UNITED NATIONS, April 23 (Reuters) – Iran’s economy has
become more robust as domestic production has grown to offset a
14 percent fall in imports in 2012, sparked by a drop in its
currency value, after the central bank was hit by economic
sanctions, Iran’s finance minister said on Tuesday.

Shamseddin Hosseini, also minister for economic affairs,
told reporters in New York that non-oil exports rose 20 percent
in the year to March 21, 2013, while inflation rose about 9
percentage points to 30 percent and unemployment hovered at 12.2
percent.

PARIS (Reuters) – The United States has dropped demands for human rights observers in Western Sahara, diplomats said on Tuesday, paving the way for a compromise that would allow the U.N. mission in the disputed territory to be extended for another year.

Western Sahara, a tract of desert the size of Britain that has lucrative phosphate reserves and potentially offshore oil, is the focus of Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute, between Morocco and pro-independence Polisario guerrillas.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Syrian families have been burned in their homes, people bombed waiting for bread, children tortured, raped and murdered and cities reduced to rubble in Syria’s two-year-old war that has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe, the United Nations said on Thursday.

A quarter of Syria’s 22 million people are displaced within the country and 1.3 million have fled to other states in the Middle East and North Africa, U.N. aid chief Valerie Amos and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told the U.N. Security Council.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – In her first seven months as U.N. envoy on sexual violence in conflict, Zainab Hawa Bangura has visited a Congolese district where rebels raped babies, and Somalia where a woman was paid $150 restitution for the rape of her 4-year-old daughter.

She met a refugee at a camp in Kenya who had been raped at gunpoint when she was eight-months-pregnant while gathering firewood and a Somali father who was fighting for justice for his daughters, aged 4 and 6, who had both been raped.