BEIRUT/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United Nations hopes to retrieve 21 peacekeepers from Syrian rebels on Saturday during a two-hour truce agreed to by Syrian troops and opposition groups after a release bid was abandoned on Friday, the United Nations and an opposition group said.

U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said the Filipino peacekeepers were being held in the basements of four houses in the village of Jamla, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which was being subjected to intense shelling by Syrian troops.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo has threatened to stop supporting two Congolese army battalions unless soldiers accused of raping scores of women in an eastern town are prosecuted, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.

The United Nations said 126 women were raped in Minova in November after Congolese troops fled to the town as so-called M23 rebels briefly captured the nearby provincial capital of Goma.

UNITED NATIONS, March 7 (Reuters) – In response to North
Korea’s third nuclear test, the U.N. Security Council voted on
Thursday to tighten financial restrictions on Pyongyang and
crack down on its attempts to ship and receive banned cargo in
breach of U.N. sanctions.

The U.S.-drafted resolution, approved unanimously by the
15-nation council, was the product of three weeks of
negotiations between the United States and China after North
Korea’s Feb. 12 test.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council agreed on Wednesday to partially lift a decades-old arms embargo on Somalia for one year, allowing the government in Mogadishu to buy light weapons to strengthen its security forces to fight al Qaeda-linked Islamists.

The 15-member council unanimously adopted a British-drafted resolution that also renewed a 17,600-strong African Union peacekeeping force for a year and reconfigured the U.N. mission in the Horn of Africa country.