Indians and Brazilians top in a list of country’s whose citizens have the most environmentally friendly lifestyles finds a survey conducted by the National Geographic. Brian Hendwerk reports for the National Geographic News.
The National Geographic Society and the international polling firm GlobeScan today unveiled “Greendex 2008: Consumer Choice and the Environment–A Worldwide Tracking Survey.” (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
“The Greendex gives us an unprecedented, meaningful look at how consumers across the globe are behaving,” said Terry Garcia, National Geographic’s executive vice president of mission programs.
Consumers in Brazil and India tied as most “green,” while those in the United States scored lowest, or most wasteful.
To create the survey, GlobeScan conducted Internet surveys of consumers in 14 countries, which together represent more than half of the world’s population and use about 75 percent of its energy.
One of only six plastic surgeons in Sri Lanka, Dr Chandni Perera performs reconstructive surgery to burns victims. She talks to NPR on abuse, why women burn themselves, stigmatisation and changing social attitudes.
Severe burns or fires kill or injure nearly 4 million women each year, according to figures from the World Health Organization, and nearly half of the reported cases occur in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Chandini Perera, one of only six plastic surgeons in Sri Lanka, performs reconstructive surgery to burn victims. She says most of the victims are poor and their living conditions make them vulnerable to the danger of fire. But there’s a disturbing dynamic in some cases: Women are set on fire by their husbands and boyfriends, and others set themselves on fire in an empty bid to escape abuse.
Those who survive the burns do so with disfigurement and disabilities requiring long recovery periods. That process tends to be more emotional than physical, Perera says, noting that victims are often ostracized. That, in turn, keeps the problems hidden. “If you are stigmatized and you are an outcast, then you live in this unseen world,” Perera says.
Perera believes that empowering burn victims to reenter society will help change social attitudes.
Journalist and old India hand John Elliott on Sunil Bharti Mittal’s new personal challenge in his blog Riding The Elephant hosted by Forbes
Sunil Bharti Mittal, founding chairman of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile phone operator, needs a new personal challenge. And he has found it with the $19 billion informal bid that he is reported to have made, or at least is considering, for MTN, the South African-based telecoms group.
Last week Mittal finished a year as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a leading business federation. That was a time-consuming post that tied him up in tedious committee work, which he disliked. His group is also partnering with Wal-Mart (WMT) in a slow-developing retail and cash-and-carry business, but that is primarily being looked after by one of his brothers.
Going by press reports, it was hard to judge whether M Night Shyamalan (MNS) was in India — after a gap of nine-and-a-half years — to pick up his Padma Shri award or to promote his new movie, The Happening, which will be distributed by UTV in India and is scheduled for a Friday, 13 June release (read the details of that business report here).
The India-born, US-based Shyamalan has almost never shown an affinity for India but that didn’t stop a mostly adoring press from flocking to his press conference at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel. Here’s a sample of questions and answers:
1. His favourite Indian actor:
MNS: ”What’s that guy’s name, we were talking about him at lunch, Shah Rukh Khan, yeah.”
2. On his favourite Indian movies:
MNS: [He's seen a total of three] “What was the name of that movie, Kabhi something… [UTV CEO Ronnie Screwvala, co-producer of Night's upcoming film, helpfully supplied Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham]… right, that one; that was kind of cool. And I remember there was an old one, it was supposed to be very salacious at the time, wait, Shivam something? [Satyam Sivam Sundaram, supplied the ever helpful Screwvala]… right, that one, right there, that was smokin’, that one. I don’t remember the name of the third one — wait, Devdas, there you go.”
3. On what he thinks of Indian cinema, based on his three-film viewing experience:
MNS: “I think it is a very powerful art form. I am just starting to learn about it, I find it very powerful — the very heightened vocabulary, the close ups, the loud music, it all adds up to a very powerful form. At first you giggle when you watch it, but then you get acclimated to that vocabulary, and you begin to feel the same sort of heightened emotions.”
4. On winning the Padma Shri:
MNS: “Honestly at first I didn’t get what it was. I’ve been getting calls for awards, asking me to come to Sri Lanka, Singapore.. but I can’t go to all the events due to work, family. So when my office got the call about the Padma Shri, my staff was like, ‘Oh, you’ve won an award.’ But when there were too many congratulatory calls, I was like, ‘what happened?’ It was only after my family and friends from India told me about the Padma Shri that I looked it up to find more details about it.”
So, was Night Shyamalan savaged by the press? Doff your hat to the power of PR, the morning’s stories were full of such glowing descriptions as ‘consummate performer’ (Rediff.com), ‘the man behind gargantuan films’ (Times of India) and ‘India’s best known Hollywood director’ (Khabrein.info).
Read some complete Shyamalan interviews here,here and here.
With MySpace making its India launch, could YouTube have been far behind? The video sharing website launched its Indian version on May 7 with a localised home page and search functions that allows users to share and upload videos and discover clips most relevant to India.
YouTube India is reported to have signed agreements with content providers like UTV, NDTV, Rajshri Films, Eros Entertainment and the department of tourism.
The journey of The Great Khali, India’s first WWE wrestler, is an astonishing one. In Tehelka, Shantanu Guha Ray susses out the man behind the spectacle:
Steve Carell, lead actor of Get Smart, once told an mtv.com reporter about a hulk on the sets who impressed everyone though he had a small role. “He could put his hand over your entire head and crush you. He’s a very sweet guy, but he did not speak English really well. I don’t even know if he was completely aware that he was doing a movie.” Carell was talking about The Great Khali, a former Mr India who briefly held, in 2007, the world champion’s title at the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, formerly, the WWF).
Now an icon across the United States, he was India’s “champion bodybuilder” in 1997 and 1998. At seven feet, three inches, and weighing 190 kilos, he is the only Indian on the WWE bandwagon (there was Tiger Ali Singh signed up before him but Singh was from Canada). Now based in Atlanta, The Great Khali comes from Dhirana in Himachal Pradesh and old-timers in Shimla recall how one Dalip Singh Rana would toss luggage onto the carriers of buses with consummate ease. That was part-time work; his full-time job was crushing stone for local contractors.
The Gandhi name can be both a burden and a gift. With the tours of rural India, is Rahul Gandhi starting to find his feet, asks Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:
IT’S 6 PM in Jagdalpur, 300-odd kilometres away from Raipur in Chhattisgarh. Four Scorpio-loads of journalists have travelled here from faraway Delhi, in search of an elusive moment with Rahul Gandhi. A surprising sense of order grips the air. Everyone seems to know what they have to do; things move with clockwork precision. Rahul Gandhi is due any moment for a small closed-door meeting with tribal representatives. A slow but efficient line of people are snaking their way through the door. A frisk, and a question: Are you a tribal? Where is your card? Several sundry enthusiasts want to get in, many have travelled long miles, but they are turned away: this is strictly a meeting for tribal representatives. The journalists are made to stand about a 100 metres away, resolutely cordoned off by a polite row of sten-gun carrying cops. Rahul does not want media intruding on his meeting.
A few minutes later, almost on the dot, Rahul’s BMW SUV pulls up in a convoy of heavy security. It’s hot outside. The mosquitoes are humming in maddening towers overhead. He does not wave at the media, but walks with single- minded focus into the room and squats on the floor with the waiting audience. Their discussions are impossible to overhear.
Satellite images from US space agency NASA showed virtually the entire coastal plain of the country, one of the poorest nations on the planet, under water. The death toll could reach 63,000.
Most killed by a 12ft tidal wave
From The Times, UK: Most of the victims of the Burma cyclone were overwhelmed by a 12ft moving wall of water that bore down on their lowlying villages at the mouth of the Irrawaddy river delta.
In a rare press conference, members of the Burmese junta today gave the most detailed description to date of the disaster that killed at least 22,000 people at the weekend, and left a further 41,000 missing, according to Burmese state radio.
From The Telegraph, UK: They are cruel, power hungry and dangerously irrational - beyond that, little can be said for certain about Burma’s ruling generals. Reading them is less like Kremlinology, more like Byzantine studies.
They may regard the cyclone which devastated their country on Friday night as an ill omen from the spirit world. Certainly, the timing - a week before the first national vote in 18 years - looks inauspicious, and they are known to consult astrologers and mystics on all aspects of political life.
United Nations envoy Paul Risley says the death toll in Burma could cross 100,000. But the Junta is still not welcoming of aid. The Associated Press has that story (carried in the Houston Chronicle)
Myanmar’s isolationist regime blocked United Nations efforts today to airlift urgently needed high-energy biscuits to survivors of a cyclone that may have killed more than 100,000 people, U.N. officials said.
Paul Risley, a spokesman of the U.N’s World Food Program in Bangkok, said three flights were waiting to take off from Dubai, Dhaka and Thailand with 50 tons of biscuits. A fourth shipment aboard a scheduled Thai Airways cargo flight was likely to bring some biscuits later today.
He told The Associated Press that the WFP was in “constant touch” with the military junta to obtain the flight clearance for the first major airlift of international aid, but there has been no word from officials.
Punches, skirmishes and a strong pair of lungs. Flank your man with two strong women. Pushing and shoving is the name of the game. The Women’s Quota Bill, which provides 33 per cent reservation to women, is finally tabled, after a delay of 12 years, in India’s Rajya Sabha. The Times of India has the report.
The planning would have done a military strategist proud. The defence was deployed with skill and guile. The back-up was forceful and arrived in time. And even though the “enemy” managed to land a few punches, the skirmish was brief and ended with the contentious women’s reservation bill being introduced in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.
Congress parliamentary managers had done their homework well. They placed law minister H R Bhardwaj on the second row away from the aisle connecting the rest of the House. He was flanked by two women ministers, Kumari Selja and Ambika Soni.
The anti-bill lobby led by Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh did its best to disrupt proceedings. SP members moved into the well, ostensibly raising demands for action against Raj Thackeray for his anti-north Indian fulminations. But they had their eyes fixed on Bhardwaj.
‘Penetrative sex’ and ’sexual intercourse’ are banned from NACO’s watered-down sex education manual for teachers scheduled to be introduced across schools in August this year. Teena Thacker has the report in The Indian Express
Over six months after it pulled out its sex education manual following nationwide protests, the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) is ready with a revised version which has been sent to various states for their comments.
The states have been given two months to review the manual, which is expected to be introduced in schools by August this year.
Following protests over the “explicit” content in the earlier manual forcing NACO to pull it out in October last year, the expert group has tried to play it safe this time. The manual, which has been re-named as the “teachers’ handbook”, has no pictures of human figures or words like “penetrative sex” and “sexual intercourse” this time. It is expected to be uploaded on the NACO website for wider comments.
Sagarika Ghose in the Hindustan Times says regional chauvanism rather than urban infrastructure is the priority of politicians who control cities like Mumbai and Bangalore
Ah, the great Indian city! The lack of urban infrastructure destroying the infrastructure of the human soul. By 2020 Mumbai will have a population of 20 million. Bangalore, already with 6.5 million inhabitants has seen phenomenal growth. Three hundred million Indians live in urban areas; the figure will spurt by 40 per cent in the next 11 years. Whatever the rural romantics may say, India’s future is irreversibly urban. Mumbai and Bangalore are symbols of the urban Indian dream, the first, whose present chief minister claims will be a new Shanghai, the second, which a former CM wanted to make into another Singapore.
But forget Shanghai and Singapore, which instead are the voices that are speaking the loudest for the Indian city? The new voices that are yelling into the urban skyline are anything but urbane or metropolitan. In Mumbai, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray has declared war on north Indians, mimicking what he calls their strange accents, noisy pujas, nasty civic manners and demanding preferential treatment in jobs for local Maharashtrians. Raj Thackeray wants north Indians out of Mumbai. In Bangalore, as the campaign for the forthcoming assembly elections gathers momentum, another ‘son of the soil’ is also demanding reservations for locals. H.D. Deve Gowda’s political manifesto demands 30 per cent reservation of jobs in the infotech and biotech sectors for local Kannadigas.
Reuters photographer Adrees Latif won the breaking news photography Pulitzer Prize for his shot of a Japanese videographer killed during anti-government protests in Burma (Myanmar). Read this riveting account of how he got the shot:
Bangkok: I landed in Yangon with some old clothes, a Canon 5D camera, two fixed lenses and a laptop.
For four days in September last year, I went to the city’s historic Shwedagon Pagoda and waited for the Buddhist monks who gathered there to lead the biggest protests against Myanmar’s military rulers in 20 years.
Since I was at the same pagoda every day, dozens of people, including monks, asked me who I was and what I was doing.
Pakistan’s newly-elected prime minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani talks about his plans for the country and his priorities. Ron Moreau in Newsweek:
The United States has said that if Pakistan cannot control the border then it will take unilateral actions. And there have been reports of U.S. Predator aircraft striking inside Pakistan without Islamabad ‘ s consent. Is this happening and, if so, will it continue? We believe in democracy and the rule of law, and we want respect for the sovereignty of the country. Since I have been the chief executive, these [unilateral attacks] have never happened, and they will never happen again. We are capable ourselves.
Can you work with President Musharraf, whose regime threw you in jail for five years?
My having been in jail has nothing to do with my position today. The Pakistan Peoples Party believes in peace and reconciliation. We don’t want to fight for non-issues. I’m not bitter at all.
US author Steve Coll spent years looking into Osama bin Laden’s family. Now, his new book, The Bin Ladens, provides a unique insight into the clan. SPIEGEL spoke with him about where the terrorist might be hiding, how his father got his start, and the unique romantic liaisons pursued by one of his brothers:
SPIEGEL: Where is bin Laden now?
Coll: I am firmly convinced that he is on Pakistani soil, and I would even venture to say where: in the mountainous region of North Waziristan, near the city of Miram Shah. Bin Laden knows the area like the back of his hand. It is controlled by the Haqqani clan, in which he has deep roots. Pakistan’s army doesn’t dare enter the region.
SPIEGEL: Do you think he’s in some sort of al-Qaida camp where he can play a role coordinating the group’s activities?
Coll: Osama probably moves from place to place, protected by friends — which doesn’t mean that someone won’t betray him one of these days. And he apparently has access to modern means of communication, like satellite TV. The Miram Shah region, unlike rural Afghanistan, is further developed in this respect than we in the West generally assume. I imagine that Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, isn’t in the same place as bin Laden.
The Prospect/Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 “public intellectuals” — “the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time” — has nine from this part of the world.
The criteria to make the list, says FP, could not be more simple: Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.
India:
1: Historian Ramachandra Guha
2: Political psychologist Ashis Nandy
3: Environmentalist Sunita Narain
4: Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen
5: Journalist author Fareed Zakaria
6: Novelist Salman Rushdie
7: San Diego-based neuroscientist VS Ramachandran
Pakistan: Lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan
Bangladesh: Microfinance guru Mohammed Yunus
China has four.
Click here for the full list, to vote your selection or to add a candidate.
Archery is the national sport in the Himalayan kingdom. Bamboo and reed have given way to fiberglass, but the passion hasn’t dimmed and the insults still fly. From the Chicago Tribune:
Dorji, a house painter with close-cropped black hair, draws his bowstring, hooks his thumb on his cheek and takes aim at what appears an impossible target: an 11-inch-wide slip of wood dug into the soil 460 feet away — deeper than center field.
He lets his finger slip and the arrow streaks down the field, raising a puff of dust when it hits the earthen bank just behind the target. He has missed.
“His wife keeps beating him! That’s why he’s getting weaker and weaker!” taunt his friends, gathered in a grove of willows along the rocky Pachu River. Dorji, 47, is accustomed to the insults that are a staple of archery in Bhutan, and just ignores them.
[Picture: Bhutanese Olympic archers Dorji Dolma, left, and her husband, Tashi Tshering, practice earlier this year in Thimpu, the capital.]
Thiruvalla, India: Everything about this city of some 60,000 people in southern Kerala – from the battery of job consultancies to endless technical training institutes – is geared towards helping people leave.
In Thiruvalla, travel agents abound, each one selling more than just a plane ticket. Thomas Beno, owner of Tomy’s Travels, does brisk business in facilitating exits – he helps get his clients passports, visas, whatever they need to get out of town, and out of the country.
“So many people are going to the UAE and the United Kingdom,” he said, sitting inside his small street-front shop among scores of similar shops.
Amrit Dhillon from Cochin, Kerala in The Telegraph, UK:
Adorned with gold, and carrying a Hindu deity on his broad back, Babu the elephant plays a central role in religious ceremonies across the Indian state of Kerala.
Now aged 45, he is approaching retirement after a hard working life - and, like many of the 650 working elephants in the state, there have always been fears for his future.
Elephants cost £340 a month to maintain, a great expense when the average monthly wage is only £50, and many owners cannot afford to look after their beasts when they finally stop working.
But help is at hand. India’s first retirement home for elderly elephants opens next month inside a tranquil forest at Kottur, outside the state capital Trivandrum, where the colossal beasts can spend their twilight years in dignity.
[Photo: After 36 years' work, Babu the elephant will be pampered in retirement]
Turkish educators are offering an alternative approach to religious schools that could reduce extremists’ influence. Sabrina Tavernise reports from Karachi in The New York Times:
Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.
He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.
“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”
But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.
After breathing fire and brimstone against smoking on screen — he wants an official government of India ban on actors lighting up in movies — India’s health minister Anubami Ramadoss spoke out on April 30 against movies that show actors drinking alcohol. Ramadoss lashed out at actors for scenes that showed them drowning their sorrows in alcohol. “Actors drinking on screen will encourage youngsters to take up the habit,” he said.
Bollywood’s badshah, Amitabh Bachchan is not amused. A democracy must treat its citizens as ‘autonomous individuals capable of rational judgement’ writes Bachchan in an open letter to Ramadoss in his blog on May 4. Quit preaching censorship and spend on public awareness campaigns on alcohol abuse, he tells the minister.
I appreciate your concern for the general health of our nation, particularly so as this is your professional remit as minister. Indeed, I admire and encourage your speaking out against addictive and dangerous substances that cause early mortality and violence by their abuse.
However, these addictive substances are structural aspects of our economy and it is in this manner where government action would be most effective: penalties for their production and sale would convince an electorate of the serious intentions of your administration. Due to the intimate relationship between a healthy and dynamic democracy and education, punitive financial measure MUST be allied to better public health campaigns that do not merely pronounce upon behaviours, but actually inform and persuade.
A child of 10 was one of three civilians who died during a botched Taliban attack on the Afghan President. Peter Beaumont reports from Kabul in The Observor, UK:
Syed Ali was playing on the roof of his mud-brick house when the killers came for Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai last week. Karzai survived the attack on Kabul’s broad parade ground. Ten-year-old Syed Ali, a kilometre away watching his mother cleaning almond shells to supplement the family’s winter fuel, died, with two others, when he was hit by a stray bullet.
Amid the furore of how a plot - apparently known of in advance - could have come so close to killing Karzai, the death of Syed Ali has all but been forgotten. An official from the President’s office came to see the family and said he would come again. When I met the family, they were still waiting for his return.
His mother can barely speak; two days of crying has reduced her voice to a croak.
India’s extraordinary conglomerate has found unique solutions to many of its problems. But it’s still unclear what will happen when the boss retires. Heather Connon reports from Mumbai in The Observor, UK:
The favourite boast of executives of the Tata Group is that it accompanies the average Indian throughout the day. They wake to the alarm of its Titan clocks, drink its tea or coffee for breakfast, wear clothes bought from its Westside shopping centres, take a Tata car or bus to work on a computer set up by Tata Consultancy Services, lunch in a Tata hotel, arrange their evening appointments on a Tata mobile phone and use Tata power to light their homes.
These days, the influence of the Indian conglomerate is spreading beyond its home country. Back in 2000, it made the first major acquisition by an Indian group when it acquired the Tetley tea company; last year, that was trumped when it bought steelmaker Corus for £6.2bn, while in March it was confirmed as the purchaser of British icons Jaguar and Land-Rover from Ford. Next month, it will make its first foray into UK financial services when New Star launches an Indian investment fund that will be managed by Tata Asset Management.
Can the right celebrities raise concern for Myanmar? Alex Williams in The New York Times:
“Hitler is alive in Burma” reads the words scrawled on a cardboard sign, held aloft by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, the “Juno” star, in a 90-second human-rights public awareness message that began showing on video-sharing Web sites last week.
The spot is one of 30 produced for U.S. Campaign for Burma, starring celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston. They will be distributed on Fanista.com, a social-networking and entertainment retail site, then passed along to sites like YouTube and Google Video every day for the next month. The goal of the campaign is to thrust the cause of human rights in Burma - now known as Myanmar - into the orbit of A-list activist causes, along with Tibet and Darfur, and to encourage international pressure on a government that activists say is one of the world’s most oppressive.
[Picture: Ellen Page of “Juno” holds a picture of Myanmar’s dictator, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.]
The desert grasslands of Gujarat in India may be remote, but the Halepotra tribe make the long journey worthwhile. Tom Parker in The Guardian:
‘This is it, it’s probably not what you expected,” Shakur said with a wry smile as he stopped his battered 1965 Fiat 2300 beside a collection of five bhungas - traditional cylindrical mud huts with white walls and grass-topped roofs.
Shaam-e-Sarhad looked like all the other tribal settlements we’d passed en route, though its surprisingly large huts had a few welcome extras such as a ceiling fan and a separate outdoor bathroom.
We were in one of the most remote parts of India, in Kutch’s desert grasslands in the state of Gujarat, with the Pakistan border and the edge of the vast salt plain known as the Great Rann of Kutch just 15km to the north - hence the resort’s name, which means “Sunset at the Border”.
Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual - they’ve been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health. The faithful have been observing the ritual at a shrine in Solapur, in western India’s Maharastra, for more than five hundred years. They believe it will make their children strong and say no accidents have ever happened. [Reuters]
The South Asian community was out in force for the premiere of Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani on Monday night, and though the crowd was certainly engaged by the all-too-topical true story, in which eight-year-old Ramchand accidentally wanders over the Pakistani border with India and winds up imprisoned for almost five years, it was star Nandita Das (photo) who had the packed theater in the palm of her hand.
Das drew an ovation for her almost-wordless performance as Ramchand’s mother, Champa, and got another round of applause upon opening her mouth to riff on Jabbar’s explanation of how she lassoed the Bollywood superstar into her debut feature. “I told Mehreen that I’d do the film, but only if I could play Ramchand,” quipped Das, who went on to note that this was, in fact, her second time performing for Jabbar, following a short film the two women had worked on together.
Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey, $2 billion, vaastu-compliant skyscraper, Antilla in downtown Mumbai, when completed, will be the world’s costliest residence. Matt Woolsey has the story in Forbes.
While visiting New York in 2005, Nita Ambani was in the spa at the Mandarin Oriental New York, overlooking Central Park. The contemporary Asian interiors struck her just so, and prompted her to inquire about the designer.
Nita Ambani was no ordinary tourist. She is married to Mukesh Ambani, head of Mumbai-based petrochemical giant Reliance Industries, and the fifth richest man in the world. ( Lakshmi Mittal, ranked fourth, is an Indian citizen, but a resident of the U.K.)
As the Olympic flame makes its way to the top of the world’s highest mountain, China’s repressive tactics have sparked fresh criticism. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent, UK:
William Holland was only thinking of the photograph. When he got to the top of Everest he planned to take the rolled-up flag saying “Free Tibet” from his rucksack, pose for posterity with the banner as a backdrop and then roll it away again before starting back down. He was not looking to make a scene.
But that is exactly what transpired. Someone in the group he was climbing with informed the Nepalese authorities of Mr Holland’s flag. When he reached Everest Base Camp he was ordered from the mountain and told to go straight to Kathmandu. From there he was deported from Nepal with an order not to return for two years.
The 26-year-old US climber’s treatment at the hands of the Nepalese authorities is just one indication of how the world’s highest mountain has in recent days become engulfed by the politics and controversy surrounding China and its relationship with Tibet.
BBC’s Jonah Fisher joins the Olympic torch for the high point of its trip - on Mount Everest. In the fifth of his diary instalments, he takes a tour of Everest base camp.
On Wednesday we had a treat. After lengthy negotiations with the border police our minders secured us permission to visit Everest base camp 5km from our media village.
With strict instructions not to film the numerous military trucks on the way, we were driven to the tented camp that forms the command centre for both the climbing team as well as the official Chinese media.
Click here for more and for his previous instalments:
As the country prepares to vote in a discredited referendum, Rachel Aspden visits the forgotten Burmese resistance - the eastern ethnic groups promised independence 60 years ago. From New Statesman:
As the sun sinks over the steep jungle hills of the Thailand-Burma border, a saffron-robed monk walks towards his temple’s golden shrine. Across a shallow gully, four grey- uniformed Burmese soldiers watch him through binoculars, their rifles poised. Below them is a huddle of abandoned, burnt-out houses.
“Six years ago, they destroyed the temple and ran the new border straight through the middle,” says the monk. “On the Thai side we are safe for the moment. On the other . . .”
Pra Preecha is a refugee from Shan State in eastern Burma. Last September, when his fellow monks led 50,000 street protesters against the military government in Rangoon, the international media heralded a “saffron revolution”. It seemed that one of the world’s most brutal and insular regimes was about to crumble. But the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) clamped down hard on protesters and sympathisers - “scores, perhaps hundreds, of monks were abducted, tortured and killed”, says Pra Preecha - and the moment for change passed.
Can a partnership between a cheap robot and a carnivore with an exquisite sense of smell aid the hunt for buried landmines? Engineer Thrishantha Nanayakkara and colleagues at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka have come up with an unusual solution.
Chitral, Pakistan: There are new casualties in the hunt for Osama bin Laden: yak-mounted, polo-playing herdsmen who have been told to shift their annual competition from a remote corner of Pakistan for “security reasons”.
Pakistan’s intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence, has ordered polo players to move their contest to a neighbouring district because the current site is too near a secret CIA surveillance post.
The hugely popular festival takes place in the Hindu Kush mountains - on what is probably the highest polo ground in the world - in Chagril, on the ancient Silk Road bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor.
Cheerleaders, slapgate and, now, a showdown between Shane Warne and Sourav Ganguly. Will the controversties at IPL never cease? CricInfo has both sides of the story.
First, Warne is upset at Ganguly’s refusal to walk
The Indian Premier League feels increasingly like the Shane Warne Show. Tonight, after his Rajasthan Royals side made it four wins in a row in front of a partisan crowd at the Sawai Mansingh stadium in Jaipur, Warne launched into a stinging attack on Sourav Ganguly, the captain of the Kolkata Knight Riders, for what he perceived to be a blatant disregard for the spirit of the game. He seemed to have a point, but right now Warne could probably tell you the earth was flat and you’d believe him.
Then, Ganguly says, ‘I just want to laugh at what Warne is saying’.
Sourav Ganguly, captain of the Kolkata Knight Riders, has dismissed Shane Warne’s criticism of his on-field behaviour, even questioning his moral right to comment about the spirit of the game. Warne, leading the Rajasthan Royals, first slammed Ganguly for taking too long to come out to bat and then condemned his attitude towards the IPL’s Spirit of Cricket agreement when he questioned a catch taken by Graeme Smith.
A serious hotel shortage has businessmen wandering the country in search of a bed. Neeta Lal in Asia Sentinel:
Paul Douglas had a surreal experience on his maiden visit to India last year. Although the Los Angeles trader was on a business trip to India’s Silicon Valley - Bangalore - he put up in Mumbai, nearly 1,000 kilometers away. Douglas would fly to Bangalore every morning during his three-day stay and then jet back after wrapping up work.
Douglas found the city’s hotels so expensive, he says, that he preferred “to stay with a friend in Mumbai, fly in for meetings to Bangalore and then catch the day’s last flight back.”
Much like Douglas, foreign visitors to India are experiencing the country’s worst hotel room crunch ever. As its economy booms, with growth projected at 8 percent in 2008-09 despite the global slowdown, demand for hotel accommodation has far outstripped supply. The shortfall is so acute that hotel rooms in most Indian metropolitan areas are either unavailable or to be had only for outrageous prices.
How the Afghan heroin trade is fuelling the Taliban insurgency. In The Independent, UK, Jerome Starkey reports from Kunduz:
The heroin flooding Britain’s streets is threatening the lives of UK troops in Afghanistan, an Independent investigation can reveal.
Russian gangsters who smuggle drugs into Britain are buying cheap heroin from Afghanistan and paying for it with guns. Smugglers told The Independent how Russian arms dealers meet Taliban drug lords at a bazaar near the old Afghan-Soviet border, deep in Tajikistan’s desert. The bazaar exists solely to trade Afghan drugs for Russian guns - and sometimes a bit of sex on the side.
The drugs are destined for Britain’s streets. The guns go straight to the Taliban front line.
In The Times, UK, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Chief Cricket Correspondent:
Cricket is in ferment again. It often is, but the first thing to understand about what we had better now call the Twenty20 Revolution is that it will not supersede Test cricket.
I keep reading that “cricket is the new football”. That is odd because that was what was being said in 2005, when the Ashes series was gripping a wider than usual proportion of the British public, just as last year’s ICC World Twenty20 tournament in South Africa captivated much of India’s vast population or the explosive fast bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson enthused Australians, among them Kerry Packer, in 1974-75.
Cricket’s popularity ebbs and flows, like the game itself, but it keeps flowing. Not because it is the new football, but because it is the old cricket, a series of duels between a batsman and a bowler in a team context and varying conditions, a game demanding as much skill, fitness and courage as most others and greater discipline, technique and intelligence than any.
Asian vultures are declining faster than any bird in history, including the dodo, and could become extinct within a decade, conservationists said yesterday.
A survey shows that the rate of decline is about 50% a year with one species, the white-backed vulture, falling by 99.9% since the early 1990s. Others such as the long-billed and slender-billed vultures have been reduced to around 1,000 in the wild.
Scientists blame the decline on an anti-inflammatory drug used for livestock, which can poison vultures feeding on treated carcasses. Diclofenac causes kidney failure in the birds within a few days of exposure and a single cow carcass can kill a large flock. Researchers counted the vulture population in northern and central India between March and June last year, surveying the birds from vehicles along almost 12,000 miles of road.
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