Bangladesh included in contest for seven new wonders of nature

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FE Report
Cox's Bazar beach and Sundarbans mangrove forest of Bangladesh have been included as nominees in an online contest for nominating 'New 7 Wonders of Nature'.
Switzerland-based foundation, New7Wonders Foundation has arranged the global campaign which will be officially declared in summer of 2010.
According to the website of the Foundation, voting for nominees for the new contest will continue until December 31, 2008. Nominees receiving the highest number of votes will be considered by the New 7 Wonders Panel of experts for final shortlisting.
The shortlist of the selected 21 candidates will be announced in January 2009 and will move to the next stage of voting.
The final voting will continue between 2009 and 2010.
Earlier the Great Wall of China topped the list of the new Seven Wonders of the World announced on July 7 of this year at a ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal.
Also making the grade were Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer, Peru's Machu Picchu, Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid, Jordan's Petra, the Colosseum in Rome and India's Taj Mahal.
The sites were selected according to a tally of around 100 million votes cast by people around the world over the Internet and by cell phone text messages, the non-profit organisation that conducted the poll said, making it the biggest online vote ever.
The Great Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, kept their status in addition to the new seven.
The campaign to pick the seven new wonders begun in 1999 by Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber. His Switzerland-based foundation, called New7Wonders, received some 200 nominations from around the world and then narrowed the list to 21 candidates for the public to vote for.
Among the sites that did not make the final list of seven wonders were the Statue of Liberty, Britain's Stonehenge and Paris' Eiffel Tower.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, maintains its own list of World Heritage sites and distanced itself from the seven wonders balloting, saying it reflected only the opinion of those who voted.
Organisers of the contest conceded that there was no foolproof way to prevent people from voting more than once for their favourite. They claimed votes came in from every country in the world.
Except for Egypt's Pyramids, all the other architectural marvels on the original ancient list of seven wonders have vanished. They were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse off Alexandria in Egypt.