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Last week UNESCO's director-general for the past twelve years, Senegal's Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, announced that he will not seek a third term when his mandate ends in November 1987. M'Bow, 65, whose autocratic stewardship has been attacked from both within and without the 158-nation organization, said he would leave "to get UNESCO out of the hurricane zone." The U.S. and Britain promptly announced that they will withhold any reconsideration of their departure until it becomes clear just how far UNESCO will ultimately move.
SOVIET UNION A Mountain For SamanthaAs a figure of Soviet veneration, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is ahead of Samantha Smith, but the gap may be narrowing. Since her death in a 1985 plane crash, the name of the Maine schoolgirl, who visited the Soviet Union in 1983 at the invitation of Communist Party Chief Yuri Andropov, has been affixed to a Siberian diamond, a hybrid violet developed in Lithuania, a street in Yalta and a five-kopeck postage stamp. The homage reached new heights last week with the dedication of Mount Samantha Smith, a 13,000-ft. peak in the central Caucasus just north of the Turkish and Iranian borders.
Samantha, then 11, won Soviet hearts during a twoweek tour arranged after she sent a letter to Andropov expressing her fears of nuclear war. The Kremlin quickly made her a symbol of the desire of many U.S. citizens to end the nuclear-arms race. That symbol clearly grew all the more poignant--and powerful--with her tragically early death.