The High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said today that an increasingly complex international environment is making it harder to help the world’s more than 43 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people.

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.

The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Somalia, Augustine Mahiga, has strongly condemned a suicide bomb attack at a Transitional Federal Government complex in south Mogadishu, which killed scores of people and wounded many more. He said the “senseless and cowardly” attack was “unacceptable”.

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.

Helen Clark, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, laid a wreath yesterday at the site of the August attack on the UN House in Abuja. Speaking to reporters after meeting with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, she vowed that the attack would not stop the critical UN development work there.

Pro-life Government, academic, legal and civil society representatives presented at Headquarters today a new declaration intended to help Governments guarantee the rights of unborn children and reject pressure to adopt laws that would legalize or de-criminalize abortion.

At his last Headquarters press conference before the end of a three-year term as United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Michael Williams said today that his departure came at a time of profound change and tumult in the Middle East and that his ardent wish was for democracy to flourish as real peace took hold in the region.

The new Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hervé Ladsous, briefed the Security Council this morning on the situation in Abyei. He noted that the United Nations Interim Security Force in Abyei (UNISFA) has not observed significant progress on the withdrawal of Armed Forces from the area.

In a statement, the Secretary-General says that the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize honours three women of uncommon courage, strength and commitment — Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and social activists Tawakkul Karman of Yemen and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia.

The work of Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Liberian President Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf and peace activists Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman, embodied exactly what Alfred Nobel had in mind for the Prize, a senior United Nations rights advocate said today at a Headquarters press conference.