As the world celebrates the International Day of Living Together in Peace, marked annually on 16 May, we are taking you back to the 1950s, when the UN deployed its first ever peacekeeping force to the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula to help bring an end to the Suez Canal crisis.
“You know you are saying something right,” Stevie Wonder told reporters at UN Headquarters on his birthday in 1985. “I really don’t mind being banned. The sad thing is, I’d like to see South Africa, and I’d like to unite with my brothers and sisters in South Africa, but as long as this condition exists in the world, we cannot continue to support it as a country, as a people. We did away with it here. We can damn sure do away with it there.”
Trinidad and Tobago is described as one of the “frontline States”, those nations that are most severely affected by the impact of the climate emergency, and youth activists are among the most prominent voices in the country calling for stronger action to combat the crisis, both at home and abroad.
Camels, long known as the ships of the desert, have played an important role helping the UN from as early as the 1940s in driving up global vaccination rates and delivering lifesaving aid.
A small but growing number of countries are well on their way to producing all of their electricity from renewable sources. Dominica, in the eastern Caribbean, is planning to join these pioneers and become the first small island developing State (SIDS) to stop using fossil fuels for energy generation.
Bassem Al-Habal carried a large bag of flour provided by the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, inside one of the shelters in the city of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, part of his daily journey to find food and water for his family while overcoming displacement, bombardment and the challenges of being deaf and mute in a war zone.
The General Assembly designated 22 April as International Mother Earth Day through a resolution adopted in 2009, but the roots of the Day go back to the 1970s.
Plastic pollution blocks rivers, chokes oceans and makes its way into the food chain as microplastics. It’s a global environmental crisis, and small island developing States are especially vulnerable, having to cope with detritus washing up on their beaches, as well as the waste they generate themselves.
Becoming a successful international fashion photographer is hard for anyone, but it’s particularly difficult if you grow up in Dominica, a small Caribbean country regularly hit by hurricanes. This hasn’t deterred Josiah Johnson, an aspiring photographer who is taking advantage of digital technology training to find new opportunities well beyond the borders of his home.
Dominica aims to become the world’s first “climate-resilient" nation, and the indigenous Kalinago people are playing a leading role in developing the country and helping its people to thrive in the face of the climate emergency.
