Himalayan tsunami: Climate change triggers deadly floods among the world’s highest peaks

Last summer more than 6,000 died after glacial melt cascaded through valleys. Scientists expect such disasters to become more common.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 18, 2013 )

UTTARAKHAND, India — The raging torrent hit in the morning, as Gopal Singh Bhist and his son, a cook and the leader of a pony train, prepared for work.

In minutes, the Mandakini river had breached its banks, sending a crushing hammer of water, ice and rock through the Himalayan villages in this north Indian state of Uttarakhand.  

“There was no meaning in it. It didn't give anyone a chance to survive,” Bhist, a gaunt, weather-beaten man with a piercing stare, told GlobalPost. “Instantly, the water turned everything upside down.”

Bhist and his son were in Rambada, 5 miles downstream from the Hindu pilgrimage town of Kedarnath. Each day during summer, an estimated 5,000 people trek through the valley to the bustling mountain outpost to visit the majestic eighth century temple dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

For the cooks, dishwashers, porters and other men who made their livelihood from the pilgrimage, a typical morning was suddenly transformed into a life or death struggle. The young and strong scrambled up the mountain. Older men, like Bhist, sought whatever cover they could find.

“I found a tree and threw my arms around it. I thought, if the tree is washed away I will go along with it. I hung on alone,” Bhist said.

His son ran off with the younger men.

Soon, unknown thousands were swept away or buried under swirling sand.

The rain beat down as Bhist clung to the tree. A sudden hailstorm pelted him with ice, and then the rain beat down again, adding to the surging current surrounding his refuge.

Finally, in mid-afternoon, the weather cleared. Slowly, a tiny group of survivors gathered, and waited.

The pilgrimage route, and the entire town of Rambada, had washed away. There was no way up and no way down. It was as if the world they had known all their lives had been erased.

For four long days Bhist and the rest of the older men huddled amid the ruins of Rambada, surviving on packages of crackers and bags of bread dropped by an air force helicopter. The weather was too rough to land. Fearing the river was contaminated, they shared four bottles of water scavenged from a local shop, rationing their sips to make it last. Finally, the air force was able to evacuate the survivors.

There was no sign of the young men who had scrambled for higher ground. Neither Bhist’s son nor any of the others ever came back.

“I waited four days hoping they would come back, but the people who went up the hill did not return,” Bhist said.

Himalayan Tsunami

The mid-June 2013 deluge affected tens of thousands of people, washed away hundreds of villages, and killed at least 6,000 people. It stranded around 70,000 religious pilgrims in the mountains for weeks, as the Indian army and air force worked day and night to evacuate them. The official tally continued to fluctuate months after the disaster as more bodies were recovered.

Across rugged Himalayan valleys, hundreds of bridges were destroyed. Landslides covered thousands of miles of road. Houses, schools and hotels toppled into the torrent. Bustling markets were swept downstream.

The epicenter of the disaster was Kedarnath, near where Bhist lost his son. There, it leveled everything but the Shiva temple.

The immediate cause: the bursting of a natural dam holding back a glacial lake that ultimately triggered the “Himalayan tsunami.”

But the root cause was climate change, according to experts.
 
As the weeks passed, scientists concluded that something more complex had occurred than the simple bursting of a glacial dam.

The devastation was unleashed by a perfect storm consisting of heavy rain; warmer, looser snowpack; and most insidiously by a climate-induced glacial instability that, in future years, threatens to wreak havoc across the region, dozens of miles from the high peaks.

Underlying all of these is a factor beyond India’s control: the changing pattern of the monsoon.

Lifelong residents say they have never seen a torrential downpour like the one that struck this past June. But the timing was as important as the volume of the rains. Since local scientists became aware of the issue of climate change, they’ve observed that the snow has been coming later and the rains earlier every year. At the same time, the sudden cloudbursts that most often cause flash flooding have increased in frequency.

In 2013, the snowmelt runoff was at its peak when the monsoon arrived — letting loose the deadly cloudburst over Kedarnath.

“Earlier there was [such a] cloudburst [every] five, six, eight years. Now you see one every second year,” said Anil Joshi, who heads the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization (HESCO).

This year, unseasonal rains lashed Uttarakhand and parts of neighboring Himachal Pradesh for three straight days.

“Continuous and heavy rainfall occurred on the 15th and 16th [of] June,” said Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG) glaciologist D.P. Dobhal. “If you see the measurement of all the previous years it was 200-300 times more than normal.”

But as global warming progresses, local scientists warn that such extreme climatic events will grow increasingly common.

The shifting climate also has an adverse impact on the snow pack.

Warmer temperatures mean that snowfall that once began in October now arrives in January. That leaves too little time for it to harden into more heat-resistant ice. So when summer returns, the volume of meltwater is much larger.

Combined with the snowmelt, the June downpour caused flooding in countless sites along the six tributaries of the mighty Ganges that originate here.

Ironically, with more water now cascading through Himalayan valleys, climatologists fear that the heavily populated downstream regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India will soon suffer from water shortages as the glacial ice becomes depleted.

Glacial time bombs

Aside from the stronger rains and the later snowfall, melting glaciers are literally transforming the Himalayan landscape at an unprecedented rate.

An hour or two before the flash flood forced Bhist and the other laborers to scramble for safety, scientific observers posted at the Chorabari Lake, about a mile and a half upstream from Kedarnath, heard a loud bang, according to WIHG’s Dobhal. It had already been raining for days, and millions of gallons of water had accumulated in the lake.

Now, Dobhal speculates that the bang heard by his researchers may have been the noise of an avalanche or landslide that knocked loose the natural dam of ice and rock holding back the lake — draining it in minutes and sending the full force of the waters down onto the town below.

It won't be the last such disaster, experts fear.

Across the region, rising temperatures are fast creating thousands of such lakes. And the growing volume of meltwater is dangerously increasing the risk of sudden glacial lake outburst floods, according to the Kathmandu-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.

“When you talk about glacial lakes, in Nepal alone there are more than 1,400 lakes. And if you talk about the whole Himalayan Range ... there are about 20,000 glacial lakes,” says Pradeep Mool, who monitors the risk of glacial lake outbursts for the mountain development center.  

More than 200 of these lakes have been classified as potentially dangerous. Some of them — like a 250-acre lake holding 5 billion gallons of meltwater high in the mountains of the northeast Indian state of Sikkim — could affect many people living hundreds of miles downstream.

“There are so many lakes in the higher reaches,” said WIHG’s Tewari. “We have to monitor all those lakes now. This might happen in other parts of the Himalayas especially in Badrinath and Gangotri [where there are also temples that attract hundreds of thousands of religious pilgrims every year].”

There are some 250 glacial lakes above population centers like the tourist town of Manali, for example.

And shortly after the Kedarnath disaster this summer, images from remote sensing satellites showed that the level of water in Parchu Lake, in Tibet, was also rising rapidly, putting some two dozen towns and villages along India's Sutlej River in Himachal Pradesh at risk.

Lost lives, lost livelihoods

Today, the tourists and pilgrims have been evacuated from Uttarakhand. But government officials and aid workers are still coping with the tragedy’s impact.

With the destruction of the roads and bridges connecting many villages to larger towns and cities, tens of thousands of people are now forced to hike for basic supplies like rice and flour. Moreover, their renewed isolation threatens to erase the economic gains that come from access to markets and labor centers.

“We have villages that got totally destroyed,” said Aditi Kaur, 43, who heads the non-profitMountain Children’s Foundation. “The river has just become so wide now, [and] the flow was so swift, that there is no rubble left to see.”

“The fields just disappeared into the river so the food-grain you are growing for the next year is not going to be there. The disaster that has happened today is also affecting tomorrow and a year from now.”

Worse still, in some of these villages, all of the men worked in Kedarnath during the pilgrimage season, so there are countless families whose fathers, husbands, and brothers have all been lost.

Because few village women have ever left their fields and livestock for paid jobs — though all of them work from sunrise to sunset — a loss of husband and father means the loss of the family’s sole breadwinner.

That was the scene that confronted Bhist when, five days after he'd clung to a tree to save his life, he hiked four hours to his home village of Chandrapuri.

Some 64 of his downhill neighbors’ houses had been washed away, along with acres of fields and crops. Half of the village was now a floodplain of gray sand.

Worst of all, his son had not returned.

When two of his four ponies straggled in, alone, a few days later, he knew he’d never see him again.

There is now nobody but 64-year-old Bhist left to support the son’s wife and two small children — a 6-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy.

Having spent all his life working the pilgrimage route, he cannot imagine returning to the only job he knows, and virtually the only one available, after the horrifying ordeal that he suffered.

His religious faith, too, has been shattered.

“Where is God? We used to go there to pay our respects to God, to touch his feet and daily bow our heads before him. God could have saved us somehow or the other. He could have taken me and saved my son.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/science/131112/himalayan-tsunami-climate-change-floods

Here's a shocker: Repainting part of the Berlin Wall is a sensitive topic

An artist’s guerilla strike on Berlin's East Side Gallery reignites controversy about what remains of the once-despised barrier.
By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (November 11, 2013)

BERLIN, Germany — As guerilla strikes go, Jim Avignon's assault on a mile-long stretch of the former Berlin Wall was a masterpiece.

Ten minutes after the artist began painting over his 1990 mural, part of what’s called the East Side Gallery, the police turned up to stop him. He proceeded to produce a letter from the organization that manages the popular tourist attraction asking him to “refurbish” his work.

The police checked his passport and told him to carry on; they'd even make sure no one else interfered.

The trouble was that Avignon wasn't exactly restoring his 1990 work. He was covering it with something entirely different, which he'd been expressly forbidden to do by the artists' collective in charge of the site.

“It was surprisingly easy because respecting the authorities has a big tradition in Germany,” Avignon said in an interview. “The letter was four years old. It didn't show my original painting. I could have easily made it with Photoshop.”

His controversial action has reignited a longstanding debate about the legacy of the Wall’s remaining pieces.

Painted spontaneously by more than 100 international artists while the rest of it was being torn down two decades ago, the East Side Gallery is the longest remaining stretch of the once-despised barrier between the Soviet Bloc and Western Europe — and a protected monument.

Avignon’s “Doin' It Cool for the East Side” depicted stunned East Berliners confronting the golden arches of a McDonald's at the Brandenburg Gate and other images of the shocking clash between the communist East and capitalist West.

That’s no longer relevant, he believes. His new work evokes Berlin's current identity crisis through images such as a dollar holding a whip and a foreign real estate speculator carrying off an apartment building like a suitcase.

Avignon argues that it addresses the commercialization, or degradation, of the original East Side Gallery works. By painting over his “historical” mural with a new one, however, Avignon was also making a statement about who owns the work.

“For years, they made it clear this is a holy thing and nobody should touch it,” Avignon says of the Wall’s other artists. However, “if one of their own group changes it, then that means the whole idea could change.”

Most members of the Artists' Initiative for the East Side Gallery disagree. Standing in its original location along the River Spree in the neighborhood of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg — formerly part of East Berlin — the gallery captures the heady zeitgeist of the days immediately following the end of the Cold War in 1989, they argue.

“We as a board agreed that Avignon's actions were totally unacceptable,” Lutz Weber, spokesman for the group, told Berlin's MorgenPost newspaper following Avignon's guerilla strike. “We are considering whether or not to lodge a legal complaint.”

“The original images were painted to capture the spirit of the times,” artist Birgit Kinder told the Tagespiegel. “If we don't preserve that, we’ll soon have a Disneyland where everyone just paints what he likes.”

Perhaps. Avignon’s critics say he couldn't walk into a museum or a collector’s home and paint over one of his own works regardless of whether he felt they’d lost their cultural currency.

Avignon counters that his painting, if not all the East Side Gallery’s works, aren’t museum pieces but street art, which means they’re transitory by nature and have no clear “owners.”

He made his original work spontaneously on a piece of public property without knowing its future fate, he says, but also without contracting for its sale.

“At the moment we created it, we thought the Wall would be taken down after three years and the single pieces would be auctioned,” Avignon says. “We were naïve.”

Today, it's clear others also see the monument as a piece of the Wall rather than an art gallery.

George Lutz's “Wir waren so frei” (We were so free) — a largely white painting of a giant Gorbachev driving with a hammer-and-sickle steering wheel — is covered with names and slogans written by tourists and ne'er-do-wells. Killroy was not here. But Johnske, Mad Mike, and Dominic Khoo were, and a brisk walk down the mile-long “gallery” reveals that Marc Neo SG was practically everywhere.

Jens-Helge Dahmen's “Pneumohumanoiden” (Pneumatic humanoids) is hardly visible beneath all the scrawls, while a leather-jacketed tourist from Spain chuckles over the word “Faggots” crudely spray painted over Dmitry Vrubel's painting “My God, help me survive this deadly love,” which depicts Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev locked in a passionate kiss with his East German counterpart Erich Honecker.

The vandalism, more than the elements of nature, has prompted the paintings’ periodic restoration.

But Avignon's supporters argue that repainting his own work and the tourist graffiti evoked the site’s original spirit more closely than refurbishing the static murals.

Historian Brian Ladd, whose book Ghosts of Berlin chronicles the city’s history through its architecture, says the arguments on both sides raise the question of why the East Side Gallery deserves preservation.

“It remains standing only because of that 1990 cooperative effort to paint it,” he says. “Yet I think the public cherishes the site now as the Wall, not as art.”

From its initial construction in 1961 until its spontaneous destruction began in 1989, the Wall’s west side served as a public canvas for political expression. Graffiti was acceptable and even welcome because it called attention to the structure’s absurdity and cruelty, Ladd says.

During the fervor of its collapse, the public claimed ownership of the hated barrier by carting pieces away as souvenirs, including a priceless mural by Keith Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990.

“That’s the key difference between the Wall before and after 1990,” Ladd says. “The functioning Wall was East German state property, which meant that on the Western side, it was seen as illegitimate. The few pieces that were saved became something different.”

Avignon (and perhaps Marc NEO SG) disagree.

“It's like Disneyland now: Tourists pose in front of the paintings and want to write their names,” Avignon says.

When it comes to evoking the feelings produced by the Wall’s destruction, “that means most of the works aren't strong enough.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131108/germany-berlin-wall-east-side-gallery-avignon

German response to NSA scandal reflects country’s changing role

Berlin rules out asylum for Edward Snowden, but his revelations mark a possible turn in relations with Washington. The question is in which direction.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 5, 2013)

BERLIN, Germany — Government officials are swiftly backpedaling on the possibility of offering asylum or safe passage to the American whistleblower Edward Snowden as the potential damage to US relations sinks in.

“There is no reason to grant asylum to Edward Snowden. He is not facing political persecution,” Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told a Munich newspaper Tuesday, apparently squashing mounting calls for an agreement for Snowden to testify before a parliamentary committee here.

Offering the former NSA contractor a deal would be “the termination letter for the transatlantic partnership” between Germany and the US, Free Democratic Party chairman Christian Lindner told the Berliner Zeitung.

But the real news lies between the lines, and reflects the authorities’ grappling with their country’s emerging role as Europe’s most influential state.

After World War II, West Germany — the capitalist Federal Republic of Deutschland — became a rubber stamp ally of the United States, on which it depended for economic aid and, for many years more, military protection.

Since the end of the Cold War and German reunification, however, the country has grown increasingly uncomfortable with that role, especially as it’s emerged as Europe’s economic powerhouse during the past decade.

Germany has taken an ever-larger role in foreign policy since 2001, including by reorienting its military in order to take part in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The euro crisis cemented its role as Europe’s de facto leader. Now Snowden’s revelations are prompting questions about whether Germany will remain an all-weather ally like Britain or a trickier one like France.

Deutsche Welle’s Volker Wagener believes the relationship with the United States continues to follow the “master and servant principle.”

But there's more pressure now than ever on Chancellor Angela Merkel to assert Germany's sovereignty, which could mark an important turning point.

The country’s data protection commissioner Peter Schaar, who’s leading calls to enact tough new regulations that would safeguard Germans’ privacy, says a way can be found to enable Snowden to testify in Germany in exchange for protection from US prosecution.

“It's more or less a political question of how far in our national interests it can be justified,” he told GlobalPost.

Last week, the Green Party's Hans-Christian Ströbele took the initiative by flying to Moscowfor a secret meeting with Snowden before announcing the whistleblower had agreed to testify before German investigators in exchange for asylum or safe passage to another country that would protect him from extradition to the US.

Various leaders, including Merkel's own interior minister, joined the chorus, even as officials traveled to Washington this week to hammer out details of a so-called no-spying pact.

But reports that the two countries’ top intelligence officials will finalize that deal by early next year — together with the sudden flurry of explanations as to why asylum for Snowden isn't necessary after all — suggest the whistleblower's revelations are as likely to tighten the Merkel-Obama embrace as to drive a wedge between them.

The no-spying pact will probably concern sharing secrets as much as curtailing surveillance, according to reports in Der Spiegel and Deutsche Welle.

That could elevate Berlin’s alliance with Washington by making it responsible for building its own all-powerful internet surveillance operation.

The model for the pact is probably the longstanding “Five Eyes” alliance, under which the English-speaking nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US agree not to spy on each other and to share intelligence information.

Like the recent German military reorientation — which reversed the decades-long stance that German soldiers should never again fight on foreign soil — that would make Berlin a closer and more valuable ally for Washington. But it would also require debate about what kind of country Germans want to live in.

“Membership in this exclusive club means [one has] to share information with the other four eyes or four members and to help in the field of mass surveillance,” data commissioner Schaar said.

“This would not be in compliance with our fundamental rights as defined in our basic law and confirmed by our constitutional court.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131105/germany-nsa-scandal-reflects-snowden-asylum

Germany: Privacy protections must go beyond 'no-spying act'

Washington and Berlin are close to agreeing not to spy on each other. That won’t be enough, Germany's data protection commissioner tells GlobalPost.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 4, 2013)

BERLIN, Germany — German intelligence officials are meeting with their American counterparts in Washington on Monday for a second round of talks aimed at hammering out a so-called “no spying pact” that would ensure US spooks never again snoop on Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone calls.

But Germany's data protection commissioner believes that’s far from enough for protecting the privacy of ordinary citizens.

“There must be a complete redesign of the structures and methods and rules governing secret services and collection of data by those secret services,” the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Peter Schaar said in an interview with GlobalPost.

He said it’s crucial that the right to privacy extends beyond borders and not remain restricted to US citizens, and that it must include clear regulations defining who can be targeted for surveillance and what kind of data can be collected.

“The complete change that has happened 10 or 15 years ago — especially after 9/11 — [has been to] go away from collecting data on suspects to collecting all data you could collect without any suspicion or any concrete information that there are threats,” Schaar said. “This is one of our main problems.”

A balding, avuncular figure, Schaar has spent the past decade in his post working to establish rules for protecting privacy in Germany and the European Union.

But he’s recently emerged as the most trenchant German critic of how his country has handled the NSA scandal. Calling for Merkel to play hardball to secure broader commitments from President Obama, he believes Edward Snowden's revelations have opened a “window of opportunity” for Germany to extend the protection of its citizens and for the EU to push through tough new privacy laws.

That window could be closing fast, however.

On Monday, Gerhard Schindler, head of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (BfV), were set to meet with NSA officials to iron out the details of a pact not to spy on each other, Germany's Die Zeit reported.

The talks follow discussions last week that included Merkel's foreign policy adviser, the coordinator of the German secret service, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Lisa Monaco, assistant to the US president for homeland security and counterterrorism.

German officials expect the “no spying” agreement to be finalized by early 2014, according to Die Zeit. But how far the pact will go in limiting the rights of the NSA and similar agencies remains to be seen.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that the two sides have agreed not to conduct industrial espionage on each other in the future.

Presumably, a pact will be hammered out to also protect Merkel's phone — the hacking of which turned Germany from quiet supporter to dogged NSA critic. However, nothing is known about any protections the deal may offer to ordinary citizens.

In Germany, where both the Nazis and the communist government of the former East employed ruthless agencies to spy on their own people, that's unlikely to assuage fears surrounding the NSA's massive internet surveillance programs.

“The Obama administration said previously that they do not spy for business purposes,” Schaar said.

“If they now say, 'Oh, well, we confirm that we don’t spy for business purposes,' we can believe this or not. But it is not an advantage compared with the situation before. We need much more comprehensive rules for what is allowed and what is a no-go area.”

Merkel has repeatedly said that concerns over the NSA scandal should not be allowed to affect business. Schaar disagrees.

Last week, the commissioner called for Germany to stop sharing banking information with companies in the United States and to suspend the Safe Harbor agreement that allows American companies operating within the European Union to transfer customer data and store it in the US — moves that would create some chaos in the business world.

He also argued in favor of suspending negotiations for the much-vaunted US-EU free trade pact.

Despite the ongoing talks for the no-spying pact, he sees no reason to back down now.

“I followed the hearing of [NSA director Keith] Alexander and Mr. Clapper in front of the intelligence committee. They said: 'What we did was in compliance with US law and we need this. We do not intend to change.' If we get this message, I would say of course there must be a clear answer from the European side.”

Although the capabilities of its own intelligence services pale in comparison with the NSA’s, Germany has also shifted from tracking concrete suspects to trolling the internet for useful information. But its clearly defined limits on that information-gathering could shape the direction of a no-spying pact as well as further regulations currently under debate in the European Parliament.

Germany's so-called G-10 act — which relates to the surveillance of communication protected by article 10 of the German constitution — bars the intelligence services from monitoring more than 20 percent of the overall internet traffic, according to Schaar.

Moreover, the search terms used to filter communications must be cleared through a parliamentary commission — ensuring, at least to some degree, that the civilian government knows what its clandestine operators are doing.

However, based on what’s known of the scale of NSA operations and Washington’s apparent use of the UK's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to skirt what limited US regulations do exist, those limitations must now go much further, Schaar believes.

“Governments can’t be convinced by good words or the public alone, he said. “Especially if that public is outside their own country.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131104/germany-privacy-protection-peter-scheer-no-spying-act

Edward Snowden angles for a ticket to Germany

The whistleblower offers to testify in exchange for asylum: MP.

By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost (November 1, 2013)

BERLIN, Germany — Edward Snowden will not testify before German officials while he remains in Russia, an opposition lawmaker said on Friday.

Speaking after the government offered Snowden to meet with German representatives in Moscow, Green Party legislator Hans-Christian Ströbele — who met with Snowden in Moscow this week — said the whistleblower is keen to testify before a proposed German parliamentary committee to investigate spying allegations surrounding the US National Security Agency (NSA) only if Germany can protect him from arrest.

“Snowden has considerable reservations [about testifying in Russia] that I neither can nor want to explain in more detail,” said Ströbele, the longest serving member of the parliamentary committee that oversees German intelligence, told reporters at a news conference.

“He can imagine coming to testify in Germany. But for that he would need to be assured that he would be able to remain safely in Germany or a comparable country,” Ströbele said.

In stepping forward to broker such a deal, Ströbele may put additional pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to take a tough stance in negotiations regarding US surveillance programs — which have raised considerable controversy here because of the legacy of the Third Reich's Gestapo secret police and the East German Stasi.

“I hope Stroebele’s making a first step will enable an open and conclusive conversation about the spying of foreign intelligence services on German citizens,” said Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an internet security expert and former spokesman for Wikileaks.

Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said earlier that his client could not leave Russia without violating the terms of his asylum.

“Snowden will not go to Germany,” the Voice of Russia reported Kucherena as saying. “This is not possible because he has no right to cross Russian borders.”

But he added that the whistleblower is free to testify to visiting German officials.

That essentially means Snowden can’t return to Russia if he leaves. However, he may be hoping to gain asylum in Germany instead by mounting pressure on Merkel to secure his testimony before the parliamentary committee.

Analysts are skeptical the government would grant him asylum.

"I don’t think asylum in Germany is the only expectation Snowden may have," said Klaus Segbers of Berlin's Free University. "But he’ll certainly insist on guarantees that in case he would travel to Germany to testify, he would be free to return to Moscow and not be handed over to the US authorities."

The German Foreign Ministry rejected Snowden’s asylum application in June on a technicality: requests can be made only on German soil.

Were Snowden to get here, he could join the thousands of refugees and asylum seekers whose cases languish for months and sometimes years before they are decided. However, if the Interior Ministry declares his presence to be in the country's national interest, he could begranted permanent residency.

During Friday's news conference, Ströbele revealed the contents of a brief letter he said was intended for Merkel, although it was addressed “To whom it may concern.”

Ströbele said he uploaded a copy of the letter to the internet.

It says Snowden hopes to participate in the “responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media” and leaked documents.

It provides no new revelations regarding NSA surveillance or Snowden's current life in Russia. But it excoriates Washington for the “severe and sustained campaign of persecution” that forced the former NSA contractor into exile.

Ströbele and members of the German media spoke with the 30-year-old whistleblower for more than three hours on Thursday. German broadcaster ARD aired some of the footage.

More from GlobalPost: Do try this at home: revolution for dummies

Ströbele said on Friday that the meeting had been planned for months.

"You all know that the entire world has been talking about Edward Snowden since June," he said. "Then I thought, why not talk to him personally?"

"I therefore have not had a holiday because I have been waiting with a packed bag," Ströbele said.

Segbers of Berlin's Free University said Americans would see Germany’s giving Snowden asylum as a serious breach of US interests. "Granting him free passage [to testify and return to Russia] may be less problematic, but not by much," he said.

"We already now find ourselves in the most serious crisis between Germany and the US since the second world war."

Here is a copy of Snowden's letter:



Snowden letter to Merkel by Daniel Bentley



http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/131101/edward-snowden-germany-letter-asylum

Kerry declines to play America's chief salesman in India

Analysis: Despite vigorous lobbying by executives, the secretary of state remains quiet on economic reform. Experts say that's the right strategy.

Jason OverdorfJune 24, 2013 16:05

NEW DELHI — America’s secretary of state often plays the role of lead US salesman abroad, urging governments to buy products and to facilitate foreign investment.

As such, American executives have been pushing John Kerry hard to get India to further open its markets to American investors.

But as Kerry’s agenda unfolds here at the start of his three-day visit, it’s becoming increasingly clear that he won’t fulfill those demands — at least not publicly.

Sources here in New Delhi say that’s probably the right approach, even for business.

Already, the current Indian government agrees with America's agenda many issues, particularly economic ones. Exerting too much pressure, particularly in open forums like press conferences and official speaches, they say, is likely to backfire.

The reason: Indians distrust lobbying from US industry, so stumping for reforms can fuel opposition claims that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's United Progressive Alliance government is the puppet of exploitative US corporations.

“This [government] is the best team you can assemble for a market reform agenda. So pushing these people hard does not make sense. It is not in their competence to change the political situation here,” said Lalit Mansingh, a former Indian ambassador to the US.

On arriving in India Sunday for the fourth annual India-US Strategic Dialogue, Kerry surprised some observers by focusing on climate change in his first speech. He did touch on broader economic issues, as well as broader security concerns as the US prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan.

But Mansingh said this approach indicates Kerry has come to India with a sound strategy.

“He didn't bring in any of these contentious [trade] issues,” Mansingh said, indicating that more can be accomplished by talking with India's US-friendly business leaders behind closed doors.

“I think he did well in pointing out three major sectors – climate change, economic cooperation and security. There are plenty of issues in these three sectors for the two countries to discuss without getting into a heated debate.”

Kerry stuck to that script at a press conference following his meeting with Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid on Monday. He mentioned blandly that the two leaders discussed trade and other economic issues. But he devoted more time to defending the National Security Agency's PRISM electronic surveillance system and to urging countries not to offer refuge to whistleblower-and-accused-spy Edward Snowden, whom Kerry called “a traitor to his country.”

He also reiterated his call for India to assist with elections in Afghanistan next year and praised India for cooperating with efforts to encourage Iran to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as announcing a $150,000 aid package for the victims of flooding in the Himalayas.

The US-India Business Council and similar lobby groups had urged Kerry to press India to alter several key economic policies, on matters such as drug patents and preferential market access for companies with local manufacturing units Lobbyists had also demanded less onerous limits on foreign direct investment in potentially lucrative areas for US firms, such as the defense and insurance sectors.

But those efforts ignored the political reality in India, where Singh and his team are keen on economic reforms but can't sell them to their coalition partners.

The politics appear to be shifting, however. Due to a plummeting rupee, the country desperately needs foreign direct investment to meet its development goals and stabilize markets. If the US business lobby can get out of its own way, the government may just succeed in expanding market access for American firms.

Last week, the rupee fell to an all-time low of almost 60 to the US dollar after US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke forecast a reduction of America's stimulus package, causing foreign investors to sell some $300 million in Indian stocks. That means India now faces a “growing strain to fund the widest current-account deficit in major Asian countries,”according to Bloomberg.

Virtually the only weapon that Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has left in his arsenal is to throw open more industries to direct investment by foreigners

“Given the current economic situation... the proclivity of the Indian government to open up to more [foreign direct investment (FDI)] will be higher at this juncture,” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at the credit ratings agency Crisil.

Before Kerry's visit, finance ministry officials said India was poised to eliminate the 74 percent cap on FDI in the telecommunications sector — though companies with local manufacturing would still have an advantage. And plans are afoot to increase the limits on FDI in defense to 49 percent from today's 26 percent, giving US firms better access to one of the world's largest and fastest growing markets if, again, they're willing to invest in making products in India.

That means that, at least in public, Kerry was wise to let India's economic situation speak for itself.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130624/why-kerry-should-speak-softly-indian-economy

India's population to overtake China's sooner than expected

Will scary UN numbers on India's soaring population spark a dangerous kneejerk reaction?

Jason OverdorfJune 14, 2013 08:51

NEW DELHI — India's population is set to outstrip China's as much as 15 years earlier than previous estimates, according to a new United Nations report. But the real concern is that the scary UN numbers could trigger a drastic and counterproductive government response.

“This is bound to cause a kneejerk reaction,” said demographer A.R. Nanda, a former secretary in India's ministry of health and family welfare. “[But] a state-directed, top-down, targeted approach of sterilization creates more problems, as well as adverse outcomes for women's health.”

According to the 2012 revision of World Population Prospects, released by the UN on Thursday, India's population will overtake China's around 2028. Previous forecasts had suggested that India wouldn't catch up until 2035 or even 2045.

By 2028, both countries will have around 1.45 billion people, the UN said in a press release. Meanwhile, the world as a whole will be groaning under 9.6 billion people by 2050, as developing nations continue to display high fertility rates.

In India, the danger is that policy makers will see the new numbers as evidence their present efforts to control the population aren't working and push for more aggressive sterilization targets, Nanda said.

More from GlobalPost: Is sterilization the answer to India's population problems?

Already, India's National Population Stabilization Fund has brought back controversial, incentive-based sterilization — which critics say have turned operating theaters into veritable assembly lines. According to a recent Bloomberg report, a stunning 4.6 million women were sterilized in India last year, many of them cut open with rusty scalpels and left to recover on concrete floors.

These programs are founded in the logic of the 1980s, reinforced by the perception that China's “one-child policy” is yet another example of the great benefits of its enviable totalitarian government.

But Nanda points out that China's fertility rates were plunging long before the one-child policy was drafted, thanks to the greater speed with which the communist government provided access to health care and education. India's fertility rates remain higher essentially because it started that process later and has been slower in improving the lives of its people.

“Our voluntary family planning program in India has not been backed up by a base of social development — access to health, access to education, access to employment has been slower [to emerge] than in China. That has been the substantial difference between the two countries,” Nanda said.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130614/india-population-growth-china

India: Where being a bad boyfriend can be a crime

When Bollywood actress Jiah Khan committed suicide, police accused her boyfriend of "abetting" her death. When does being a bastard become a crime?

Jason OverdorfJune 12, 2013 09:01

NEW DELHI, India — You've heard of assisted suicide. What about “abetment of suicide?”

That's right. In the wake of the suicide of up-and-coming British-Indian Bollywood actress Jiah Khan on June 3, the young star's boyfriend was taken into police custody on Tuesday for alleged “abetment of suicide.” But was he Dr. Death, or just a bad boyfriend?

According to Indian law, and the dictionary, abetment means aiding or encouraging. But Indian boyfriends frequently face criminal charges just for being, well, bastards—just as they are sometimes charged with rape because they don't follow through on promises of marriage.

Breaking up is hard to do, but illegal? What do young Indians think?

More from GlobalPost: Sex offender taps India's boobming surrogacy trade for baby girl

“It does make sense, because in her [suicide] letter she has specifically said that she has gone through a very bad time—she also had an abortion—just because of her boyfriend,” said Hemant Jain, a 20-year-old college student. 

“He promised her that they would get married and sent her a bouquet saying that he wanted to break up. That's not right, na?”

The boyfriend in question, 22-year-old Sooraj Pancholi, was remanded to police custody until June 13 by a Mumbai court. According to the prosecution, his detention was necessary to interrogate him about allegations that he threatened, assaulted and raped Khan, contained in a suicide note that was discovered three days after the actress hanged herself. 

“I guess the family, at least, deserves to know,” said Shreya Krishna, a 19-year-old college student. “If that calls for blaming the boyfriend, I guess it's OK. [Whether a crime took place] is for the police and the courts to decide.”

“I don't think anyone can be charged for something like this,” said Devika, a 25-year-old artist, who asked that her surname not be published.

More from GlobalPost: India women: segregated for safety

“You do have a responsibility, but I don't know if it can be charged as a criminal offense, because you don't know what that person [who killed herself] was going through internally.”

Mumbai prosecutors think you can—though India's Supreme Court has ruled that to convict someone for abetment the state must prove both intent and a direct act on the part of the accused that led the deceased to commit suicide.

“Under Section 306 of the Indian penal code, the essential ingredient of abetment [of suicide] is the intention of the person accused of the crime,” said Rajinder Singh, a criminal lawyer affiliated with the Delhi High Court. “It is a very serious offense, with a punishment of up to ten years also.”

The case touches on several new realities of Indian life. 

More from GlobalPost: Indian men pose with toilets to woo brides

Even as more and more young people are dating, having sex and living together without getting married, in both the city and the village there remains tremendous social pressure on women to conform to traditional notions of propriety. Just last week nine brides were thrown out of a government-sponsored mass marriage in the state of Madhya Pradesh after they “failed” a pregnancy test. 

And the rapid social changes may be taking a heavy toll, as suicide is now the second-most common cause of death among Indians between 15 and 29 years old, according to a study published in the Lancet.

However, the real question shouldn't be whether Pancholi was a bad boyfriend, but rather whether he actively encouraged Jiah to kill herself or aided her in some way. Otherwise, his so-called crime derives from an action taken by his victim, rather than anything he did.

Say what you want about a guy who (allegedly) promises to marry his girlfriend, beats her up, gets her pregnant, and then dumps her. But you can't say he's any worse, or deserves any more jail time, than another guy who does the exact same thing, just because one girlfriend killed herself and another did not.

Except in India.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130612/jiah-khan-suicide-boyfriend

Israeli sex offender taps India's booming surrogacy trade for baby girl

Sex offender's use of surrogate highlights need for regulatory oversight.

Jason OverdorfJune 10, 2013 15:34

NEW DELHI, India — The revelation that a convicted sex offender from Israelsucceeded years ago in hiring a surrogate mother and taking a baby girl home from India sent shock waves through India's booming, controversial surrogacy industry this week.

But there is little that India or Israel can do at this point to influence the fate of the little girl, who is now 4 years old.

“The child is not going to be removed from the home now because according to the law in Israel if there's no proof that the parent is severely harming the child [the authorities] cannot take the child out of the home,” Elizabeth Levy, director of international relations at the Jerusalem-based National Council for the Child (NCC), told GlobalPost.

After receiving an anonymous tip via email, the NCC confirmed through its own investigation that the man caring for the young girl was a convicted sex offender, Levy said. He had spent 18 months in jail previously for sexually abusing young children under his supervision, the Jewish Chronicle reported.

The nonprofit group said they informed the police, Israeli social services and the girl's school of their findings. Israeli authorities placed the man under observation and compelled him to undergo psychological counseling, but no other legal action can be taken — partly because authorities believe the man is the girl's biological father.

Further, the NCC investigation hasn’t turned up any evidence of current abuse. “There's no proof that he's harming the child. The child has not complained about any misconduct on the part of her father,” Levy said in a telephone interview with GlobalPost.

For many Indians, that's hard to accept. But experts say there aren't legal grounds for Indian authorities to take action, either. Neither are there rules in place to stop another convicted pedophile from hiring an Indian surrogate mother tomorrow — an oversight that has prompted calls for the speedy passage of a bill to regulate the industry that has been pending since 2008.

The surrogacy trade in India started in 2002, when the government declared the practice legal, and has experienced a boom over the past five years or so.  Though official numbers aren't available, rough estimates suggest that the surrogacy business is already worth more than $350 million a year, according to a recent report by the New Delhi-based Sama Resource Group for Women and Health. Meanwhile, industry estimates suggest that some 50,000 people visit India annually seeking surrogate mothers, resulting in around 2,000 births per year — and providing livelihoods, albeit controversially, to thousands of poor, unskilled women.

As a move to bar gay men from India's surrogacy business showed earlier this year, regulating the industry is morally complex. New restrictions and new levels of bureaucratic oversight — whether well-meaning or founded in ignorance — can be very bad for business. After the rule against gay men was instituted, an industry expert told GlobalPost he expected it would mean losing a third to half of India's present customers to places like Thailand.

But, while increased regulation may limit business, the cost of ignoring potential problems when determining fit parents can be extraordinarily high — as the case in Israel reveals.

“The biggest problem is that in our country [India] there is no written law regarding surrogacy. Surrogacy is seen as a private contract between two willing parties,” said Rekha Aggarwal, a Supreme Court lawyer who specializes in adoption cases.

That means that there are no background checks required for parents who wish to hire an Indian surrogate to bear a child for them. And as long as these clients can prove that they are the biological parent of the baby, the more stringent rules governing adoptions don't come into play. Indeed, in many, if not most, cases, the biological parent soon establishes that the baby is a foreign citizen.

Currently, the NCC has not been able to learn anything about the surrogate mother employed by the convicted sex offender in Israel, or the agency he might have used in India, Levy said. Without more details, Indian rights workers are stumped about how to proceed.

“We tried to get more information about which part of the country the child came from,” said Bharti Ali, an activist with the New Delhi-based Haq Center for Child Rights. “They [the Israelis] don't have much information, so we're struggling as a result.”

In both countries, the case has prompted calls for stricter regulations.

In India, child rights advocates have stressed that the government should move rapidly to pass the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, pending since 2008, and to institute background checks for clients seeking surrogacy like the ones used to screen adoptive parents.

Similarly, in Israel, the NCC wrote to the Ministry of Health demanding effective regulations for parents who choose to employ surrogates outside the country.

“On one hand, legislation will facilitate the process for good and worthy citizens who have chosen (often with no other choice) to become parents through surrogacy abroad and find themselves with a child born abroad with no regulated status and without rights,” the letter argued.

“On the other hand, the legal regulation of foreign surrogacy will allow screening of those requesting to go this route in order to avoid situations that are often discussed such as having children for the purpose of trafficking or abuse.”

For now, though, the 4-year-old girl is caught between two countries, in the arms of a potentially dangerous father.

“This child is like nobody's child,” said Aggarwal. “The Indian government can't touch that baby, because she doesn't have Indian citizenship. She's nobody's baby now, as far as the government is concerned.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130610/india-israeli-sex-offender-taps-indias-booming-surro

India: Buried in garbage

As India's economy grows, the country's poorly managed trash sites are overflowing.

Jason OverdorfJune 6, 2013 06:06

NEW DELHI, India — The signs of India's garbage crisis are everywhere.

In the slums of New Delhi, piles of refuse slated for recycling tower over the shanties.

In the posh colonies of the wealthy, so-called ragpickers — who make a living selling scrap metal, glass and other recyclable items — pull garbage out of primitive concrete enclosures to sort it on the street.

They cast aside anything they can't sell, while stray cattle and half-wild dogs wade through plastic bags and bottles to root out kitchen scraps.

On highways and city streets, potato chip packets and betel nut wrappers blow in the wind, clogging up rain gutters just in time for the monsoon.

It looks like hardly any of the stuff makes it to designated dump sites.

But the real emergency remains out of sight.

New Delhi’s 16.75 million people make it one of the biggest cities on the planet, and their combined waste is massive. The city generates nearly 10,000 tons of garbage — equal to the US average weight of about 5,000 cars — every day.

That volume is expected to double over the next decade or so.

Yet the city's four dump sites — most of which aren't sophisticated enough to be called landfills — are already overflowing.

At the Ghazipur dump site, in East Delhi, for instance, ragpickers scramble over a pile of filth that towers 100 feet or higher.

And while experts estimate the city will need some 500 acres of new landfills to process the city's mounting waste, only 100-odd acres have been targeted for waste-management projects, and even those sites have been delayed by India's notorious problems acquiring land.

“If you go to Ghazipur on a summer day, it's unbearable as soon as you get out of your car,” said N.B. Mazumdar, senior technical adviser at IL&FS Environmental Infrastructure & Services.

“You feel a blast. You feel as if you are inside an oven. The dust, the smoke, the heat. And there inside you will find so many ragpickers, from children to old people, rummaging through waste. What is this? This is hell!”

Outside the capital, the problem might be even worse. Last year, citizens across the country protested against the garbage pileup — with the villagers of Vilappisala, in Kerala, lying in the road to prevent trucks from adding to a dump site they say has dangerously polluted the local aquifer.

Burning trash remains one of the largest sources of air pollution, despite mushrooming factories with little monitoring from the Central Pollution Control Board, and the overflowing garbage contaminates water sources and breeds vermin.

In Mumbai, for instance, failure to collect garbage has contributed to the growth of a huge population of stray dogs, drawing leopards from Sanjay Gandhi National Park into urban areas where they maul and sometimes kill poor slum dwellers.

Leopard attacks are only the most exotic way that garbage can kill. Across India, rabies resulting from stray dog bites accounts for 20,000 deaths a year.

Meanwhile, trash fires are responsible for about 20 percent of Mumbai's air pollution. Every year they spew into the air some 2,500 times the amount of toxins emitted by all 127 ofFrance's waste-to-energy plants, according to a recent editorial by Ranjith Annepu of the Global Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council.

No doubt the situation in other cities is as bad or worse.

Some hope may be on the horizon from public-private partnerships and new initiatives to make money from waste.

For instance, an IL&FS composting plant in Okhla, an industrial neighborhood of southeast Delhi, processes about 200 tons of garbage per day, reducing 80 percent of it to humus-rich fertilizer that is badly needed in India due to low carbon content in the soil. (This year, the plant earned about $50,000 worth of carbon credits under the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism in the process).

In Ghazipur, IL&FS has ambitious plans to build a new waste-to-energy plant that will slowly eat away the massive tower of trash. And the company is seeking ways to supplement the incomes of 450 small local dairy farms with a biomass plant and to provide better housing for about 375 slum families associated with the Ghazipur flower market and other local cottage industries.

Similarly, other Indian companies such as Arora Fibres, Hanjer Biotech Energies and Cerebra are tapping the never-ending flow of garbage to manufacture packaging material, generate “refuse-derived fuel,” or RDF, for use by cement plants and other factories and mining thousands of tons of electronic waste for precious metals.

But there are massive hurdles to overcome.

Municipal governments are loath to raise property taxes to finance projects that could turn garbage into a renewable resource. Thousands of city garbage collectors shirk their jobs, while sharp-eyed, motivated ragpickers — potentially the most valuable resource for sorting-dependent units like the Okhla composting plant — remain “self-employed” and hungry. And the recent plunge in international prices for carbon credits has made it virtually impossible for either composting or waste-to-energy facilities to make a profit.

Perhaps worst of all, precious few Indians have realized that the country's garbage culture has to change.

“On the one hand, we've progressed a lot in different fields. We use the best gadgets. We want the best comforts,” Mazumdar said.

“But on the other hand, we just don't look at the waste basket in our kitchen, or what we're doing when we litter the streets. Behaviorally, we don't tend to be responsible enough.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130605/indian-garbage-dump