UNESCO

But adding Venice to the UNESCO endangered list—which is dominated by sites in developing and conflict- ridden countries—would be an international embarrassment, and could even hurt Italy's profitable tourism industry.

But UNESCO didn't even hold a vote.

Earlier this year, Italy signed an accord with UNESCO to establish a task force of police art detectives and archaeologists (考古学家) to protect cultural heritage from natural disasters and terror groups, such as IsiS.

In 2014, UNESCO gave Italy two years to manage Venice's flourishing tourism or the city would be placed on another list—World Heritage In Danger, joining such sites as Aleppo and Palmyra,destroyed by the war in Syria.

Italy boasts more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other country in the world, granting it considerable power and influence within the organization.

The city's current mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, has ridiculed UNESCO and told it to mind its own business, while continuing to support the cruise ship industry, which employs 5, 000 Venice residents.

The former head of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which oversees heritage sites, is Francesco Bandarin, a Venetian who now serves as UNESCO' assistant director- general for culture.

The Italian Culture ministry says it is unaware of any government efforts to pressure UNESCO.

Venice's deadline passed with barely a murmur this summer, just as UNESCO was meeting in Istanbul.

The US has already lost more than a third of the native languages that existed before European colonisation, and the remaining 192 are classed by UNESCO as ranging between unsafe and extinct.

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations—UNESCO and national geographic among them—have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

In fact, half of the 6, 000-7, 000 languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century, according to the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization UNESCO.

Unesco united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization recently set April 30 as a day to raise awareness of Jazz music, its significance, and its potential as a unifying voice across cultures.