The United Nations was fully behind the electoral process in Guinea and confident that the elections set for 27 June would proceed smoothly, and it was equally engaged in the first round of elections in Niger, penned in the calendar towards the end of the year by the new leadership there in an effort to make the post-coup transition a short one, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA) said today.

Boosting the recycling rates of both everyday and specialty metals — from the cooper used to wire our homes to the lithium needed for battery packs in hybrid cars — would be critical to moving the global economy towards clean, environmentally friendly technologies, experts on United Nations-backed panel said today.

A Security Council mission has left today for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which the Council members will visit on Friday and Saturday. Over the next two days, the Council members will meet with President Joseph Kabila and his key ministers, and with the senior officials of the United Nations Mission in the country — MONUC.

The Secretary-General spoke this morning at the General Assembly’s informal meeting on piracy, saying that, though it may seem like something out of the past, piracy is very much with us. According to the International Maritime Organization, the global figure for pirate attacks for 2009 was 406 — an increase of 100 over 2008. The Secretary-General said that the figures are alarming, and that we need to assess what is working and what needs to be improved.

A two-day meeting on the African perspectives on security sector reform ended in New York today with agreement that, if such processes were to be sustainable and viable, they must be built on the basis of national ownership, Adedeji Ebo, Chief of the Security Sector Reform Unit of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said at a Headquarters press conference today.

While pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden had fallen from 20 per month in the summer of 2009, to between 4 and 5 today, the tenacity of pirates and level of their violence against mariners had changed over the years, said Rear Admiral Peter Hudson, Operations Commander of the European Union Naval Force in Somalia (EU NAVFOR) — Operation Atalanta, expressing hope that other countries would share in the asset-sapping task of combating the problem.

The Secretary-General has appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to succeed Yvo de Boer. Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector.

As the rest of the world begins to shake off the worst effects of the global economic and financial crisis, a United Nations report launched today argues that Africa should position itself for long-term development by pursuing an employment-intensive strategy prioritizing sustained growth and increased job-creation.

The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, has condemned in the strongest possible terms the attack in Kabul today, which killed many Afghan civilians, a number of international troops and also injured several dozen Afghan civilians. De Mistura has offered his condolences to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those who were injured.

The Secretary-General participated in the launch of a global effort to end distractions while driving. Every year, more than 1.2 million people die on the roads around the world, and as many as 50 million others are injured. The Secretary-General said that driver distraction — mainly through the use of mobile phones — was one of the emerging challenges of road safety.