ground in war-torn Bunia, a senior UN official said today that the stand those troops had made against violent militia was a challenge to the international community to spare no effort to help end the atrocities being committed throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Regions with traditionally low numbers of cancer deaths could face alarming mortality rates by 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned today, and challenged all sectors to work together to prevent and treat the disease throughout the world.

The emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from Europe, Japan, the United States and other highly industrialized countries could grow by 17 per cent from 2000 to 2010, despite domestic measures currently in place to limit them, according to a new United Nations report released today.

Calling it “good news” and urging all countries to continue their checks, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a cow in Canada proved that active surveillance and diagnosis programmes are working.

Warning that lack of funding continues to stand in the way of a polio-free world, United Nations agencies today hailed Rotary International for raising nearly $90 million as part of the “front line” battle to immunize every child and urged the global community to follow the organization’s example.

The United Nations envoy for the world’s poorest countries told academics and aid workers at an international humanitarian training seminar that helping the most vulnerable people in times of crisis required assistance combined with long-term development plans – more than just providing “emergency relief.”