As you know, today is one month since the Haiti earthquake. And we’re going to start the briefing with a video by David Ohana, who is from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who was in Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the earthquake. And this doesn’t represent an exhaustive account of the relief efforts. It’s David’s rendering of what he saw in Haiti, and it’s our way of marking the day. It’s short, it’s very poignant and we’ll be posting this on the web as well.

Looking to re-energize the global push to prevent or mitigate the impacts of climate change, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today launched a new high-level advisory panel -- to be co-chaired by the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and Ethiopia -- intended to identify effective mechanisms for raising up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations cut emissions and foster green growth.

As Haitians observed a national day of mourning to mark one month since the massive earthquake levelled much of their capital city, Port-au-Prince, and left more than 200,000 dead, the scale of the disaster was becoming clear, and early recovery programmes were under way to help the traumatised Caribbean nation regain a sense of life and community, senior United Nations officials said today.

With the number of journalists killed worldwide surging to 70 last year, Robert Mahoney, Deputy Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists called for stronger action by the United Nations, as he announced the release of his group’s annual report this morning.

Ad Melkert, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq, briefing the Security Council on Iraq, discussed the de-Baathification process, and said that the UN Mission in Iraq has consistently emphasized the due-process requirements and refrained from judging the outcomes. What eventually will matter most, he said, is the acceptance by the Iraqi people of the election result.

In their first visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in six years, senior United Nations political aides had called on Korean officials last week to return promptly to the six-party talks on eliminating nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula, B. Lynn Pascoe, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, said at a Headquarters news conference today.

Chad wished to work out a compromise between a total withdrawal of the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad and merely extending its mandate as it stood, the country’s Permanent Representative said at Headquarters this morning.

The Secretary-General condemns the attack by unidentified armed assailants against a UNAMID police convoy returning to Nyala in South Darfur from a confidence-building patrol to the El Sharif camp for internally displaced persons in South Darfur on 16 February. Seven of the eight formed police unit members escorting the patrol were injured in the exchange of fire.

In spite of the hard task it faced, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala was delivering “very obvious” results and breaking taboos, President Álvaro Colom Caballeros said at a Headquarters press conference today.

The resignation of Yvo de Boer as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would not substantially disturb ongoing negotiations leading up to the climate change conference in Mexico later this year, Janos Pasztor, Director of the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team, told correspondents this morning.