Ad Melkert, who is the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq, has strongly condemned the assassination of a female election nominee, Suha Abdullah Jarallah, who was shot dead in Mosul, just before Iraq’s electoral campaign is due to start. And Melkert said that such incidents cannot be tolerated. He said that campaign violence in Iraq must not be allowed to intimidate candidates or interfere with the right of every Iraqi to vote.

The recent appointment of a Special Representative for Sexual Violence in Conflict was a clear indication of the international community’s commitment to ending a crime that devastates millions of women and children, Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said today.

The Secretary-General is calling for a worldwide cessation of hostilities for the duration of the twenty-first Winter Olympic Games, which start in Vancouver this Friday. The truce is in the spirit of what the Games’ founders did in ancient Greece some two-and-half thousand years ago.

Dmitry Titov, the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, briefed the Security Council this morning in an open meeting on the Secretary-General’s latest report on Sudan, saying Sudan has reached a critical juncture and will face enormous challenges in the coming year. These include the April national elections and next year’s planned referendum on the self-determination of Southern Sudan.

Nearly one month after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake rattled Haiti and levelled most of its densely-packed capital, Port-au-Prince, the United Nations ‑‑ with much of the world body’s staff working out of tents and a few sleeping in their cars ‑‑ finally had a clear picture of the breadth of the devastation, and was racing to ramp up the massive recovery and reconstruction effort ahead of the coming rainy season, senior peacekeeping officials said today.

Following its North American launch yesterday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), organizers of the International Year of Biodiversity said today that they must compete with hot-button topics such as climate change in order to rouse world attention to disappearing biodiversity, with losses estimated at a cost of €1.5 to €3 trillion annually.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a new report issued today, argued that attacks on education should be a trigger for Security Council intervention through its monitoring and reporting mechanism on children in armed conflict, on par with action now being taken to combat child soldiering.

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.