While West Africa continued to make progress in critical areas, weak governance, lagging development, climate change, the changing nature of drug trafficking and other challenges continued to threaten peace and stability in the volatile subregion, a top United Nations official told the Security Council today.

The Security Council Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee has today made available on its website new Standard Forms for Listing of individuals and entities, respectively, to be used when proposing the inclusion of names on the Committee’s Consolidated List.

In accordance with the principle of monthly alphabetical rotation, the following are the Presidents of the United Nations Security Council and the Chairmen of the Military Staff Committee for 2010:

The following Security Council press statement was read out by Council President Zhang Yesui (China) today, 13 January:

Following a two-day retreat of officials from 11 regional organizations with the Secretary-General and a Security Council meeting that heard from them this morning, the Council expressed its intention to promote closer and more operational cooperation between the United Nations and such organizations in the fields of conflict early warning, prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding and to ensure the coherence, synergy and collective effectiveness of their efforts.

The following Security Council statement was read out today by Council President Zhang Yesui (China):

The crisis in Somalia was no longer local or even regional, but a global one that could no longer be ignored, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the Secretary-General’s top representative in that country, said today in a briefing to the Security Council.

While the fragility of Nepal’s peace process remains real, in the past month the parties had demonstrated a “renewed urgency” on the core issues and those breakthroughs in the political impasse must be followed by swift progress in the peace process to avoid instability and allow the United Nations mission there to complete its tasks, the Security Council was told this morning.

The following Security Council press statement on the Haiti earthquake was read out today by Council President Zhang Yesui (China):

On 19 January 2010, the Security Council Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee approved the addition of the three entries specified below to its Consolidated List of individuals and entities subject to the assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo set out in paragraph 1 of Security Council resolution 1904 (2009) adopted under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations.