Features

In September 2017 two category five hurricanes swept across the Caribbean, devastating island communities in the region.  In the 2nd part of this special report marking the one year anniversary of hurricanes Irma and Maria hitting the Caribbean, UN News looks at how the UN has responded, helping communities to get back on their feet, and preparing them for the inevitability of more damaging hurricanes in the future.

“It was angry. That's what it sounded like to me. When the roof came off, there were these horrible screeches, this horrible noise. It was devastating, and we all had to run”.

On 19 August 2003, a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives to the United Nations headquarters in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, Iraq, and blew it up, killing 22 people – among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN mission in Iraq.

If Bilal Bashir, a Palestinian fisherman and lifeguard living on the coast of the Gaza Strip, does not get work over the summer months, he risks being sent to debtors’ prison.

Twenty-three-year-old Kodi Moumdau laughs with a group of young women in brightly coloured shawls in her ward at the National Fistula Centre [Centre National de Référence de Fistule Obstétricale] in the outskirts of Niamey, the capital of Niger. They can consider themselves amongst the lucky women who have been treated for and survived an obstetric fistula condition.

After the Second World War, 90 per cent of the Holocaust survivors were between 16 and 45 years old. Today, the youngest survivors, who were born in the last phase of the war, are over age 70.