Press Conference

As the focus in Haiti turned to long-term recovery and development, significant humanitarian needs still had to be addressed, with 600,000 people remaining homeless after last year’s earthquake, the United Nations top humanitarian official said this afternoon, following a two-day visit to the country.

Saying she expected a “good ride” for the Security Council this month, U. Joy Ogwu (Nigeria), its President for October, today outlined a programme of work comprising a varied mix of both new and routine agenda items. Briefing at a Headquarters press conference, she said that since the world was not static but dynamic, the work programme allowed for the addition of new items, to be dealt with as and when they arose.

The “path-breaking” 2006 Millennium Villages initiative was now the largest scale project to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated rural development approach in sub-Saharan Africa, Jeffrey Sachs said today at the launch of the project’s second phase, for which George Soros had pledged an extra $47 million.

The United Nations, as part of its ongoing effort to bolster international law and strengthen the rule of law, will host its annual treaty event from 20 to 22 September and 26 to 27 September on the margins of the General Assembly’s general debate, top legal officers said today at a Headquarters press conference.

While donors continued to provide substantial resources to fund tangible improvements in the lives of millions of people around the world, there was still a troubling distance between what had been pledged and what was actually being done to help poor countries realize the Millennium Development Goals through international cooperation, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today at a Headquarters press conference.

Following is a transcript of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s press conference, held in New York today, 15 September:

The General Assembly will convene a landmark meeting next week to energize the global community’s strategy to tackle deadly non-communicable diseases — including heart disease, the world’s number one killer — which not only caused huge numbers of premature and preventable deaths, but also undermined socio-economic development, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said at Headquarters today.

With staggering numbers of people in the drought-stricken Horn of Africa affected by — and on the run from — severe shortages of food and water, a senior official overseeing the response of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to the crisis said today that the United Nations was intensifying its efforts to save lives and livelihoods, while working with regional partners to help drought-prone countries avert future catastrophes.

Remarkable but fragile gains had been made in the fight against malaria over in last decade, making it critical to close funding gaps, scale up the use of effective interventions, combat drug and insecticide resistance, while supporting research and development to ensure that new ambitious targets would be met, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at a Headquarters press conference today.

The General Assembly’s incoming President, in his first Headquarters press conference this afternoon, said the sixty-sixth session would focus on the priority theme of mediation.