Tuvalu -- the UN's newest member

The South Pacific nation of Tuvalu has become the newest entry to the United Nations and its one-hundred-and-eighty-ninth member.

Tuvalu is one of the world's smallest countries, with a population of about nine thousand people living on nine coral atolls covering twenty-six-square kilometres.

Its membership was welcomed by the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, at a flag-raising ceremony at the U.N.'s headquarters in New York.

He praised it for its stability and serenity at a time, he said, when many other small countries were embroiled in violent conflict. Tuvalu was known as the Ellice Islands during the eighty or so years that it was ruled by Britain.

It gained independence in 1978.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service