New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday welcomed North Korea's decision to accept verification measures of its nuclear plant and called on the government there to completely disable its plutonium processing facility.

Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, welcomed Pyongyang's decision to re-admit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) after the United States government removed North Korea from the list of states sponsoring terrorism.

New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will take part in talks next week in Geneva to try to settle the Russia-Georgia conflict and determine the future role of the UN in the Caucasus, a UN spokeswoman said Friday.

Ban will join representatives of the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Geneva on Tuesday, a day before the start of official negotiations on the Georgian conflict.

New York - The flare-up in fighting along the border areas between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo may provoke a wider conflict in the region, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Friday.

The continued fighting between Congo's armed forces and Rwanda's local group known as CNDP (the National Congress for Popular Defence) under Laurent Nkunda is inflicting added suffering on the civilians in Congo, he said.

New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday praised Martti Ahtisaari, winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, as a "long-standing United Nations colleague and ally in the cause of peace, development and human rights."

Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, has had an "exceptional career" as a UN troubleshooter in missions including the former Yugoslavia, Namibia and the Horn of Africa. His latest mission was heading negotiations to resolve the status of Kosovo, a former Serbian province.

Rome - Climate change and bio-energy are the focus of this year's World Food Day activities, expected to involve over 150 countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Friday.

The Rome-based FAO celebrates World Food Day each year on October 16, the day on which the Organization was founded in 1945.

"Global warming is already underway and adaptation strategies are now a matter of urgency, especially for the most vulnerable poor countries," FAO Assistant Director-General, Alexander Mueller said.

FAO estimates that some 920 million people in the world face hunger, including small-scale farmers, fishers and forest-dependent people.

New York - The UN Security Council on Thursday extended its former UN military observer mission in Georgia for just four months rather than a longer period because of the unsettled Russian-Georgian conflict in that country in August.

The mission's new mandate will expire in mid-February. Its 153 military observers were caught in the fighting between Russia and Georgian troops and had to be evacuated in August from their posts in the Kodori Valley that separates breakaway Abkhazia and the Tbilisi government.