NYT: "Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday that the United Nations would mediate talks on the release of Israeli and Hezbollah prisoners.... Mr. Annan said the talks would be conducted discreetly, with the goal of setting up the "mechanism" to effect the release of prisoners from both sides, which he said he hoped would be the first step in more thorough-going talks involving Israel and Lebanon. He also said he would insist on control of the negotiation and no interference from outside."
"The Sudanese government has dramatically intensified the war in Darfur in a bid to finish off the tenacious, three-year-old rebellion before a U.N. peacekeeping force can deploy there, say analysts, rebels and officials from the African Union monitoring mission.... The U.N. Security Council last week approved a peacekeeping force of up to 22,500 that would take the place of the African Union troops, but Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has sought to block it from being deployed." More
IHT: "Afghanistan's opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said in Kabul."
"The United Nations strongly condemned the slaying of an international Red Cross driver in Darfur and demanded factions in the war-torn Sudanese region protect humanitarian workers." More
Also: New round of fighting is feared in Darfur - UN votes to send peacekeepers
"The UN post at Naqoura is barely a kilometre from the Israeli border. Beside it is a sleepy fishing harbour used to bring in supplies and reinforcements.
AP: "A new study finds that very few survivors of Hurricane Katrina contemplated suicide despite the extreme conditions they faced.
While the survivors suffered twice as much mental illness as the pre-storm population, they contemplated suicide far less often than mentally ill people surveyed before Katrina.
BBC: "The UN's most senior humanitarian official has warned that Sudan's Darfur region faces a new humanitarian disaster owing to lack of security.
Jan Egeland spoke as the Security Council considered a US and UK plan to send 22,000 UN troops to Darfur."