...but the UNESCO Literacy Prizes have certainly gone to deserving winners, which were this year awarded on the theme of "Literacy and Empowerment."  To wit:

The second award of the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize goes to the NGO Nirantar’s project "Khabar Lahariya" - "news waves" - in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. It has created a rural fortnightly newspaper entirely produced and marketed by “low caste” women, distributed to more than 20,000 newly literate readers. Its well-structured method of training newly literate women as journalists and democratizing information production provides an easily replicated model of transformative education.

Without making a vulgar comparison, this kind of effort reminds me of Washington, D.C.'s own Street Sense, which has always struck me as an innovative and productive way to take on poverty and homelessness.  That such an initiative is thriving with "low caste" women in India is incredibly heartening.

The World Food Program posts a video with some powerful images from Abyei, which is an oil-rich border region between South Sudan, Darfur and Sudan proper. Despite a peace accord between Souther Sudanese rebels and the central Government four years ago, Abyei remains a persistent flash point.

The Enough Project call's the region "Sudan's Kashmir" and has published some important work highlighting the centrality of peace in Abyei to peace throughout Sudan.

Tipped by Dipnote, Afghanistan has officially established its first national park, at a beautiful locale called Band-e-Amir.

Methinks they should have a few more of these.  More pics, courtesy of flickr user wesolson, under a Creative Commons license, after the jump.

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It seems that the stars have finally aligned and the Obamas will plant a vegetable garden on the White House lawn this spring.

ABC News' Ann Compton and Sunlen Miller report that the new White House vegetable garden will be dug up and planted on the South grounds of the White House -- near the fountain but out of view of the main house.

[snip]

In the April issue of [O Magazine], Mrs. Obama tells Winfrey, "We want to use it as a point of education, to talk about health and how delicious it is to eat fresh food, and how you can take that food and make it part of a healthy diet."

Regular readers know this is an idea we have been pushing ever since Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International won the On Day One contest with this very idea, which he calls Eat the View. Here is statement from Roger on today's news.

Launched in February 2008 under the rallying cry “Eat the View”, the campaign used viral videos and social networking technologies like Facebook to grow a large support base, attract international media attention, and help inspire similar grassroots efforts. The campaign’s proposal that the Obamas replant a White House Victory Garden with part of the produce going to local food pantries won the “On Day One” contest sponsored by the United Nations Foundation in January 2009, beating out 4000 other entries.

While the Obamas’ garden and the online technologies that helped lead to it might be new, the idea of an edible landscape at the White House is not. Throughout its history, the White House has been home to food gardens of different shapes and sizes and even to a lawn-mowing herd of sheep in 1918. The appeal of the White House garden project, Doiron asserts, is that it serves as a bridge between the country’s past and its future. “The last time food was grown on the White House lawn was in 1943 when the country was at war, the economy was struggling and people were looking to the First Family for leadership. It made sense before and it makes sense again as we try to live within our own means and those of the planet.”

I caught up with Doiron a couple of weeks ago and we chatted about this idea...where else, but in front of the White House.

*UPDATE: The planting has begun!