"A senior delegation of United Nations and donor country officials held talks in Baghdad this weekend on coordinating assistance to Iraq as well as the country's development priorities." More...
"U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday." More...
Alertnet: "The closure of the UNICEF office in Bossaso after several death threats against staff underscores the difficulty and danger faced by the handful of aid workers who venture into the anarchic country ravaged by nearly 14 years of militia fighting."
Instapundit: "TIM WORSTALL notes a new UN report on Iraqi casualties that's rather at odds with the Lancet report, and wonders why it's not getting nearly as much attention."
"A U.N. engineer from Myanmar was among three people killed when a suicide attacker walked into a Kabul Internet cafe and blew himself up, officials said Sunday, in the first fatal attack on a U.N. staffer in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001." Full Story
"Julius Lanya, a nurse in mud-caked work boots, rushed out of his office, leaned over Haja Hamid and began gently examining the gaunt 12-year-old girl, limb by limb, as she rested on a straw mat under a tree.... Lanya is one of more than 10,000 humanitarian workers operating under the auspices of the United Nations in this region of western Sudan. Their tasks range from monitoring tubes at infant feeding centers to digging sanitation ditches and boreholes for water outside one of the dozens of squalid refugee camps that dot Darfur's war-shattered landscape. Like Lanya, a Kenyan, the vast majority are from the continent -- Africans trying to help fellow Africans." Full Story
ALERTNET: "Less than 3 percent of funds needed to tackle a humanitarian emergency in the Republic of Congo have been received, highlighting the oil-producer's plight as a forgotten nation in crisis, the United Nations said.
Congo's civil war officially ended in 1999 but sub-Saharan Africa's fourth biggest oil producer has no peacekeeping force and is struggling to disarm former rebels who continue to attack civilians in the Pool region, far from international eyes.
"This is scandalous. We need to have a better response to this emergency," Aurelien Agbenonci, the head of the U.N. in Congo, told Reuters in an interview."
UN News Service: "Clashes between the Government and rebels in Sudan's western Darfur region, attacks against international aid workers, rape and the persecution of its victims, abuse of children, and torture by security forces, underscored a continuing dire situation, according to the latest United Nations report on the region released today.
"The killing of civilians and combatants alike must stop and a genuine ceasefire must be observed," Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in the report for March, the latest in a monthly series mandated by the Security Council. He calls on all parties to abide by several agreements they have already signed."
"The United Nations human rights investigator for Sudan demanded on Friday that the government disarm militia who continue to kill and rape civilians in Darfur, warning of a "time bomb" that could explode.
Emmanuel Akwei Addo, the independent U.N. expert on the situation of human rights in the Sudan, said 2,000 African Union troops lacked power to deter crimes in the remote region where aid workers were pulling back due to deteriorating security." Read More...