The Global Voices Book Challenge

April 23rd is a symbolic date for world literature for on this date and in the same year of 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. The date has been chosen by UNESCO and the United Nations for the annual celebration of World Book and Copyright Day.

The Global Voices Book Challenge is as follows:

1. Read a book during the next month from a country whose literature you have never read anything of before.
2. Write a blog post about it during the week of April 23.

UPDATE: Tag your posts with #gvbook09 so we can find your posts.

Read more about the Book Challenge!

Become a World Heritage Junior Ranger!

Wally the U.S. World Heritage Wolf invites kids from 8 to 14 to become World Heritage Junior Rangers. You can do so at home by completing five interesting activities available at

THIS WEBSITE!

If you can, get you parents to take you to visit the many World Heritage Sites which are U.S. National Parks and complete their respective Junior Ranger programs

The U.S. Reasserts Interest in World Heritage Program

Source: "U.S. Revisits Its World Heritage Roots," Melinda Burns, Miller-McCune, March 28, 2009.

"for the first time since 1995, the U.S. Department of the Interior nominated two new sites for inclusion on the United Nation's World Heritage List of places of "outstanding universal value," a kind of Nobel Prize in the world of preservation. The two sites are George Washington's Mount Vernon estate on the Potomac River, and the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.......

"Since 2005, following a lapse of six years, the U.S. has been a member of the 21-nation World Heritage Committee, selecting and monitoring sites and making management recommendations. In 2007, the National Park Service became an associate member of the World Heritage Alliance, a partnership with the travel services company Expedia, Inc. to promote the sites."

In the early 1970s, under then-President Richard Nixon, the U.S. was the chief architect of and the first country to sign the World Heritage Convention, an international treaty administered by UNESCO that encourages all countries to protect places of exceptional ecological, scientific or cultural importance.

Read more!

UNESCO Non-Alligned Countries Meet

There is a report in Diario Granma, in Spanish (Havana, March 25, 2009), on a recent meeting of the Non Aligned Nations of UNESCO. The follow is extracted from that article:

The participants in the meeting reaffirmed the priorities given to South-South cooperation on education, cultural diversity and human rights. The meeting also identified as important UNESCO fields of action:

• New information and communications technologies
• The effects of the global economic crisis on education
• the defense of linguistic diversity and
• the support of the Palestinian peopls.
  

In the plenary meeting, chaired by the Héctor Hernández Pardo (Cuban Ambassador to UNESCO and president of the Group, Farouk Hosni was presented as the candidate of the Arab nations in the October election for the new Director General of UNESCO.