Marking the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, the Organization’s top peacekeeping officials today paid tribute to the 112 blue helmets that had lost their lives in 2011 — as well as the 37 killed in the line of duty since the beginning of 2012 — and praised “blue helmets and blue berets” for effectively carrying out their duties in challenging security environments.

The Secretary-General has arrived in Istanbul at the start of his trip to Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Tomorrow, he will take part in a Partners Forum for the Alliance of Civilizations, at the invitation of Turkey’s Prime Minister. He will also meet with the Forum’s co-chairs, the Foreign Ministers of Turkey and Spain.

In the Secretary-General’s remarks today to the Alliance of Civilizations Partners Forum in Istanbul today, he said the Alliance has emerged as an increasingly important voice on the global stage. The challenge now is how to enable it to play an even more constructive role on the issues that confront us.

Cohesive global action was needed to support the world’s refugees and internally displaced people, whose numbers were rising dramatically due to an emerging “multiplication of factors”, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees today, as he launched the agency’s 2012 report.

Nations meeting in Rio this month must come together on ambitious sustainable development goals backed by specific implementation agreements to ensure the survival of oceans, the decent subsistence of farmers whose fields were drying up and other urgent priorities, representatives of non-governmental organizations said this morning.

A broad commitment to the “rebirth of Somalia” had been evident in Istanbul, where business leaders, civil society representatives, traditional elders and international partners had been meeting since yesterday to discuss the end of that country’s transition process, said a top official from the Somali Permanent Mission to the United Nations at a Headquarters press conference today.

The Secretary-General has been co-chairing the Istanbul conference on Somalia today. In his remarks, he said his message was for the world to commit to long-term assistance for Somalia, and the United Nations would lead in helping achieve peace, stability and prosperity.

The Secretary-General will be returning to New York from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia overnight. Earlier today, he met the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, and visited the Islamic Development Bank. On Sunday, he opened an advisory board meeting of the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre with the Saudi Foreign Minister.

As the Security Council navigated “a very packed schedule” in June, it was critical for the body to maintain “unswerving support” to international mediation efforts in Syria in the face of terrible recent events, the representative of China, which hold’s the Council presidency for the month, said this afternoon.

Transparency and intergovernmental coordination for recovery from the economic crisis were the priority of the Mexican presidency of the G-20, the Group of the world’s 20 largest economies, in preparations for the upcoming summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, a representative of the presidency said this morning.