How UNICEF’s storytelling tents are helping Somalia send children to school, and a discussion on the Nobel Prize in literature.
Facebook pulls out of role as aide to political campaigns
Facebook Inc will no longer extend direct support to political campaigns ahead of elections, as it did with U.S. President Donald Trump in the 2016, reports Reuters.
“The company and other major online ad sellers including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc have long offered free dedicated assistance to strengthen relationships with top advertisers such as presidential campaigns,” the report added.
Facebook will instead help candidates through an online portal, saying that political organisations could still contact employees to receive basic training on using the site or for assistance on getting ads approved.
UNICEF boosts literacy among Somali children with ‘storytelling tents’
Their childhood threatened by civil strife and poverty, children in Somalia are finding a fresh passion for education through ‘storytelling tents’ supported by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), reports Xinhua.
Jesper Moller of UNICEF said the tents “seek to harness the power of songs, dance and poetry to amplify the importance of education to Somali youngsters”.
“We at UNICEF decided to promote the craft and love of storytelling because stories make learning easy and fun, and they also hold a special place in Somali people’s oral tradition,” Xinhua quoted Moller as saying.
Around 60 children attended one such tent organised on 8 September at Hafata camp for the displaced. Somali minister for education Mohamed Abukar Abdi said the country and its bilateral partners were exploring innovative ways to boost child literacy. In Somalia, the number of schoolgoing children is below the global average.
Titanic relics to be auctioned to pay off company’s debts
Relics retrieved from the Titanic, the doomed ocean liner that sank on its maiden journey in April 1912, will be auctioned to pay off the debts of the company that owns them, CNN reported.
The entire collection, which has already invited an opening bid of $19.5 million, features more than 5,500 artefacts. The auction will go ahead only if someone makes a rival bid that is $2 million higher.
The owner, Premier Exhibitions, had filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
Relics from the Titanic have drawn giant bids over the years. In 2013, a violin played by the band leader on the liner fetched $1.7 million, while last year, a letter written in the ship’s final hours was sold for $166,000.
According to the CNN report, a group of museums in the UK was trying to secure the rights to the artefacts since July to display them in Belfast and London — cities where the ship was built. They have warned that the items could disappear from the public domain if auctioned.
How a New York jail inmate’s sketches helped prove his innocence
A US convict jailed nearly three decades ago has finally been exonerated after his artistic flair impressed a prison warden and sparked a review of his case, reports BBC.
Valentino Dixon, 48, was put behind bars after a man’s death in a shooting in New York in 1991. Dixon had claimed he was at the site of the crime but didn’t pull the trigger. However, he was arrested even though prosecutors found no gunpowder residue on his clothes. A friend had admitted to the crime in a media interview days later, but Dixon remained behind bars.
His road to exoneration started in 2012, when the warden handed him a golf park in Georgia and asked him to sketch it. The drawings caught the attention of editors at Golf Digest, which carried his artwork along with a profile.
“After 19 years in Attica Correctional Facility, the look of a golf hole spoke to me,” Dixon was quoted as saying in the interview.
“The magazine’s coverage spurred wrongful-conviction advocates to look into the matter. Georgetown University law students championed his case,” the BBC report added.
What literary critics think about the literature Nobel
While this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been postponed on account of a sex scandal in the Swedish Academy, which hands out the award, The New York Times asked domain experts about the award’s significance in the literary world.
Parul Sehgal, an NYT book critic, said the “Nobel has felt a little lost in comparison” to the Man Booker International Prize, which she called “an incredible cross section of styles and sensibilities”.
Another literary critic, Dwight Garner, said the Nobel often did extraordinary things for not-so-famous writers. “The Nobel in literature often does extraordinary things for small publishers,” he added.