Newsline 8 September 2009: New York marks the 400th anniversary of Dutch influence, the plight of East Timorese children who were sent to Indonesia and it’s World Literacy Day today – but is there anything to celebrate?

Listen to today's edtion of the show:

From New Amsterdam to New York
Four hundred years ago, Captain Henry Hudson sailed his Halve Maen (Half Moon) to what we now know as Manhattan in New York, then inhabited by Native Americans. In the decades that followed, the Netherlands set up the colony of New Amsterdam, which later transformed into New York. This week, the Big Apple is full of festivities to mark the 400th anniversary. Our Radio Netherlands Worldwide correspondents join the celebrations.
 

International Literacy Day
Today marks International Literacy Day, an event that has been celebrated by UNESCO in 1966. But is there anything to celebrate when still one in five people in the world are not able to read or write and with 75 million children not going to school?
 

East Timor and the horror of child abductions
From 1975 to 1999, thousands of East Timorese children were abducted by Indonesians who took the children from Catholic East Timor to Islamic Indonesia. What happened to these children? And why were they taken away from their families?