June 19th is Juneteenth, a date commemorated by many African-Americans since the late 1800s. On this date in 1865, about two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas. He informed people that the Civil War had ended and those enslaved in Texas were free. The enslaved people in Texas, about 250,000, were...

• Responsible consumption
• SDG12
• SDG13
• climate action
• Trees

by Anne van Oorschot, AWC The Hague

The first contact I had with the concept of planting trees to compensate the emissions produced by air travel was at the first FAWCO Conference I attended in Stockholm in 2003. Environment Committee Chair Valerie Garforth, had a chart with distances from various cities to Stockholm and the number of trees one needed to...

According to the UN, at least 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) in 30 countries where the practice is concentrated. There has been some progress: in these countries, the prevalence of this harmful practice declined 25% between 2000 and 2018. Recently, the government of Sudan criminalized FGM, another step towards achieving better health...

NOTE: SARS-CoV-2 is the virus and COVID-19 is the disease caused by it.

Q. Does SARS-CoV-2 just infect the respiratory tract and lungs, like influenza?

A. Patients in China were initially presenting with an unusual pneumonia (characterized by a ground glass appearance on CAT scans) so it was initially thought to be a purely respiratory illness. Now it is known that...

by Adrianne George, AWC Gothenburg, AWC Malmö, AWC Stockholm

Remember the days when you might have thought homeschooling was a concept only hippies or recluses could embrace? When you thought, “no way would I keep my kids home all day”? Does it seem like a long time ago that you thought, “I’m no educator, I’m just a parent”? For many...

• climate change
• conservation
• SDG15
• climate action
• birds

by Meenakshi Advani Rai, ACIW Mumbai  

Fly means “to soar through air; move through the air with wings,” the Old English fleogan: “to fly, take flight, rise into the air.” Migratory birds connect people, ecosystems, cultures, development and nations, offering an extraordinary opportunity for international collaboration. “They are symbols of peace and of an interconnected planet,” says Secretary-General António Guterres of the...