Overdue commitments made to small island developing States must be fulfilled to enable them to survive climate change and other international crises that were threatening their very existence, officials from three such States said at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon.

The Secretary-General strongly condemns the wave of terrorist bombings and other attacks in Iraq yesterday that reportedly claimed the lives of over a hundred people and injured many more, mostly civilians. The United Nations stands in solidarity with the Iraqi people in the face of these deplorable, unjustifiable acts.

We issued a statement last night in which the Secretary-General said he is encouraged by the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks and commends the United States initiative in this regard. The Secretary-General hopes that the parties are able to make progress and move towards direct negotiations.

The Secretary-General is in Ottawa today, where he just spoke to the UN Association of Canada about the importance of the relationship between the United Nations and Canada. He said that relationship is particularly significant this year, as Canada will soon host the G-8 and G-20 meetings.

The adoption of a resolution this morning by the General Assembly to convene a high-level summit in September 2011 on the issue of prevention and control of non-communicable diseases was a “momentous and historical” occasion, not only for the world, but also for the Caribbean community which had taken the lead on the issue, Marina Annette Valère, Permanent Representative of Trinidad and Tobago said today during a press conference at Headquarters.

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.