March 27 officially declared the arrival of spring to the Hindu community, celebrated with the Holi festival. Known as the festival of colours, Holi has a broad appeal in and outside India, particularly among youth. Hindus send their greetings and welcome good luck by throwing coloured powder to others and smearing people’s clothes with paint.

The celebration of Holi will usually last for several weeks and will also take place in different areas across America. At the UN, the United Nations Staff Recreations Council initiates the celebration to embody the festival’s spirit of bridging social barriers of language and status.

United Nations Staff Celebrates Holi, the Hindu Festival of Colors from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

This year also marks the fifth annual Holi Festival in New York City, which, with the theme “Green Holi”, stressed the use of new herbal and non-toxic colours.

On the sidelines of the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Huairou Commission (HC), on March 4th, organised a panel discussion on women’s access to justice. 

Sponsored by UNDP and coordinated by HC, women from over 70 communities in seven countries across Africa for over a year engaged in a participatory action research on local obstacles to women’s access to justice and new bottom-up models to remove judicial bottlenecks.

These 70 groups are dealing with issues ranging from domestic violence to HIV/AIDS, care for handicapped children and social development. Through their research, they revealed contradictions and gaps in legal frameworks that prohibit women’s access to justice — findings which they have built upon in their collective responses, including the training of community paralegals and watchdog groups.

The results of their research will further influence future policy-making within UNDP.

Shorai Chitongo, representing Ray of Hope Zimbabwe, an organisation dealing primarily with domestic violence, was among the panelists that participated in the research, along with local headman Gilbert Tendai Mungate, who talked about their collaboration. The panel was chaired by Randi Davis, Officer in Charge of the UNDP Gender Unit.

UN CSW Side Event from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

At a time when big grocery stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are attracting scores of hungry customers, many local family-run farms are fighting to keep afloat.

“We stay in business because some people do get it,” and are prepared to invest in local produce, Jessica Migliorelli, a New York farmer, told IPS.

Nonetheless, many products are left over from each day of sales.

City Harvest, a food rescue organisation in partnership with GrowNYC, a non-profit environmental group, uses the leftover produce to help the more than a million people in desperate need of food within the five boroughs of New York.

The scorching summer heat poses challenges for the Migliorelli family-run farm and other Grow NYC farmers selling their products at the Union Square farmer’s market.

David Hughes of GrowNYC told IPS, “The weather…is always a challenge for our producers. Many simply scale back on the volume they bring to market. They also use shade cloth, lots of ice, spritzer bottles and refrigerated box trucks to keep products cold.”

Associate Director of Food Sourcing at City Harvest Lisa Spazato said City Harvest has maintained a steady supply of produce from the GrowNYC farmers that participate in donating food that does not sell by the end of the day.

The partnership that developed between City Harvest and GrowNYC is explained by the latter’s David Sherman as a “natural relationship; obviously we have amazing seasonal produce that is perishable at the end of a long market day. What a wonderful thing for New Yorkers to give back to other New Yorkers at an end of a market day.”

In this pictorial story, IPS United Nations Multimedia Correspondent Shari Nijman shows how the food rescue process literally takes a team to happen.

The Union Square greenmarket is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

The short video interview below was filmed by Shari Nijman.

“We Tripantu” means “rising of the new sun,” and is the new year celebration of the Mapuche people, held over the shortest days of the year in the southern hemisphere, coinciding with the winter solstice.

U.N. correspondent Stephanie Parker sits down with filmmaker Lieven Corthouts as he opens up about the children in “Little Heaven” orphanage, located in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

“Ethiopia has one of the largest populations of orphans in the world, with 13 percent of all children having lost one or both parents. That makes 4.6 million orphans,” the film notes.

Lydia Berhanu is the main character in the film and on her 13^th birthday she is told that she has HIV by a caretaker and is moved to the “big kid” orphanage: Little Heaven.

As she grapples with the news, the viewers get a chance to see the vulnerability of a child but also the normal life she leads with the other children in the orphanage.

The viewers also get a glimpse into Lydia’s support system and her health problems as Corthouts navigates through her struggles and hopes to go on to a better school the following year.

“There needs to be more support and structure to help the African people. HIV infected people need to be better informed and to receive more material assistance, with daily access to medications,” the filmmakers note.

The film premiered on June 25^th at the Human Rights Film Festival in New York City.

IPS correspondent Shari Nijman filmed the interview.

Why can’t we live a different way? That’s the question asked by a pioneer community of 160 trying to achieve greater sustainability and a higher quality of life.

Twenty years ago, they created Ecovillage at Ithaca (EVI), an ecological intentional community located only two miles away from the city of Ithaca in upstate New York.

EVI has proved a successful housing model and could be leading the way for the future of urban planning.

In the village, pedestrian-only streets lead to different community amenities such as the swimming pond, the kitchen garden, or the community house in which residents gather for dinner twice a week.

The community meals are comprised of locally-grown organic vegetables that come from a nearby farm.

West Haven Farm has been a part of the ecovillage from the very beginning and feeds about 250 families through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.

It allows the shareholders – many of whom live in the ecovillage – to enjoy organic seasonal eating and a greater connection to their food as they come pick their vegetables every week.

In order to keep the community running, each resident is expected to put in two hours of work a week in one of the different teams – cooking, dishwashing, cleanup, maintenance or finance.

The houses, smaller than the U.S. average, are clustered together to allow easier social interactions and to ensure that 90 percent of the land be kept wild.

“The quality of life here is off the charts,” Liz Walker, one of EVI’s co-founders, told IPS.

The village is inter-generational and many families decide to move in to what they consider a children’s paradise.

EVI is already made of two co-housing neighbourhoods and a third one is under construction.

Each new neighbourhood is using the lessons learnt from the past, allowing for the residents’ ecological footprint to keep decreasing.

EVI also has all the amenities of a modern urban neighbourhood, ranging from high-speed internet to parking spots.

“We’re not being radical, so it makes it easier for people to adopt,” Walker told IPS.

One of the first ecovillages in the world, EVI could be used as a model for a more sensible way of life.

“We can change the way we’re currently developing housing to a much more satisfying way of life.

It would be healthier for people and for the planet. There’s no reason we can’t be doing it now,” Walker told IPS.

Two weeks after the United Nations conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro has left many lukewarm, activists, government representatives and U.N. officials are looking forward to setting new goals for the future.

“I think the world needs much more than what we achieved,” Heikki Holmas, Norwegian minister of international development, admitted at a press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York on Thursday.

Still, the focus of the discussion was less on casting blame than on how to move on and set new sustainable development goals for the future.

“There have been many creative solutions put forward,” said Joanna Kerr, CEO of the anti-poverty group Action Aid.

According to Kerr, addressing the issues of how to best use tax revenues and limiting investment in “false solutions” are key to establishing a sustainable future.

“For many years, many governments have been trying to put forward a financial tax that could levy a very small amount on financial transactions, but it could actually leverage billions and billions of euros and dollars for climate change and development. And that is key, to make sure that if we raise new taxes, that we spend them progressively,” she said.

Lakshmi Puri, deputy director of UN Women, said she hoped that Rio+20 will prove to have “unlocked the potential of women as drivers of sustainable development.”

According to Puri, gender equality should be treated as an economic, social and environmental issue, rather than just a “side alley”.

All three panellists pointed out that there are lessons to be learned from Rio, and that future conferences can build upon its outcomes.

“Now we have the high-level forum… and we need to look at how to make sure the high-level development forum is strong and able to push the development goals,” Holmas said.

“Talk is cheap,” Kerr added. “But failure to address sustainable development is even more expensive.”

Reducing the risks associated with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats is the goal of a new multi-country initiative known as the Centres of Excellence (CoE).

The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), representatives of the European Union and CBRN experts are launching a joint CoE, which seeks to improve policies and unite countries across the globe against CBRN risks.

In response to increasing concerns over criminal misuse of CBRN materials and the threat of industrial catastrophe among other risks, CoEs are being set up in Kenya, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Georgia, Uzbekistan and the Philippines, and will draw on input from more than 60 countries around the world.

Currently, many countries would find themselves isolated in the event of a crisis. CoEs aim to develop partnerships between regions to share the risks of CBRN incidents and improve their capacity to protect civilian populations, explained Francesco Marelli, UNICRI CBRN programme manager.

Bruno Dupré, European Diplomatic Service policy coordinator for CBRN issues, explained that the regional secretariats being established in each region seek to mobilise local communities – the judiciary, police force, and military personnel – to develop and share knowledge on specific risks and threats.

Illicit nuclear trafficking

Amid growing global concern about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) the CoE initiative’s first two pilot projects are aimed at countering illicit nuclear trafficking and the threat of nuclear and radiological terrorism.

Since 1998, in the U.S. alone there have been more than 1,300 reported incidents of lost, stolen, or abandoned devices containing sealed radioactive sources, an average of about 250 per year, according to a January 2011 CBRN case study submitted to the European Union.

Project Geiger, a joint initiative between the international police organisation INTERPOL and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with the aim of gathering comprehensive data on the illicit traffic in nuclear and radiological materials has also recorded more than 2,200 cases of trafficking, according to the study.

The CoE projects are aimed at mitigating the risk posed by illicit trafficking through capacity building in nuclear forensics in the Southeast Asia region. They incorporate issues such as the safe retrieval of nuclear material, measures to protect the public and management of the crime scene to allow for prosecution.

In response to questions regarding the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Syria spreading outside the country, Dupré emphasised that CoE was primarily a preventative initiative not to be confused with a permanent institution or crisis response organisation.

Whilst CoE seek to prevent crises through addressing structural issues – early warning and early assistance systems – coordinating a response to scattering weaponry in conflict situations in the Middle East and North Africa region was deemed beyond its mandate.

Toxic waste

With the threat of nuclear terrorism attracting the most widespread concerns, projects addressing other chemical, and biological concerns are slower to materialise.

The disposal of electronic waste (e-waste) has been made a priority in the Africa region, where toxic properties contained in electrical equipment, including laptops and mobile phones, present severe health hazards to those working daily to dispose of them.

CoE waste management projects in Africa are in the process of finding sponsors in order to develop the means to address e-waste issues. However, funds are lacking, according to Dupré.

A report titled “Recycling — from E-Waste to Resources,” launched Feb. 22, 2010 by the United Nations Environment Programm (UNEP), found that India, and China and countries across Latin America and Africa face the growing threat of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health.

The report found that countries like Senegal and Uganda can expect e-waste flows from PCs alone to increase four to eight-fold by 2020 and Kenya is estimated to generate 11,400 tonnes from refrigerators, 2,800 tonnes from televisions, 2,500 tonnes from personal computers, 500 tonnes from printers, and 150 tonnes from mobile phones.

Speaking on the subject of e-waste in Africa, Dupré told IPS, “It’s a huge issue because we don’t have enough money.”

“What we are trying to do is to find sponsors that will help us define procedures. We have a programme of waste management in Africa and we are really trying to get funds by encouraging international organisations to support waste management”

“(Waste management) is their priority much more than the issue of proliferation of terrorism,” he added.

The CoE initiative is designed to build on local assets in order that regional projects do not operate under the interests of any given donor. But it faces the challenge of securing funds to address multiple issues regardless of the attention they command on the international stage.

On Saturday, Jun. 9 2012, the annual Capital Pride Parade brought together hundreds of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people marching with their allies in the sunny streets of Washington DC.

“I am always amazed by the diversity of the people who attend ­ age, ethnicity, gender, colour. It truly is a rainbow,” Missy Toms, director of external affairs for Capital Pride, told IPS.

“In addition to the groups you would expect to participate in the parade, we have local and national businesses, churches, politicians, schools, families and community groups marching,” Toms added.

The event, voted DC’s best parade by the residents of the Washington DC area, benefits from the participation of dozens of volunteers who help control the situation.

On the following day, the Capital Pride Festival brought together more than 200,000 people who showed their support to the LGBT community with different concerts and events taking place in front of the Capitol.

“Capital Pride is a chance for the entire community, gay or straight, to come together and celebrate who we are as one humanity.

I look forward to the legalization of gay marriage in all fifty states, that will be a celebration,” Toms told IPS.

Coralie Tripier interviews filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering about their latest film "Invisible War".

The US military is facing one of its biggest scandals, depicted in “Invisible War”, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s latest documentary. The movie collects the stories of women – and men – who, along with many others, became victims of sexual abuse while serving their country and now face post-traumatic stress disorder. The statistics are staggering: more than 20 percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted during their service. In fact, a female soldier is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed in enemy fire. The lack of response is often as traumatising for the victims as the abuse itself. Most victims do not report the rape in fear of retaliation, and when they do, their attacker is unlikely to be punished. “Invisible War” won several awards, including the Audience Award at Sundance, and is part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival currently taking place in New York. In a interview with U.N. correspondent Coralie Tripier, filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering explain why they decided to make the movie and what must urgently be done to reform the military justice system. IPS correspondent Shari Nijman filmed the interview. “Invisible War” opens in U.S. theaters on Jun. 22. The video of the interview follows.