IHT Rendezvous: Environmental Warning Fatigue Sets in

Record levels of industrial smog? A dwindling number of fish in the world’s oceans? A 4° Celsius warming in global temperatures by the end of the century?

How about environmental warning fatigue?

Global concern for major environmental issues is at an all time low, according to the results of a global poll of more than 22,000 people in 22 countries, released earlier this week.

“Scientists report that evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever — but our data shows that economic crisis and a lack of political leadership mean that the public are starting to tune out,” said Doug Miller, the chairman of GlobeScan, the company that carried out the study.

While respondents clearly still had grave environmental concerns, fewer people were “very concerned” about various environmental issues than at any point in the last 20 years. The sharpest decrease in global concern occurred over the last two years.

The issue of climate change, which 49 percent of respondents rated last year as “very serious” was the only exception to the general trend. Pollsters found that there was less concern between 1998 and 2003 than today.

Shortages of fresh water and water pollution were the highest global concern, with 58 percent of the respondents marking it as “very serious.”

Respondents were asked to rate seven different environmental issues – from climate change to loss of biodiversity – as being either a “very serious problem,” “somewhat serious problem,” “not very serious problem” or “not a serious problem at all.”

The latest numbers were gathered last summer in telephone and face-to-face interviews with participants in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Join our sustainability conversation. Do you take the environmental issues more seriously now than in the past? Do you find yourself tuning out?

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British By-Election Shows New Support for Rightist Party

LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives took a harsh pummeling on Friday with a by-election result that showed surging support for the United Kingdom Independence Party, a right-wing group whose deep inroads into the Conservative vote, if sustained at a general election in two years’ time, could oust the Conservative government and usher the Labour Party back into 10 Downing Street.

Midterm by-elections in Britain have been notoriously quirky for decades, providing an opportunity for protest voting that have often been poor predictors of general election outcomes.

And that was the line taken by Mr. Cameron as senior figures in his party were acknowledging privately that the result from Thursday’s vote in Eastleigh, a mainly suburban constituency near the coastal city of Southampton, had thrown the deeply divided Conservatives into further disarray.

“This is a by-election. It’s midterm. It’s a protest. That’s what happens in by-elections,” Mr. Cameron said after the Eastleigh results showed the independence party, known as UKIP, taking 28 percent of the vote, pushing the Conservatives, with 25 percent, into third place in a contest for a seat that they hoped they could win. The winners were the Liberal Democrats, a left-of-center party that has been in an increasingly fractious governing coalition with the Conservatives since the general election in 2010.

Commentators attributed the UKIP surge — their best result in a contest for a parliamentary seat — to the party’s relentless campaigning on two issues that have a powerful resonance among right-of-center voters: high levels of immigration and Britain’s membership in the 27-nation European Union.

European directives on a wide range of social, economic and judicial issues have been a persistent source of discontent among British voters generally and a cause of long-standing strife among Conservatives.

Increasingly in recent months, the general election expected in 2015 has become a magnetizing force in British politics, with all parties watching opinion polls with a view to gaining advantage in what is expected to be a tight contest. The Conservatives have been running up to 12 percentage points behind Labour in recent national opinion polls, a gap that has not been insuperable for some governing parties in the past.

But their uphill battle to retain the power they won in 2010, after 13 years in opposition, could founder if the UKIP surge continues and turns the election into a four-cornered battle, with UKIP, hitherto seen as a mainly marginal protest group, contending as a mainstream force alongside the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. While it drew support from all three major parties in the Eastleigh vote, early analyses of the voting suggested that it inflicted most damage on the Conservatives.

Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, described the by-election result as a watershed moment for the party, particularly as it came in a southern, heavily middle-class constituency that has not seen the influx of immigrants that has helped boost the UKIP vote in other recent electoral contests, particularly in rundown industrial centers where competition for jobs and housing have contributed to making immigration a contentious issue. In Britain’s last round of by-elections, in November, UKIP came second to Labour in the northern city of Rotherham, with 22 percent of the vote.

The Eastleigh result took on a particularly ominous cast for the Conservatives — the party has never won a general election outright without winning Eastleigh since the constituency was established in 1955. Among UKIP officials, the result was seen as a bellwether. “We have really connected with voters in this constituency,” Mr. Farage told the BBC after the Eastleigh vote. “And that is because we are talking about issues that other parties would like to brush under the carpet.”

 

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IHT Rendezvous: Down With Guy Fawkes!

LONDON — A decision by authorities in Bahrain to outlaw Guy Fawkes masks looks like a pretty desperate and ineffective way of crushing dissent.

Officials at borders and ports were ordered this week to be on the lookout for anyone trying to import the masks, which have been adopted by pro-democracy demonstrators in the small Arab kingdom.

The ban is unlikely to deter the hardy Bahraini protestors.

It will certainly do nothing to dent the popularity of the masks as symbols of international anti-establishment dissent from Wall Street to Tahrir Square. If anything, it will enhance it.

But how did a reactionary 17th-century English sectarian end up as the symbolic hero of a global movement that espouses freedom, fairness and justice?

The real Fawkes was among a group of would-be bombers who, had their Gunpowder Plot succeeded, might now be remembered as having heralded an era of absolutist rule. (Fawkes had previously fought in the service of autocratic Spain against the freedom-loving Dutch Republic.)

As it turned out, the failed plot to blow up Parliament and the protestant king, James, set back the emancipation of the conspirators’ fellow Catholics by 200 years.

Although the Nov. 5 anniversary of the plot long since lost its anti-Catholic overtones, Fawkes remained the seductive villain of the celebrations.

His masked effigies, put together by schoolchildren in Britain out of old clothes stuffed with newspaper, were annually put to the torch in backyards across the country to the accompaniment of fireworks — at least until health and safety concerns took the fun out of Bonfire Night.

In recent years, Fawkes has become the chosen avatar of anti-authoritarian movements that oppose the unaccountable power of governments, corporations and religious sects.

The credit, or the blame, goes to the makers of “V for Vendetta”, a 2005 movie based on a graphic novel set in a futuristic and dystopian Britain, ruled by a brutal dictator. The dissident hero of the film hides his identity behind the now familiar Guy Fawkes mask.

The plastic mask has since emerged, via the brand-promoting influence of an Internet meme, as the must-have accessory at every street protest.

Supporters of Anonymous, the hacker movement, adopted it to disguise their identities and to promote their cause in demonstrations against the Church of Scientology and other targets.

“It’s a symbol of what Anonymous stands for, of fighting evil governments,” one mask-wearer told my colleague Nick Bilton at a San Francisco demonstration in 2011.

The Guy Fawkes craze provided an unintended boost to the bottom line of Time Warner, which owns rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee for the sale of each mask.

Anonymous now offers online guidance on where to find alternatives that avoid the trademark fee.

All efforts to argue against the Guy Fawkes phenomenon, widely adopted by the worldwide Occupy movement, are probably doomed to failure, despite efforts to explain the history.

It has sparked some lively online debates, with even protest activists arguing Fawkes is an odd choice as a hero. Apologists argue that at least Fawkes died for his cause, even if it was not one they would support.

Perhaps it’s time to look for a more appropriate symbol for a worldwide protest movement that has been boosted by public outrage at government failures and market excess. What about Robin Hood, who stole from the rich to give to the poor?

Does the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes make you squirm? And who would you pick as a more appropriate symbol of people power? Let us know your thoughts.

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India Ink: ‘Hole in the Wall’ Wins Indian Educator $1 Million TED Prize

Sugata Mitra, an Indian education innovator, was awarded the first $1 million TED Prize for what the global organization called his “innovative and bold efforts towards advancing learning for children.”

“Sugata and his colleagues carried out experiments for over 13 years on the nature of self-organized learning, its extent, how it works and the role of adults in encouraging it,” said TED, which announced the award at its influential annual conference of ideas in Long Beach, California, on Tuesday.

Mr. Mitra, along with his colleagues, dug a hole in a wall bordering a slum in New Delhi in 1999, installed a computer connected to the Internet and left it there, to demonstrate how kids can learn almost anything by themselves. He has spoken frequently on the need to improve the way children are educated.

Mr. Mitra said in a statement posted on the TED Web site that he would use the prize money to build the “School in the Cloud,” a learning lab in India, where children can engage with information and mentors online.

“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together,” he said.

“Our current definition of education is to produce individuals who can fit into a bureaucratic machine,” Mr. Mitra told Forbes. “The result is a society that creates identical factory workers. The day of the factory is done.”

He has also underscored the power of cloud computing to revamp the way children learn.

In Mr. Mitra’s closing remarks while accepting the TED Prize, he shared an anecdote: “A little girl was following me around. I said, ‘I want to give a computer to everyone,’” recalls Mitra. “She reached out her hand and she said to me, ‘Get on with it.’”

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British Media to Challenge Secrecy Bid in Litvinenko Case

The British Broadcasting Corporation said it and other news organizations would oppose an effort on Tuesday by the British government to limit information disclosed to the planned inquest into the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former officer in the KGB who died of radiation poisoning in London more than six years ago.

The BBC reported that the government had planned to apply for a so-called Public Interest Immunity certificate, usually issued on the grounds of national security that would prevent the inquest from hearing information on topics which have not been made public.

The authorities’ resistance to full disclosure may force a postponement in the scheduled May 1 start date for the inquest, which would be the first — and likely the only — forum for sworn testimony about the killing, according to a lawyer for Mr. Litvinenko’s widow, Marina Litvinenko.

The lawyer, Ben Emmerson, complained on Tuesday that the preparations for the inquest were becoming “bogged down” by “the government’s attempt to keep a lid on the truth.”

“It is the government’s secret files that are delaying this inquest,” he said, according to the Press Association news agency, which also quoted the coroner, Sir Robert Owen, as saying on Tuesday that “due to the complexity of the investigation which necessarily precedes the hearings” the schedule for the inquest to begin on May 1 “may be a timetable to which it may not be possible to adhere.”

The Guardian newspaper, which is also opposing the government’s effort to restrict evidence, said that it would argue that “the public and media are faced with a situation where a public inquest into a death may have large amounts of highly relevant evidence excluded from consideration by the inquest. Such a prospect is deeply troubling.”

But the Foreign Office said the authorities had made their application in line with their “duty to protect national security and the coroner would rule according to “the overall public interest.”

The case has strained ties between Britain and Russia, reviving memories of the cold war.

Mr. Litvinenko, who styled himself a whistle-blower and foe of the Kremlin, died in November, 2006, weeks after he secured British citizenship. He had fled from Russia to Britain in 2000.

Britain’s Crown Prosecution is seeking the extradition from Russia of Andrei K. Lugovoi, another former KGB officer, to face trial on murder charges. Mr. Lugovoi denies the accusation and Russia says its constitution forbids it from sending its citizens to other countries to face trial.

At a hearing in December in advance of the inquest, which is to start on May 1, Mr. Emmerson, the lawyer representing Marina Litvinenko, said that Mr. Litvinenko was a “registered and paid agent and employee of MI6, with a dedicated handler whose pseudonym was Martin.”

Mr. Litvinenko also worked for the Spanish intelligence service, Mr. Emmerson said, and both the British and Spanish spy agencies made payments into a joint account with his wife. The lawyer added that the inquest should consider whether MI6 failed in its duty to protect him against a “real and immediate risk to life.”

The BBC said Marina Litvinenko would also oppose the British government’s effort to limit information about its knowledge of her husband’s death.

The coroner has said in previous hearings that he will examine what was known about threats to Mr. Litvinenko and would also seek to determine whether the Russian state bore responsibility. In a deathbed statement, Mr. Litvinenko directly blamed President Vladimir V. Putin, who dismissed the accusation.

Russian state prosecutors are expected to be represented at the inquest. Moscow has denied British suggestions that it may have been involved in killing Mr. Litvinenko, who died after ingesting polonium 210 — a rare radioactive isotope — at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in central London.

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India Ink: Laliji, the Octogenarian from Bihar

Why do millions of people, from entire Indian villages to urbane middle managers to foreign tourists, brave the crowds at the Kumbh Mela? During this year’s 55-day pilgrimage, to Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, an estimated 100 million Hindus and others are expected to take a holy dip in the Ganges River to wash away their sins. India Ink interviewed some of them.

Laliji, 80, from Chhapra, Bihar, was one among them. This is what she had to say.

Why did you come to the Kumbh Mela this year? Is it your first time?

I have come to the Kumbh before, but this is the first time my son brought me here. It was his way of showing his gratitude.

How have you found it so far?

I like it, especially since all my friends and fellow-villagers are here. We are celebrating it. The dip was memorable, though the water was cold. But I am enjoying.

Describe your journey to the Kumbh. Did you travel alone? How long did it take?

We took a bus from our house to the district headquarters, from where the village leaders had promised to arrange transport for us. But that seemed to be a crowded option, hence we decided to take another bus and come here.

Do you consider yourself a religious person?

I am very religious, and have brought up my eight sons that way. We are God-fearing people. We think twice before we can hurt anyone or anything. It’s not for nothing that we are respected in our village.

Who do you think is going to win the 2014 election?

I don’t understand politics. Last year, someone paid us to vote for them — we did.

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IHT Rendezvous: Opera for an Era When Money Is Tight

VIENNA—Not long ago it looked as if cuts in arts funding would sound the death knell of the Vienna Chamber Opera, known in German as the Kammeroper, an ensemble esteemed for its chamber-scale productions in an intimate, inviting setting. The Austrian federal government’s decision to eliminate entirely its support, which constituted half of the company’s governmental subsidies (the other half coming from the city) effectively put the Kammeroper out of business.

Yet the 2012-13 season has seen the Kammeroper come roaring back with five new productions—including a “Bohème” finishing up performances this weekend— put on by a resident company with an established orchestra in the pit.

How to explain this turnaround? In fact, the old company, which was founded over 50 years ago by Hans Gabor and was subsequently run by Isabella, his widow, is history. The new Kammeroper, formally known as Theater an der Wien in der Kammeroper, is a case of one opera company rushing to fill the void left by the collapse of another.

Few opera companies today are in a financial position to go into expansionary mode. But, with the city willing to continue its support, the Theater an der Wien saw an opportunity, as its director of artistic administration, Sebastian Schwarz, who oversees the Kammeroper, explained by phone. Surprisingly, as he pointed out, the Vienna Staatsoper lacks a young artists program, so the new venture helps meet a need in the city. It also adds a degree of continuity to the Theater an der Wien’s own operations, which include world-class productions of interesting repertory that are assembled individually, with visiting performers and orchestras.

What has happened at the Kammeroper would be akin the Metropolitan Opera taking over the name and venue of a smaller New York company in financial trouble, giving the city the “Mini-Met” audiences have fancied for decades. The Kammeroper’s venue is especially choice: the gilded former ballroom, dating from the turn of the last century, of the venerable Hotel Post in the old Fleischmarkt district of the city. Outfitted with an orchestra pit, it comfortably seats 300. The performance I attended was packed, and with ticket prices ranging from 16 to 48 euros ($21-64), it is a bargain.

At the core of the new Kammeroper is an ensemble of seven young singers, which Mr. Schwarz described as constituting a “cast for ‘Così Fan Tutte’ ”—two sopranos, a mezzo soprano, a tenor, a baritone and a bass, plus a counter-tenor. In addition to their Kammeroper duties, the singers take smaller roles at the Theater an der Wien.

“La Bohème” can make a special impact when cast with young singers, and so it does here, as performed in Jonathan Dove’s 1986 chamber version with newly composed modernistic music at the start and between acts by Sinem Altan. Basically, the opera is performed straight, but with choral and other big moments from Acts 2 and 3 excised. The interludes, which included prerecorded music, are atmospheric and intermittently engaging, but essentially peripheral. For one not knowing what to expect, it was a relief when—with Rodolfo and Marcello already onstage—the familiar music of Act 1 began to unfold and continued on uninterrupted.

The lively, updated staging is by Lotte de Beer, the young director of Robin de Raaff’s recent “Waiting for Ms. Monroe” at the Netherlands Opera. The set by Clement & Sanôu, who also did the lighting, focuses on the modern kitchen of the bohemians’ apartment, which also, somewhat confusingly seems to be part high-end boutique (at least until the merchandise is removed after Act 2). In any case, it is handsome and full of stylish details. The playwright Rodolfo writes at a laptop and throws pages of his opus into the oven for warmth.

There is an inevitable loss of grandeur in Act 2, but Ms. de Beer nicely handles Rodolfo and Mimi’s growing attraction to each other and the conflicts of Act 3. The setting of Mimi’s hospital room for Act 4 is rather contrived, however, especially since the others, not at first being allowed in, communicate with her from pay phones in the lobby, which detracts from the emotional impact. Mimi has lost her hair, presumably as a result of treating a fatal illness different from that specified by Puccini. Still, this is an engaging show

The vocal ensemble, which is capably augmented by two guests, Oleg Loza as Schaunard and Martin Thoma as Benoit and Alcindoro, is uniformly strong. From the opera’s opening line by Marcello, one admired Ben Connor’s rich, fluent baritone, and it didn’t take long for the tenor Andrew Owens to catch his stride as Rodolfo and spin his own handsomely lyrical phrases and a fine high C.

All the singers displayed ample voices that could be overpowering in a hall this size, but they didn’t allow that to happen. Cigdem Soyarslan’s Mimi was a little uneven at first, but one came to appreciate her warm spinto sound, especially in her Act 3 aria, and Anna Maris Sarra sings Musetta with a glinting soprano that is heard to fine effect in her animated account of the waltz aria.

Igor Bakan brings a full, resonant bass voice and a strong emotional charge to Colline’s farewell to his overcoat. The fine Vienna Chamber Orchestra is in the pit, led with assurance by Claire Levacher.

The newly constituted Kammeroper has thus emerged as a bright spot on the Viennese opera scene.

Two more productions remain this season, a double bill of Britten’s “Curlew River” and “Prodigal Son” and Handel’s “Orlando.”

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India Ink: In Hyderabad, Anger and Frustration

Srinivas Mahesh, 28, was snacking outside his hostel near the Konark Theater in Dishknagar, his usual hangout in Hyderabad, when he heard a loud explosion Thursday evening. Not long after, he saw smoke filling up the air. Once he realized it was a bomb blast, instead of rushing back to his hostel he resolved to helping the injured.

“I saw disfigured bodies for the first time in my life,” he said. He helped three severely injured people into ambulances and took another injured man by auto to Osmania Hospital.

Mr. Mahesh, who is originally from Kurnool, came to Hyderabad two years ago to do a graduation in engineering from Ashok Institute in Dilsukhnagar. After yesterday’s blasts though, he might have to return home.

“My parents were visiting Hyderabad in 2007, when there were blasts. They had a tough time then,” he said. “After yesterday, they are convinced that this city is cursed and want me home.”

More than 24 hours after two bombs went off near the ever-crowded Dilsukhnagar bus stand, there is palpable frustration and anger in the area. N.Pradeep Reddy, 29, a chartered accountant who lives in Dilsukhnagar, heard the first blast and came to the balcony of his house. Then he saw the second explosion. Aghast, he couldn’t move for several seconds, he said.

Mr. Reddy’s family has been in Hyderabad for 10 years now, but now he is disillusioned with the charm of the city, he said. “No one cares for our lives here – not the politicians, not the media not the police,” he added.

Hyderabad has been the site of numerous explosions in recent years, including two in 2007 attacks that killed dozens of people.

Soon after Thursday’s blasts, the road in front of the Dilsukhnagar bus stand had a median dividing it into two. While traffic was allowed on one side, the other side of the road was cordoned off by the police.

“This is obstructing traffic and adding to the commotion,” said P. Sadanandam, who commutes through the road regularly. “They are not doing this for security, it is just so that the VIPs can visit the blast site and have a photo-op,” he said angrily.

Andhra Pradesh Director General of Police and other senior police officers visited the at blast site today to look for evidence.

All the shops on a two kilometer stretch on the Dilsukhnagar main road were shuttered down all day today. Some security men outside the shops said that this was not due to the bandh, or shutdown, that the Bharatiya Janata Party had called, but because the shop owners were sure that there would be no customers today. They might open on Monday, they said.

Narsing Vennala, 25, sells flowers on the main road. He is one of the only three flower vendors who reopened their shops today. A temple next door needs flowers, he said, and therefore he had to come to work.

His 18-year-old sister is so paranoid about his coming to work a day after the blasts that she keeps calling him every half-an-hour to check if he is alright.  Mr Vennala walks home at 11 p.m. every night, and he plans to do the same even today.

“Whatever had to happen, happened,” he said. “Now how long can we stay hungry and not earn because of that?”

“Bharat mata ki jai,” (Victory for mother India) was loudly shouted by a bunch of residents. They said that was their answer to those that were against peace in the country.  There was also some anti-Pakistan sloganeering.

One resident estimated that there were 500 to 600 educational institutions in Dilsukhnagar. They have offerings ranging from short-term computer courses to three-year degrees. Thousands of students, from smaller towns and neighboring districts, live in hostels around their respective institutions. Many of them were on the streets yesterday to help the injured.

While some students don’t see any option but to stay in the city, others, like Mr. Mahesh, are packing their bags.

“I have to go home, even if I don’t like to,” he said “My family will be worried every day I stay in Hyderabad.”

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India Ink: What They Said: Could the Hyderabad Explosions Have Been Prevented?

As more information emerges about the most recent bombs in Hyderabad, many in India have begun to question the role of state and central government authorities, intelligence agencies and local police, asking whether they could have done more to prevent the attacks.

Less than two days before the two explosions in Hyderabad on Thursday evening, which killed at least 15 people and injured more than 100, the central government warned state officials of the possibility of a terror attack. In the days before the bombs exploded, CCTV cameras in the area had been disabled but were not repaired.

India Ink talked to intelligence experts Friday about the bombings and the difficulty of preventing terrorism attacks, even when there is some warning. Government officials also spoke publicly about the explosions.

J. N. Rai, former additional director of the Intelligence Bureau, India’s internal intelligence-gathering agency, in a telephone interview:

All alerts in intelligence are of a general nature. If you have specific information, you will arrest the guys and prevent the event.

Alerts that include a specific place, specific time or specific operation are next to impossible to provide. Even the guys who are planting the explosives may not know until the very last minute where they are going to plant them. Or someone is told to go park a cycle in one place, and they don’t know what’s on the cycle.

These alerts are so routine that you cannot act upon them. With more use of technology and online communication, it has become more difficult. The terrorist modules use code language. So it has become more difficult to detect.

At times we get information that some members of networks visited a particular town, so we send an alert to that town. But that is not of much use. At times we learn that a particular module is collecting explosives and arms and giving training, so we interpret that they are gearing up for a big operation.

One guy was arrested, and he said that he did a recce at Dilsukh Nagar in 2011. You cannot make much out of that.

Ajit Doval, former director of the Intelligence Bureau, in a telephone interview:

If you do not have any information, it is an intelligence failure. But if you have some information, and even then you cannot prevent the event, then it is the failure of the government.

All the intelligence inputs are of a generic nature. It is up to the government agencies to develop those generic inputs into actionable inputs. You need to do lots of followup on the ground. It can be done by hard work. However nebulous or generic the intelligence input is, it is to be followed by ground work by the state police.

S. A. Huda, director general of Andhra Pradesh state police, in a telephone interview:

It is too early and too premature. We’re getting back to the scene. We’ll not do ball and ball commentary.

The moment we give some information, the terrorists get an alert. It’s happened so many times before.

There have been no arrests as yet. It’s painstaking work. We don’t want to jump the gun.

Sushma Swaraj, leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, during the Parliament session on Friday:

This is a very unfortunate, painful and shameful act. These events are not an opportunity for the blame game; they are an opportunity to fight terrorism together with determination. But that we can do only if we have a common thinking. I feel sorry that a common thinking to fight terrorism is not emerging in our country.

On many occasions we advocate for the human rights of terrorists and advocate to deal with them softly.

On many occasions, the central government gives an input to the state government and thinks that their job is over. In this case, this has happened. The home minister said that the input was shared with the state government.

If you have the input and even after that the incident takes place, then the failure is doubled. What was the central government doing, what was the state government doing? These are the questions which come up after every terrorist incident.

We all understand that terrorism is not to seen in religious terms or in any color. A terrorist is a terrorist. If the whole country starts fighting terrorism with this spirit, if the whole country gets together and political parties get together, we will be able to defeat terrorism.

Sushil Kumar Shinde, Home Affairs Minister, during the Parliament session on Friday:

I extend my heartfelt condolences for the bereaved families who lost their near and dear ones in the blasts. The Government is committed to combat such cowardly terror attack and it shall make all possible efforts to apprehend the perpetrators and masterminds behind the blasts and ensure that they are punished as per the law. (Read his full statement.)

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Car Bomb In Syrian Capital Kills At Least 31, Opposition Says

Sana/European Pressphoto Agency

An injured man was carried near the site of a car bomb explosion in Damascus on Thursday.

In renewed violence reaching the center of the Syrian capital, a car bomb exploded in Damascus on Thursday near the headquarters of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling party, killing more than two dozen people, mainly civilians but also some security forces, according to opposition sources.

The violence coincided with renewed talks among Mr. Assad’s adversaries who met in Cairo on Thursday to discuss the terms on which the opposition Syrian National Coalition is prepared to talk about a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

Reuters quoted a draft communiqué under discussion by the group as saying it was prepared to negotiate, but Mr. Assad and his security force commanders were “not part of any political solution in Syria.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad group based in Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria, reported that at least 31 people were killed by the bomb which exploded in the neighborhood of Mazraa.

Syrian state television said two children were wounded, while Al Ikhbariya, a pro-government television channel, showed footage of two dead bodies and body parts in a park.

The area where the bomb exploded was near the headquarters of Mr. Assad’s ruling Baath Party and the Russian Embassy. State television and the Syrian Observatory also said that mortar shells exploded near the Syrian Army General Command in the center of the capital, but there were no reported casualties.

The strikes were the latest to extend to the heart of the Syrian capital.

Reports this week appeared to show that rebel shells have reached new areas in Damascus.

State media and opposition activists reported on Wednesday that mortar rounds had hit the Tishreen sports stadium in the downtown neighborhood of Baramkeh. The state news agency, SANA, said the explosion killed an athlete from the Homs-based soccer team Al Wathba as he was practicing.

Government forces hit a rebel command center in a suburb east of the capital on Wednesday, injuring a founder of the Liwaa al-Islam brigade, Sheik Zahran Alloush, the brigade said in a statement.

On Tuesday, activists reported that up to seven mortar rounds had been fired by fighters of the Free Syrian Army toward Mr. Assad’s Tishreen Palace in Damascus.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, and it was not known whether Mr. Assad was there at the time. The palace, surrounded by a park, is in a wealthy area that has largely been insulated from the insurgency and it lies less than a mile from the main presidential palace.

Syrian rebels are entrenched in suburbs south and east of the capital, but they have been unable to push far into the center, although they strike the area with occasional mortars and increasingly frequent car bombs.

Such indiscriminate attacks, however, risk killing passers-by, exposing the rebels to charges that they are careless with civilian life and property. Many Damascus residents are undecided in the civil war and fear their ancient city will be ravaged like Aleppo and other urban centers to the north.

At the same time, the government has decimated pro-rebel suburbs with airstrikes and artillery, leaving vast areas depopulated or terrorized.

Fighting continued also for control of the main civilian airport in Aleppo on Wednesday.

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IHT Rendezvous: True or False? The Tussle Over Ping Fu's Memoir

Did Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a recent memoir, “Bend, not Break”, make up her horrible experiences during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship? Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum?

That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese Americans, say. It’s an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving lawyers prepping client to make false asylum claims.

As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored the founder of the software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems) with a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award.

Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in 1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student, denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how she became an American.

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The marriage took place while she was living in California, she said.

“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later. Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers, who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S. immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since divorced, received many “hate emails,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt innocent people.”

If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue, there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear communication with her ghost-writer, Los Angeles-based MeiMei Fox, she said.

In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers – an invasion of the woman’s body.

Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway.

In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet that maybe weren’t correct,’’ said Ms. Fu.

Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s geography,’’ said Ms. Fu.

At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left, in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no criminal charges or record.”

And in an email to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that magazine but another one, “This Generation,” that was taken to a meeting in Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in the email. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she wrote.

But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil conversation” about disagreements apparently harder.
Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle

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IHT Rendezvous: Women Killed as 'Witches,' in Papua New Guinea, in 2013

BEIJING — “They’re going to cook the sanguma”, or witchcraft, “mama!”

This terrifying cry by Papua New Guinean children opens “It’s 2013, and They’re Burning ‘Witches’,” a long and eloquent report in The Global Mail, an Australia-based online news site.

It was published last week before news shot around the world on Tuesday that the police in Papua New Guinea, in another case, had charged two people with torturing and killing a 20-year-old mother, Kepari Leniata, whom they accused of being a witch. Ms. Leniata was “stripped, tortured with a hot iron rod, doused in gasoline and set alight on a pile of car tires and trash” earlier this month in front of a crowd of hundreds of people, including young children, The Associated Press reported.

Why?

“Leniata had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who had died in a hospital. Ware and Watea are believed to be the boy’s mother and uncle, police said in a statement,” The A.P. reported.

The year 2013 or not, such violence against women is not uncommon in Papua New Guinea, where “witches” (in reality just women, often older ones) may be blamed when things go wrong, a reflection of the powerful belief in sorcery in the Pacific nation just north of Australia. A key reason for identifying a woman as a witch and attacking her is when a man, or child, dies unexpectedly.

But there may be other reasons. As the Australian international television station Australia Network reported, in a resource-rich country undergoing a boom, accusing a woman of being a witch is an easy way to take her land.

Dame Carol Kidu, a Papua New Guinean politician, told the station: “There are other things involved nowadays, like greed, acquisition of people’s properties and land, and all sorts of things might be all be tied up in all of this, using – killing the sorcerers as a reason to acquire land. So it needs to be investigated and we need to work out how we can deal with it. It is a very complex issue.”

The United Nations also found that accusations of sorcery can be used to kill women for a range of motives: “The U.N. Human Rights agency says they’ve seen an increase in these types of killings as well as torture and rape. They say the accusations are often used to deprive women of land and property,” U.N. radio reported recently.

What lies behind the ferocity? Traditional beliefs, alcohol and drug use among men, and uneven development in a country that is in the middle of a mining boom where, as The Global Mail wrote, “the wealth bypasses the vast majority.”

It writes: “enduring tradition widely resists the notion that natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a death. Rather, bad magic is the certain culprit.”

The dead person if often a man; the culprit is a woman. Or, a “witch.”

“When people die, especially men, people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’ not ‘What’s behind it?’” said Philip Gibbs, a longtime resident, anthropologist, sorcery specialist and Catholic priest who was quoted by The Global Mail.

But in its report, the news site was careful to point out that while many Papua New Guineans believe in sorcery to some degree, that does not mean they support the lynchings.

“In the words of the editor of the national daily Post Courier, Alexander Rheeney, city and country folk alike overwhelmingly ‘recoil in fear and disgust’ at lynch mobs pursuing payback, and at the kind of extremist cruelty that Sister Gaudentia was about to witness,” it wrote, referring to the “cooking” that the children were shouting about.

That’s Sister Gaudentia, a Swiss nun who tries to save “Angela,” a woman accused of witchcraft in the Global Mail article. The article includes powerful photos of accused “witches” (warning – they are graphic, showing machete injuries or healed, hacked-off limbs.)

Hearing the children shout that a witch was about to be cooked, Sister Gaudentia rushed after them. “Two days earlier, she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men.”

“Angela” was luckier than Ms. Leniata.

She had no male relatives to protect her (a common profile for accused “witches”) and was horribly tortured, but lived, the article says. A “sorcery survivor,” today she is in hiding with her small son.

“Those victims who lived to tell the tale owe their lives either to individual police members or to a strong church leader who intervened for them,” Mr. Gibbs, the anthropologist and priest, told the Global Mail.

“In effect it means that, if sufficiently motivated to act, the power of the police and civil authorities, or the power of the church, can be enough to defend a person who is otherwise powerless,” he said.

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Armenians Vote in Closely Watched Ballot

MOSCOW — Armenians went to the polls on Monday in a presidential election that seemed certain to return President Serzh Sargsyan to office for a second five-year term, and to maintain stability in a country that has become an increasingly important, if uneasy, United States ally in monitoring Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Mr. Sargsyan, 58, a veteran politician, is generally viewed as having presided over modest economic improvements in recent years, even as the country has struggled because of closed borders with Turkey and with Azerbaijan, its enemy in the ongoing war over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Mr. Sargsyan faced relatively weak competition after his two strongest potential challengers and their parties announced last year that they would not compete in the election — former President Levon Ter-Petrossian of the Armenian National Congress and Gagik Tsarukyan of the Prosperous Armenia Party. Mr. Tsarukyan is a wealthy businessman, lawmaker and the head of Armenia’s national Olympic committee.

But while Mr. Sargysan’s victory has been predicted for months, there have been some unexpected developments in the campaign. One challenger, Andreas Ghukasian, a political commentator who manages a radio station in the capital Yerevan, has been on a hunger-strike demanding that Mr. Sargsyan be removed from the ballot.

Another challenger, Paruir A. Airikyan, was shot in the shoulder in late January in what the authorities described as an assassination attempt, although there was no known motive. Mr. Airikyan is a former Soviet dissident who promoted Armenian independence and has run unsuccessfully for president several times previously.

He briefly considered invoking a Constitutional provision to delay the election for two weeks as a result of his injury but ultimately decided to allow the balloting to proceed.

Mr. Sargsyan’s expected second term will be watched closely for any sign of progress in resolving the war with Azerbaijan, and for any indication that Armenia reduces support for economic sanctions against Iran, as those sanctions make life more difficult in both countries.

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh continues at a low simmer with period violence along the line of contact, including frequent exchanges of gunfire and occasional casualties. Peace talks led by the so-called Minsk Group, which is chaired by the United States, Russia and France, have mostly stalled.

With the border with Turkey still closed because of historic animosities and Turkey’s ties with Azerbaijan, Armenia has traditionally relied heavily on Iran as an economic partner but those ties are now constrained by sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program. Western powers accuse Tehran of seeking the technology to build nuclear weapons, but Iran denies the charges. The suspicions about the program have prompted the imposition of a broadening array of United States, United Nations and European Union sanctions.

Armenia has supported the measures, while continuing to engage in permissible economic activity, such as swapping electricity for natural gas from Iran with no money changing hands.

“Having Iran as your economic lifeline is not a good position to be in,” said one senior Western diplomat, who asked not to be identified to avoid creating any tension with players in the region. “They have been very very careful, very very good, at some cost to Armenia, to honor international U.N., U.S. and E.U. sanctions against Iran,” this diplomat said. “But it’s increasingly difficult for them to do that.”

International election observers have fanned out across Armenia in recent days. Initial reports suggested that that Mr. Sargsyan’s party has made some inappropriate use of government resources to promote his candidacy, a common criticism of incumbent candidates in former Soviet republics. But observers say the overall climate has improved, with opposition candidates, for instance, enjoying better access to coverage by the news media.

Armenia faces a peculiar problem when it comes to potential election fraud because of the hundreds of thousands of Armenia citizens who live abroad, including in the United States percentage-wise one of the largest percentage diasporas in the world given Armenia’s population of 3.1 million, according to the World Bank.

By law, with few exceptions, absentee balloting is not permitted. As a result, experts say, the Armenian election rolls are filled with the names of people who will not appear in person to vote, creating the potential for fraudulent use of those names.

Mr. Sargsyan and his wife, Rita, paused on Monday to speak with reporters after voting at School No. 24 in Yerevan. “I have voted for the security of our citizens and our families,” he said, according to aysor.am, an Armenian Internet news site.

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IHT Rendezvous: In Singapore's Immigration Debate, Sign of Asia's Slipping Middle Class?

BEIJING — Immigration is a hot-button issue nearly everywhere in the world, though the contours of the debate vary from place to place. In the United States, sweeping changes to the law may offer legal residency for millions of people who have entered the country illegally, my colleague Ashley Parker reports.

In Singapore, the debate looks somewhat different: The government plans to increase the population from just over five million to a possible high of nearly seven million by 2030, via regulated, legal immigration, and this is provoking opposition.

So much so that on Saturday, about 3,000 people turned out for what some commentators said was one of the biggest demonstrations in the nation’s history. (If the number seems small, it reflects the tight political control exerted over Singapore life by the People’s Action Party, which has run the country for about half a century and discourages public protest.)

What are the contours of the debate in Singapore?

Concern over booming immigration, often focused on new arrivals from increasingly rich China, has been simmering in the nation, with many feeling that the immigrants do not play by the same rules, that their manners are poor and that they are pushing up prices. That feeling crystallized last year when a wealthy Chinese man driving a Ferrari at high speed killed three people (including himself) in a nighttime accident.

(Similar sentiments are found in Hong Kong, as my colleagues Bettina Wassener and Gerry Mullany wrote.)

Vividly illustrating the resentment, Singaporeans sometimes call the wealthy immigrants “rich Chinese locusts,” according to an article in the Economic Observer’s Worldcrunch.

So the Singapore government’s Population White Paper that passed in Parliament earlier this month, just before Chinese New Year, was bound to stir things up.

The government is presenting the rise in immigration as a target that is needed if Singapore, where immigrants already make up about 40 percent of the population, and which has the highest concentration of millionaires in the world, is to continue to flourish, reports said. Singaporeans just are not having enough children, said the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong.

“In my view, in 2030, I think six million will not be enough to meet Singaporeans’ needs as our population ages because of this problem of the baby boomers and bulge of aging people,” Mr. Lee said in Parliament, adding that 6.9 million was not a target but a number to be used to help plan for infrastructure.

“Do we really need to increase our population by that much?” wrote a person called Chang Wei Meng in a letter to The Straits Times, according to Reuters. “What happened to achieving the Swiss standard of living?”

Gilbert Goh, a main organizer of the rally Saturday at Singapore’s Speaker’s Corner in a public park, said the protesters had a message: “They want to tell the government, please reconsider this policy. The turnout is a testimony that this policy is flawed and unpopular on the ground,” The Associated Press quoted Mr. Goh as saying.

Yet amid the familiar rhetoric about immigrants, heard around the world – they don’t fit in, they’re rude, they’re different – might something more important be going on here?

In a blog post on Singapore News Alternative, Nicole Seah, a politician who has run for Parliament and comments on social issues, wrote: “Along with many other Singaporeans, I oppose the White Paper.”

Why? She is looking for “a society that lives in harmony, rather than tense and overcrowded conditions,” she writes.

“Not the Singapore Inc. that has been aggressively forced down our throats the past few years – a Singapore which is in danger of becoming a transient state where people from all over, come, make their fortunes, and leave.”

Not “a Singapore that has become a playground for the rich and the people who can afford it. A Singapore where the middle class is increasingly drowned out because they do not have the social clout or sufficient representatives in Parliament to voice their concerns.”

Ms. Seah’s statements raise an interesting question: Is this part of a phenomenon that the columnist Chrystia Freeland has written about so ably for this newspaper, the ascendancy of a wealthy, “plutocrat” class and the slipping status of the middle class?

As Ms. Freeland wrote last week: “The most important fact about the United States in this century is that middle-class incomes are stagnating. The financial crisis has revealed an equally stark structural problem in much of Europe.” Is it hitting Asia, too, and does Singapore’s protest speak, at least in part, to this? Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction too?

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India Ink: Newswallah: Bharat Edition

Jammu and Kashmir: A week-long curfew in the Kashmir Valley that was imposed after the execution of the militant Muhammad Afzal was lifted Saturday, NDTV reported. Supporters of Mr. Afzal, who hailed from the Sopore town of Baramulla district, believed that he received an unfair trial for his role in the deadly Parliament attack case of 2001. Internet and television services have been restored in Kashmir after having been shut down, the report said.

Assam: At least 19 people died in violence during the civic polls in the state, India Today reported on Thursday. Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi admitted Wednesday to lapses by his government that led to the violence in some parts.  Thirteen people were killed when the security forces opened fire to control a mob that attacked polling officers in Goalpara district, the report noted.

Meghalaya: More than 100 of the 341 candidates who will be running in the upcoming state assembly polls own assets worth more than 10 million rupees, according to Meghalaya Election Watch, an independent organization, the Press Trust of India reported. The governing Congress party has fielded 35 such candidates and the two richest candidates are also from its ranks.

Gujarat: Prison officials at the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad thwarted an attempted jailbreak last Sunday night, according to a Press Trust of India report on the NDTV Website. The attempted jailbreak comes as the trial of the 2008 Ahmedabad serial explosions is currently being conducted within the walls of the jail.  And 14 of the 68 accused in the case are lodged within the jail in a single barrack, where officials discovered that an 18-foot-long tunnel had been dug. The prison staff are suspected to have aided the jailbreak attempt, since work for the tunnel went undetected for 2 months, the report said.

Rajasthan: An MiF-27 aircraft of the Indian Air Force crashed in the Barmar district of Rajasthan on Tuesday, The Deccan Herald reported. While the plane crashed within minutes of takeoff from the Uttarlai base, there were no casualties and the pilot suffered only minor injuries.  A court of inquiry has been ordered to look into the crash, which was believed to have been caused by a technical defect.

Karnataka: The state got its new Lokayukta, or anti-corruption ombudsman, on Thursday, The Hindu reported. Y. Bhaskar Rao, the former chief justice of Karnataka State, filled the position that had been vacant for more than a year after his predecessor, Justice Shivraj V. Patil, was forced to resign following accusations of corruption in land deals.

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Meteorite Fragments Are Said to Rain Down on Siberia; 500 Injuries Reported

MOSCOW — Bright objects, apparently debris from a meteorite, streaked through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast area of territory. Around 500 people were reported to have been injured, most from breaking glass.

Emergency officials had reported no deaths by Friday afternoon but said that 14 people had been hospitalized.

Russian experts believe the blast was caused by a 10-ton meteor known as a bolide, which created a powerful shock wave when it reached the Earth’s atmosphere, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Scientists believe the bolide exploded and evaporated at a height of around 20 to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, but that small fragments may have reached the ground, the statement said.

The governor of the Chelyabinsk district reported that a search team had found an impact crater on the outskirts of a city about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk. An official from the Interior Ministry told the Russian news agency Interfax that three large pieces of meteorite debris had been retrieved in the area and that 10,000 police officers are searching for more.

A small asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, is expected to pass close to Earth later on Friday, NASA reported on its Web site. Aleksandr Y. Dudorov, a physicist at Chelyabinsk State University, said it was possible that the meteorite may have been flying alongside the asteroid.

“What we witnessed today may have been the precursor of that asteroid,” said Mr. Dudorov in a telephone interview. Video clips from the city of Chelyabinsk showed an early morning sky illuminated by a brilliant flash, followed by the sound of breaking glass and multiple car alarms. Meteorites typically cause sonic booms as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. On Friday, the force was powerful enough to shatter dishes and televisions in people’s homes.

“I saw a flash in the window, turned toward it and saw a burning cloud, which was surrounded by smoke and was going downward — it reminded me of what you see after an explosion,” said Maria Polyakova, 25, head of reception at the Park-City Hotel in Chelyabinsk, which is 950 miles east of Moscow. A video made outside a building in Chelyabinsk captured the astonished voices of witnesses who were uncertain what it was they had just seen.

“Maybe it was a rocket,” said one man, who rushed outside onto the street along with his co-workers when the object hit, far out of sight. A man named Artyom, who spoke to the Moscow FM radio station, said the explosion was enormous.

“I was sitting at work and the windows lit up and it was as if the whole city was illuminated, and I looked out and saw a huge streak in the sky and it was like that for two or three minutes and then I heard these noises, like claps,” he said. “And then all the dogs started barking.”

He said that there was a blast that caused balconies to shake and windows to shatter. He said he did not believe it was a meteorite. “We are waiting for a second piece, that is what people are talking about now,” the man said.

The object was visible from the city of Nizhniy Tagil, around 220 miles north of Chelyabinsk, where so many people called an emergency assistance number that it stopped working, the Novy Region news service reported.

The government response on Friday was huge. Seven airplanes were deployed to search for places where meteorites might have fallen and more than 20,000 people dispatched to comb the area on foot, according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. There were also 28 sites designated to monitor radiation. No unusual readings had been detected, the ministry reported.

The area around Chelyabinsk is also home to “dozens of defense factories, including nuclear factories and those involved in production of thermonuclear weapons,” said Vladimir Lipunov, an astrophysicist at the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute.

“No one needs to be told what the Urals is,” Mr. Lipunov told the NTV television station. “A second hit in the same area is unlikely and everything could have been much, much worse.”

Siberia stretches the length of Asia, and there is a history of meteor and asteroid showers there. In 1908 a powerful explosion was reported near the Tunguska River in central Siberia, its impact so great that trees were flattened for 25 miles around. Generations of scientists have studied that event, analyzing particles that were driven into the Earth’s surface as far away as the South Pole. A study published in the 1980s concluded the object weighed a million tons.

In the United States, NASA alluded to the Tunguska incident when it said that it was watching closely an asteroid 150 feet in diameter expected to whiz past Earth on Friday at a distance of around 17,200 miles, the closest for many decades.

In a statement on its Web site, NASA said on Friday that there was no risk that the asteroid, 2012 DA14, would collide with Earth. But it would pass within “the belt of satellites in geostationary orbit, which is 22,200 miles above Earth’s surface.”

The asteroid is set to pass Earth at around 2:25 p.m. Eastern time, NASA said. “At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will be over the eastern Indian Ocean, off Sumatra,” the agency said.

“Asteroid 2012 DA14 will not impact Earth, but if another asteroid of a size similar to that of 2012 DA14 were to impact Earth, it would release approximately 2.5 megatons of energy in the atmosphere and would be expected to cause regional devastation,” NASA said. The asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye, the agency added.

Referring to the “Tunguska Event,” NASA said the impact of an asteroid just smaller than 2012 DA14 “is believed to have flattened about 825 square miles of forest in and around the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.”

Viktor Klimenko contributed reporting from Moscow, and Alan Cowell from London.

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IHT Rendezvous: Hanging of Militant Raises Questions in India

In my latest column in the International Herald Tribune, I argue that the Indian justice system, which includes shoddy police investigations and the powerful influence of political calculations, is not competent nor fair enough to grant India the moral right to hang a man, assuming that any society can have such a right in the first place.

Page Two

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

On Saturday, a militant who is widely known in India as Afzal Guru, was hanged in a secret operation. The hanging, which was his punishment for assisting five terrorists who had attacked the Indian Parliament in 2001, has raised a number of issues, most of them questions that supporters of human rights have raised since 2004 when he was sentenced to death by the highest court in the land. They believe that he did not receive a fair trial, that he was a convenient scapegoat, that he was a minor player in a crime that the Indian state was not good enough to fully investigate, that he did not deserve to be hanged according to the evidence that was available.

They had solid reasons to say all this, but one of Afzal Guru’s misfortunes was that the liberal voice in India has progressively lost its power and influence because it has lost its credibility with the state, the news media and the fast-changing Indian urban middle class.

In the past, when the liberals took on the state over dams or other developmental projects, or minority rights or the armed activities of tribal gangs that sought their own revolutions, they have been more preoccupied with maintaining their ideological positions and their love for the underdogs than with the practicality of hard facts. So, even though the Indian state’s handling of the Afzal Guru’s case was disgraceful, the voice of the liberals had become too feeble, dull and predictable to intimidate the state. The liberals are seeing their constituency shrink even in mainstream English journalism in India, and they have themselves to blame for this.

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IHT Rendezvous: Mario Draghi Takes the E.C.B.'s Message to Spain

MADRID—The European Central Bank and its president, Mario Draghi, want to ensure that their voices get heard beyond the financial district of Frankfurt.

But their efforts to travel around Europe and spread their message more directly to its citizens have ended up backfiring, at least when it comes to visiting Spain, one of the countries at the center of the Continent’s debt crisis.

Last May, the E.C.B. held one of its regular meetings in Barcelona, under the kind of police surveillance worthy of a city at war and in a convention center on the outskirts of the city, in order to shield Mr. Draghi and his fellow central bankers from anti-austerity street protests. About 7,500 police officers were deployed around Barcelona, with helicopters hovering above, while only a few hundred students gathered in the city center to protest spending cuts by the Spanish government in areas like health and education.

On Tuesday, Mr. Draghi was again in Spain, this time in Madrid to address lawmakers in Congress. The security was less fearsome, but the meeting was held behind closed doors, and Parliament did not provide the usual transcript of such an official session. As a result, regardless of what was said inside, Mr. Draghi’s visit ended up generating more controversy because of its format than its content.

Afterward, Spain’s opposition lawmakers lambasted the president of the Parliament, Jesús Posada, for using frequency-scrambling technology to block any cellphone transmissions within the chamber during Mr. Draghi’s session, to thwart the plans of some parliamentarians who had promised to send Twitter messages and upload videos to keep people informed about what Mr. Draghi was saying.

Valeriano Gómez, the spokesman on the economy for lawmakers from the main opposition group, the Socialist Party, said the restrictions surrounding Mr. Draghi’s appearance had done “no favor to the E.C.B., nor to the prestige of our chamber.” Other leftist lawmakers denounced the format of the event as a violation of parliamentary rules and an insult to democracy.

Mr. Draghi, meanwhile, later spoke to reporters to detail his views on the Spanish economy, while the E.C.B. also published the text of Mr. Draghi’s opening speech to Spanish lawmakers.

Asked about the lack of transparency, Mr. Draghi insisted that that he had not set the rules and would have had no problem speaking more openly before lawmakers if the Spanish Parliament had wanted. Given that videos of his session were eventually released by some frustrated lawmakers, Mr. Draghi concluded that, “I don’t believe anybody missed out on anything.”

Except perhaps Mr. Posada, the Parliament president, who may have hoped to see Mr. Draghi showing a bit more solidarity and helping to justify his communications strategy.

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IHT Rendezvous: Lively Online Reactions in China to Nuclear Test

BEIJING — As the world grapples with the news that North Korea has conducted a nuclear test, what is the reaction here in China, often considered North Korea’s one true friend, the ally that was as “close as lips and teeth”?

The reaction from China’s foreign ministry appeared muted, no different from statements it has made on the issue in the past. It said it “firmly opposed” the test and called for calm, Xinhua, the state news agency, said.

But online the conversation flowed briskly as the test trended on microblog sites with nearly 40,000 comments tagged to “nuclear test” or “earthquake” by late afternoon, on Sina Weibo, the biggest microblog site. Much of the conversation was critical – but there were supporters.

Sounding worried, a user called @Bianju fanxin wrote that after China carried out nuclear tests in Lop Nor, its former Central Asian testing site, there was radioactive fallout in cities. With this explosion near the China-North Korea border, “how many Chinese cities will receive contamination?” (The test was underground, but his concern about radiation was quite widely shared by others.)

Tiankongzhong de qingjiao wrote: “The nuclear test is only 400 kilometers from my hometown,” and followed it with an angry face symbol.

Another, Hongqinshijian-nongtian, wrote: “Oh oh oh, Northeast Asia is unstable again!”

“If Chinese people had the vote, would North Korea dare to do this?” wrote @Aji de weibo. “And they still don’t cut off Three Fatty’s milk,” referring to Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader and the third-generation leader of the Kim family. “I **!” the person concluded.

Even Hu Xijin, the editor of the nationalist Global Times newspaper, was critical: “North Korea is going down a wrong road. Its people will pay for the nation’s mistakes. North Korea’s political power must be re-considered.” His comment was forwarded over 2,300 times and drew nearly 1,600 very varied, responses.

One contained an apparent dig at China’s support of North Korea: “Chinese political power must be re-considered even more,” wrote weeks8888.

But North Korea has its supporters, too.

Praising the test, Dujiangji wrote: “For China’s Pacific strategy, a nuclear ally in North Korea is in China’s national interests. Plus, we should study the North Korean people’s unbending and unswerving spirit in the struggle of international relations.”

Dai Xu, whose “verified” Weibo account (the “V” lends users a stamp of authority) identified him as an “active Air Force colonel” and a “military expert,” said: “Blaming North Korea is easy. But every time the international community blames North Korea it hastens its way forward. Does the world really have no other wisdom other than blame?”

He continued: “Why doesn’t anyone ask North Korea why it carries out nuclear tests? Why doesn’t anyone think about how North Korea’s nuclear tests are an explosive result of America’s strategy of pressure? People should know that blaming won’t work on a country with an extreme lack of sense of security.” The comment was forwarded nearly 230 times.

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IHT Rendezvous: Is Europe's New Budget Really 20 Percent Green? Opinions Differ.

The European Union’s proposed budget for 2014-20, fiercely negotiated in Brussels until Friday, is smaller than its predecessors — a first for a European budget and the surest sign that Continent-wide austerity has seeped into one of the most important documents of the union.

Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for Climate Action, insists that there is another guiding principle to the new Multiannual Financial Framework:

“European heads of state and government have taken on the commission’s suggestion to commit at least 20 percent of the ENTIRE E.U. budget from 2014-2020 to climate-related spending,” she wrote in a statement to reporters. (Emphasis hers.)

My colleagues James Kanter and Andrew Higgins reported on the many different needs that make writing the budget framework so challenging, and on the perceived winners and losers of the most recent summit meeting:

The colossal effort that was required to agree to a sum of about €960 billion, or $1.3 trillion, a mere 1 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product, exposed once again the stubborn attachment to national priorities that has made reaching agreements on how to save the euro so painful in recent years.

Given the importance of the problem it is supposed to address, climate-related spending is to be an integral aspect of the new budget.

“Rather than being parked in a corner of the E.U. budget, climate action will now be integrated into all main spending areas — cohesion, innovation, infrastructure, agriculture etc,” Ms. Hedegaard said in the statement, noting that E.U. leaders wanted to lead the transition to a low-carbon economy.

But some environmental advocates are a lot less enthusiastic. They say that cuts to the LIFE program and international development funds, as well as some of the union’s agricultural spending, make the budget less climate-friendly than it should be.

“Instead of tackling issues that matter to the European public like the creation of green jobs, sustainable farming, environment or overseas development funding, they have agreed on a backward-looking budget,” Tony Long, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature European Policy Office, said in a statement.

The LIFE fund for environment and climate projects was supposed to get €3.6 billion to replace the current LIFE+ program. Though precise figures have not yet been determined, the category cuts suggest that any proposed funding increase will end up being cut, Sébastien Godinot, an economist with the WWF, said by telephone.

The program finances initiatives ranging from recycling drives in France to the enlargement of Natura 2000, the network of protected ecological areas, to technological processes for the molecular inactivation of fly ash.

One of critics’ biggest concerns is cuts to one of the biggest slices of the budget: the Common Agricultural Policy. In addition to subsidizing farming across the Union, the policy is supposed to make farming practices greener. Environmentalists charge that such development funding is being cut disproportionately to save direct payments to farmers, a policy that is seen to encourage large-scale agricultural businesses regardless of their environmental record.

According to Mr. Godinot, only about two percent to three percent of the C.A.P. funding goes toward measures to reduce climate change.

“It doesn’t match the challenges of climate change in Europe,” he said of the program.

Oxfam, meanwhile, criticized the cuts in international development aid.

“It is grossly unfair to balance the books on the backs of the world’s poor, who are being worst hit by financial and economic crises they did not cause,” said Natalia Alonso, head of Oxfam’s E.U. office.

Though destined for countries outside the Union, the aid is often tied to climate mitigation projects or contingent on climate-aware policy, Mr. Godinot said.

“They have cut the funds that were the most climate friendly,” he said.

What do you think? Is the proposed E.U. budget framework green enough? Or too green? Is austerity to blame for it not being greener?

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