Note to Correspondents

United Nations Headquarters to Host Panel Discussion

 

on ‘Getting the Facts Right’, 4 May

 

A panel discussion on “Getting the Facts Right”, to be held at United Nations Headquarters on Wednesday, 4 May, will seek to draw lessons from the recent past from the perspective of “If we had known then what we know now”.

The event, to be held in the Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., will promote the launch of the 2007 edition of the United Nations Yearbook, which has been released for the first time as an e-book.  Panellists will look at some of the main events of 2007 and draw lessons for the present.

The speakers are Pamela Falk, Professor of American Foreign Policy and International Relations and Law at Hunter College, United Nations Resident Correspondent and CBS News Foreign Affairs Analyst; Robin Andersen, Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Fordham University; Roland Schatz, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Media Tenor International; and Norhan Basuni, Baccalaureate student at the City University of New York and witness to the events on Tahrir Square in Cairo.

With opening remarks by Kiyo Akasaka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, and Robert Bullock of the New York State Archives as Moderator, the panellists will explore five topics highlighted by the 2007 edition of the Yearbook in the current media context: Darfur, attacks on United Nations and humanitarian workers, progress towards realizing the Millennium Development Goals, climate change and the global economic effects of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States.

The event will also showcase the first-ever e-book version of the Yearbook, which is now available in digital format for a variety of readers, including Kindle, iPhone/iPad, Nook and Sony e-Book Reader.   The e-book version includes full text search, bookmarking and adjustable font size and colour, as well as a hyperlinked table of contents, indices and references.

The panel is organized by the United Nations Academic Impact initiative, launched in 2010 by the Department of Public Information to engage the academic world.

For information about the United Nations Academic Impact initiative, please visit http://academicimpact.org, or contact Nathalie Leroy at leroyn@un.org.

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For information media • not an official record