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Three survive eight days under Nepal quake rubble; but many trekkers dead


(Reuters) - Three people were pulled out alive from the rubble of their home eight days after Nepal's devastating earthquake, an official said on Sunday, but rescuers have found about 50 bodies on a popular trekking route that was hit by an avalanche.

The current toll of 7,056 dead is likely to rise as an entire village was carried away by the avalanche and many more people are believed to have died, officials said.

A home ministry official said police and army rescued three people from the rubble in the district of Sindhupalchowk, northeast of the capital Kathmandu and one of the worst-hit areas in the country. No further details were immediately available.

In the northern Rasuwa district, a Nepali police team has pulled out the bodies of about 50 people, including some foreign trekkers, from the avalanche-hit area, officials said.

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The entire village of Langtang was wiped out by the avalanche, said Ganga Sagar Pant, the head of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal, who has a representative in the area.

"All that is left is scattered belongings like bags and coats, all the houses have been thrown down the mountain," he said. "There is nothing left. I don't think anyone can survive that."

The village is on a popular trekking route and has 55 guesthouses catering to visitors. It was not clear how many people were there at the time of the avalanche and whether they were foreigners or local villagers.

None of the recovered bodies has been identified, said Pravin Pokharel, deputy superintendent of police in the northern district of Rasuwa. Pokharel, who led the police team, said the bodies were pulled out from under snow and ice on Saturday. Rescuers were to return to the remote area on Sunday.

At least 200 other people are still missing in Langtang, including villagers and trekkers, said Uddhav Bhattarai, the seniormost bureaucrat in the district.

"We had not been able to reach the area earlier because of rains and cloudy weather," he said by telephone.

Tulsi Prasad Gautam, the head of Nepal’s tourism department, said: "The death toll (of foreigners in Nepal) will go higher because in the Langtang area a significant number are still missing."



U.S. MARINES TO HELP

U.S. military aircraft and personnel were due to arrive in Nepal on Sunday, a day later than expected, to help ferry relief supplies to stricken areas outside the capital Kathmandu, a U.S. Marines spokeswoman said.

Marine Brigadier General Paul Kennedy has said the delayed U.S. contingent included at least 100 U.S. soldiers, lifting equipment and six military aircraft, two of them helicopters.

The team arrives as criticism mounted over a pile-up of relief supplies at Kathmandu airport, the only international gateway to the Himalayan nation, because of customs inspections.

United Nations Resident Representative Jamie McGoldrick said the government must loosen its normal customs restrictions to deal with the increasing flow of relief pouring in from abroad.

But the government, complaining it has received unneeded supplies such as tuna and mayonnaise, insisted its customs agents had to check all emergency shipments.

"They should not be using peacetime customs methodology," the U.N.'s McGoldrick said. Instead, he argued, all relief material should get a blanket exemption from checks on arrival.

Kennedy also warned against bottlenecks at Kathmandu airport, saying: "What you don't want to do is build up a mountain of supplies" that block space for planes or more supplies.

Nepal lifted import taxes on tarpaulins and tents on Friday but a home ministry spokesman, Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, said all goods coming in from overseas had to be inspected. "This is something we need to do," he said.

Nepali government officials have said efforts to step up the pace of delivery of relief material to remote areas were also frustrated by a shortage of supply trucks and drivers, many of whom had returned to their villages to help their families.

Many Nepalis have been sleeping in the open since the quake, afraid of returning to their homes because of powerful aftershocks. Tents have been pitched in Kathmandu's main sports stadium and on its golf course.

According to the United Nations, 600,000 houses have been destroyed or damaged.

The United Nations said 8 million of Nepal's 28 million people were affected, with at least 2 million needing tents, water, food and medicines over the next three months.



Displaced Again and Again, Some African Migrants Had No Plan to Land in Italy

Agyemin Boateng, a Ghanaian who migrated to Libya for work, is now being held at a detention center in Sicily. He said he left Libya because of his fear over the growing violence there. CreditLynsey Addario for The New York Times

SYRACUSE, Sicily — By now, the unceasing tides of migrants arriving at the ports of Sicily fall into loose national categories.


The Syrians usually arrive with money, bearing broken lives in canvas bags, and are able to slip out of Italy, bound for affluent northern Europe. The Eritreans may be far less wealthy but they too are well organized, with networks that move them north as well.


Then there are men like Agyemin Boateng and Prince Adawiah, who were scooped out of the Mediterranean this month by an Italian rescue ship. Both are from Ghana, and neither has a plan for a new life in Europe — nor, they say, did either of them ever plan to come to Italy. They were working as laborers in Libya, until life there became untenable and returning to Ghana became unfeasible.


“There are guns and bombs,” said Mr. Adawiah, 25, who worked in Tripoli for nearly three years. “Every day, there is shooting. I’m afraid. That is why I traveled to Italy.”


Europe’s migration crisis escalated sharply in April, with the coming of warmer weather in the Mediterranean. Many more smugglers’ boats took to the sea, and a record number of migrants died attempting the crossing — more than 1,700 people so far in 2015, by some estimates.
At Umberto I, a migrant detention center in Syracuse, Sicily, men who were held there said they did not know the status of their asylum applications. CreditLuca Bruno/Associated Press




Conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia have shaped and reshaped Europe’s migrant flows in recent years, with none more transformative to the Mediterranean smuggling trade than the civil war in Syria. And the tumult in Libya is changing the migration equation once again.


Libyan lawlessness has allowed a haven for smugglers to operate along the country’s coastline, but it has also unmoored many African laborers who were working there as migrants. Many of these men now languish in Italian detention centers without contacts or plans for the future, and their growing numbers are frustrating some Italian mayors and other officials.


“We don’t know anything,” said one migrant, Shamsudeen Sawud, 18, who arrived in Italy more than a week ago. “No one is telling us anything.”


Migration statistics offer a hint of the shift. More than 170,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Italy by sea last year; Syrians and Eritreans were the two largest groups among them, accounting for more than 76,000 people, according to Italy’s interior ministry. Gambians ranked a distant fifth. Yet during the first quarter of 2015, a relatively slow period with just 10,165 arrivals — Gambia was the leading country of origin, accounting for 1,413 of the migrants.


The authorities have not published figures for April yet, but humanitarian and migration groups confirm that a majority of the arriving migrants came originally from sub-Saharan African countries — some directly, with Italy as a destination, but many end up here less deliberately.


“We see that even people who had originally moved to Libya with the intention to remain there — including both refugees and migrants — have now decided to flee toward Europe, even though it means risking their lives in a very dangerous journey at sea,” Matteo de Bellis, the Italy representative for Amnesty International, said in an email.


Bruce Leimsidor, an expert on Europe’s asylum system, said a certain amount of skepticism should be applied, because migrants may make such claims in the hope that it will help their requests for asylum in Europe.


Before the fall of the Qaddafi government, Mr. Leimsidor said, hundreds of thousands of West Africans, as well as many Bangladeshis, worked in Libya to save money for an eventual return home, and never planned to move on to Europe, but the situation was very different now.


“It has been several years now that work in Libya for the migrants has been quite scarce,” Mr. Leimsidor, who teaches European asylum law at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, said in an email. Given that scarcity and the dangers of violence in the country, he said, “those who have come into Libya in the last few years have had at least some intention of coming to Europe.”


At the Umberto I detention center in this ancient Sicilian port city, Mohammed Njie, 31, described his route to Italy. He left his home in Gambia seven months ago after a dispute with his boss over unpaid wages. He made his way to Libya, hoping to send money back to his parents and two children, following in the footsteps of older generations of Gambians who worked in Libya and returned home with nest eggs.


“They could buy homes, buy a car,” he said. “They could live a better life.”


Now, though, Mr. Njie and other African migrants at the detention center said there was rampant abuse in Libya. Some men said the construction bosses had stopped paying wages to laborers, and other men who did get their pay said they were preyed upon by criminal gangs, including marauding teenagers who robbed people at gunpoint.


“They know you can’t send money back to Ghana,” said Mr. Adawiah, who had worked in Libya since 2012. “There are no banks. That is why they know that money is with you. That is why they attacked us every day.”


Mr. Boateng said trying to go home from Libya would be perilous because militias and criminals now infest the land routes. He said one Ghanaian man who worked in Libya for three years was robbed of all his savings while trying to make his way home.


“It is difficult to go back to your country, even if you have money,” Mr. Boateng said. “When they see you are black, they know you have money on you.”


Several men said that sympathetic Libyans had put them in touch with smugglers as a means of saving their lives, even as the smugglers were actively seeking black laborers to make the trip. “They say, ‘If you want to save your life, leave, and we will take you to Italy,’” Mr. Adawiah said of the smugglers.


The growing population of migrants in Italy is becoming a political controversy. A group of Italian mayors recently tried to block plans by the national government to distribute migrants to detention centers around the country. Italy has also been criticized for allowing many Syrians and Eritreans to pass through and apply for asylum in northern Europe, a violation of European Union policy.


At the Umberto I center, many of the migrants expressed dismay and uncertainty. None had a cellphone or had been able to contact relatives in Africa. (By contrast, Syrian migrants often traveled with smartphones.) None of the migrants knew the status of their asylum applications.


“I want to work,” said Mr. Njie, the Gambian. “I left my family behind, so I want to work. And I want to find peace of mind.”





Germany Is Accused of Helping N.S.A. Spy on European Allies


BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is fending off allegations that the German secret service helped the United States to spy on European partners and companies, nearly a year after Ms. Merkel expelled the top American spy in a rare display of anger over revelations of widespread United States intelligence operations in Germany. Over the past week, the German news media has reported that the country’s domestic intelligence agency, known by its German initials, B.N.D., gathered information on European companies at the behest of the United States National Security Agency for years, citing confidential documents and government experts. The aviation giant Airbus said Thursday that it had filed a legal complaint against unknown persons over acts of criminal espionage and was seeking information from the German government in the wake of the reports. On Monday, the newspaper Bild named the aviation company as a target of the American agency.




“We are aware that as a major player in this industry we are a target for intelligence activities. In this particular case there appears to be a reasonable suspicion of alleged industrial espionage,” Airbus said in an emailed statement. “We are alarmed by this.”




Germans hold privacy in high regard, given their history of police states under the Nazis and, in the old East Germany, the Communist Party. In 2013, the country displayed a collective outrage over revelations that American intelligence agencies had been monitoring Ms. Merkel’s cellphone conversations and German telecommunications.




The German news media have further said that the Merkel government knew of cooperation between the B.N.D. and the American spy services, but withheld that information from a parliamentary committee assigned to investigate the affair.




The chancellor says her office, which oversees B.N.D. operations, has cooperated fully with the lawmakers’ inquiry, but one of her strongest allies, Thomas de Maizière, who was Ms. Merkel’s chief of staff from 2005 to 2009, is facing allegations that he lied to Parliament about cooperation with American intelligence agencies.




“I strongly reject allegations the government did not tell the truth,” Steffen Seibert, Ms. Merkel’s spokesman said Wednesday. Mr. Maizière, now the interior minister, has consistently denied misleading Parliament.




In the latest round of revelations, the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported Thursday that B.N.D. helped the United States spy on high-ranking members of France’s Foreign Ministry and presidency, as well as on the European Commission.




Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the commission, said in Brussels that investigating the allegations was a matter for the German Parliament. “The German authorities will have to deal with that and I suppose that they will do so,” Mr. Juncker said.




Mr. Juncker came under scrutiny last year over allegations in the news media that more than 300 companies benefited from preferential tax deals with Luxembourg during the nearly two decades he was that country’s prime minister.




“I know from personal experience that they are very difficult to be kept under control,” Mr. Juncker said, wryly adding that amid all the rumors of spies in Brussels, “the commission should have a secret service.”






Police Fire Tear Gas and Water Cannons at Istanbul Protesters

ISTANBUL — Riot police officers fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse hundreds of protesters who took to the streets of Istanbul on Friday to defy a government ban on holding May Day celebrations in Taksim Square. Scores of demonstrators scurried through side streets as the police unleashed the tear gas and jets of water. At least 136 people were detained, according to Istanbul’s police chief, Selami Altinok. The authorities had made an attempt to lock down the city with roadblocks and by suspending main public transportation lines. About 10,000 police officers were also deployed in an effort to prevent labor unions and activists from gathering in Taksim Square, where violence has marred May Day celebrations in the past.
In the Besiktas district, activists shouted resistance slogans and May Day chants. Many protesters were stopped and searched by the police, and several people with gas masks were arrested in the Sisli district. “Turkey has a highly oppressive government with dictatorial tendencies,” said Kani Beko, the president of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey, which represents more than 320,000 workers in the country.






“They would do anything to prevent anyone calling for better democracy in this country,” he added. Cengiz Umut, a member of the trade union confederation, said: “Taksim is ours. It is a symbol of May Day. Gathering there is our right.” “Look at all this police around you,” he added. “This is pure fascism.” Taksim Square was closed to May Day celebrations by the military government in 1980 after an episode in 1977 when gunmen opened fire on the rally, killing dozens of protesters. The government reopened the square for May Day celebrations in 2010, but it closed it again citing security concerns. The square has been under tight police control since 2013, when it became the center of sweeping antigovernment protests that roiled the country and created one of the greatest challenges to the government of the former prime minister and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Before the protests on Friday, the governor of Istanbul, Vasip Sahin, said Taksim Square was not a suitable site for May Day events, citing risks to security and property. He invited union representatives to lay wreaths in the square to commemorate the dead protesters, but he urged them to hold any mass gatherings in designated areas outside the city center. In March, the government passed a security bill that broadened police powers and increased penalties against unauthorized demonstrators, in what was widely considered an attempt to secure public order before parliamentary elections in June. The protests on Friday came at a time of deep polarization in Turkey. There has been mounting opposition to what many see as the authoritarian style of Mr. Erdogan and his government. The authorities have responded by increasingly quashing dissent. “This government has made this city unlivable,” said Alev Kuyumcu, a protester who lives in Besiktas. “They make us suffocate on a national holiday. You can’t even leave the house.”


Macedonia Indicts Opposition Leader Who Denounced Graft



The leader of the left-wing Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, recently unveiled plans for a mass protest in the capital, Skopje, in May.CreditRobert Atanasovski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


WARSAW — Macedonia’s main opposition leader has been formally indicted on charges of wiretapping and antigovernment activities after months of political turmoil, prosecutors said. The leader of the left-wing Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, was charged with “one continuous criminal act of unauthorized wiretapping and audio recording” as well as “violence against representatives of the highest authorities,” according to a statement posted on the state prosecutor’s website late Thursday. The indictment came shortly after Mr. Zaev unveiled plans for a mass protest in the capital of the landlocked Balkan nation, Skopje, to be held this month — “the biggest one that the country has seen,” he said. Macedonian politics has been rocked for months by Mr. Zaev’s release, bit by bit, of leaked transcripts of what he said were thousands of government-made recordings of conversations involving government officials and others. Mr. Zaev says they point to instances of corruption, vote-rigging and manipulation of the criminal justice system. Photo The leader of the left-wing Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, Zoran Zaev, recently unveiled plans for a mass protest in the capital, Skopje, in May. Credit Robert Atanasovski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Officials in the conservative government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski have said that while some of the recordings appear to be legitimate, others are fabricated. Mr. Gruevski has blamed an unnamed foreign intelligence service for making the recordings and instigating the scandal. Officials from his party have labeled it an attempt to topple the government. The scandal is a blow the image of Macedonia, a poor country on the southern fringe of the Balkans, which has been seeking to join the European Union and NATO. Mr. Zaev said at a news conference in Skopje this week that the opposition had more than 100,000 transcripts of conversations and over 18,000 text messages from more than 12,000 telephone numbers, and that it would continue to make them public and share them with prosecutors. Western leaders have become increasingly alarmed over what they say is growing authoritarianism in Macedonia. Diplomats from the United States and Germany, among others, have called in recent weeks for a thorough and transparent investigation of the scandal. “There are serious allegations about government abuse of power,” Jess L. Baily, the United States’ ambassador to Macedonia, said in an interview with a local television station last week. Mr. Zaev was placed under preliminary indictment in January, and his passport was confiscated. The formal announcement of the indictment shows that prosecutors believe they have amassed sufficient evidence to bring him to trial, a date for which will be set shortly. While Mr. Zaev remained free after the preliminary indictment, several others, including employees of Macedonia’s Interior Ministry, were placed in pretrial detention and will remain there now that the indictments have been formalized. Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from London.

New Owner for The Moscow Times and Vedomosti
MOSCOW — A Finnish media company on Thursday said it would sell its one-third stake in Vedomosti, Russia’s most influential business newspaper, as well as ownership of The Moscow Times, the country’s only English-language daily, to a Russian buyer. The deal, announced Thursday by the Finnish company, Sanoma, is the first in what is expected to be a wave of sales or restructurings in the Russian news media as foreign companies adjust their Russian assets under a new law that limits them to a 20 percent stake. Lawmakers adopted the legislation last year, saying it was needed to ensure Russia’s national security. Vedomosti, which regularly publishes investigations and opinion pieces critical of the government, has been a focus of official ire. Both Pearson, publisher of The Financial Times, and News Corp., which owns Dow Jones, also own 33-percent stakes in the newspaper, which by law they will be required to reduce by 2016. In a statement, Sanoma said it began the process of selling its holdings in Russian news media in 2013, before the law was adopted, in order to focus on its “core markets.” “We are confident that these iconic titles are in good hands and will continue to develop as some of Russia’s leading media titles,” the company’s group president and chief executive, Harri-Pekka Kaukonen, said in a statement. No price was given for the deal, but the company said it booked a capital gain of $8.9 million before currency translation adjustments. The buyer was Demyan Kudryavtsev, a veteran Russian media manager and former business partner of Boris Berezovsky, who died in 2013. Mr. Kudryavtsev served as the general director of the Kommersant publishing house from 2006 until 2012. Acquisitions in Russian news media, particularly those that involve politically sensitive publications, have raised concerns that the Kremlin could be inserting loyal businessmen to help dull critical reporting. Oleg Kashin, a Russian journalist, defended Mr. Kudryavtsev’s record at Kommersant, saying that he had maintained independence at the newspaper under successive oligarch owners despite external pressure. “There were no forbidden topics, there was no censorship,” Mr. Kashin said. Mr. Kudryavtsev left Kommersant in 2012 amid scandal when an editor was fired for a magazine cover with an image of a voting ballot defaced with an offensive message to President Vladimir V. Putin. Yet, Mr. Kudryavtsev’s purchase of Sanoma’s stake also raised a question about where he had found the money to buy all of the Finnish company’s investments. “I know Demyan,” said Leonid Bershidsky, the founding editor of Vedomosti, who now lives in Berlin. “He is a good poet and a smart guy, but he doesn’t have that kind of money, and if he did, he’d think of a better investment than a minority stake in an independent paper in Russia, of all places.” In an interview with the Russian news agency RBC on Thursday, Mr. Kudryavtsev said that the money was his own and that he had not approved his purchase of Vedomosti with the Kremlin. The deal also ended 23 years of uninterrupted foreign ownership of The Moscow Times, which was founded by the Dutch publisher Derk Sauer in 1992. Mr. Sauer, who sold the newspaper to Sanoma in 2008, said by telephone from the Netherlands that Mr. Kudryavtsev’s main challenge would be making the paper profitable. “I urged them to find an owner who supported it from an idealistic point of view because it is important that The Moscow Times stays alive,” he said. At the newspaper, the editor in chief, Nabi Abdullaev, welcomed news of the deal, saying it had put an end to “a certain atmosphere of suspense and lack of certainty about the future.” “I am glad it happened,” Mr. Abdullaev wrote in response to written questions. “With the law on the ownership already adopted, it doesn’t make sense to be concerned that much about the ‘foreign-Russian’ thing, but more about the ‘which Russian’ variant.”
U.S. Lawmakers Press Iran to Free Jailed Americans
Congressional lawmakers, already conflicted about an impending nuclear deal with Iran, are increasingly angry over the incarceration of American citizens in that country, where at least three are imprisoned, including one held for more than three and a half years. Whether that anger could grow and have a bearing on the outcome of the nuclear talks is unclear. The latest evidence of indignation was seen on Thursday when Representative Dan Kildee, Democrat of Michigan, announced at a news conference in Washington that he had introduced a bipartisan congressional resolution that says in part, “Iran should release all detained Americans immediately and provide any information it possesses regarding any Americans that have disappeared within its borders.” In a telephone interview, Mr. Kildee said that he hoped the resolution would pass unanimously and that he anticipated it would be set for a vote well before the conclusion of the nuclear talks, which face a June 30 deadline.
Mr. Kildee emphasized that he believed that the nuclear and prisoner issues should remain separate. But he also said there is deep antipathy in Congress over what many regard as Iran’s use of Americans as hostages. “This is a very high priority,” he said. “Iran should understand that the American people and American Congress are watching.” There is no provision in a framework nuclear agreement reached four weeks ago between Iran and the group of six world powers, including the United States, for the release of the Americans. While the Obama administration has kept the nuclear and prisoner issues distinct, it has repeatedly pressed Iran to free the prisoners in discussions held on the sidelines of the negotiations, which are aimed at guaranteeing Iran’s nuclear activities remain peaceful in exchange for a termination of economic sanctions on the country. Mr. Kildee’s constituents include the family of Amir Hekmati, 31, of Flint, a Marine veteran whose parents emigrated from Iran. He was seized while visiting relatives in August 2011, convicted of spying and sentenced to death, a verdict later reduced to helping a hostile country, with a 10-year sentence. The other Americans known to be incarcerated are Saeed Abedini, 34, of Boise, Idaho, a Christian pastor imprisoned since 2013 on charges of disturbing national security, and Jason Rezaian, 39, of Marin, Calif., The Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, who was arrested last July and is facing espionage charges. All of them have declared they are innocent of any wrongdoing. A fourth American, Robert A. Levinson, disappeared in Iran in March 2007. The Iranian authorities have said they do not know what happened to Mr. Levinson. Iran’s government considers Mr. Hekmati, Mr. Abedini and Mr. Rezaian Iranian citizens because all are of Iranian descent, and it has refused to acknowledge their American nationality. Yet people connected to the families of all three say they believe that the Iranians are essentially using them to gain concessions from the United States. Some also have speculated that conservative Iranian officials who oppose improved relations with the United States are hoping that the prisoner issue derails a nuclear agreement. The Washington Post, which has called the treatment of Mr. Rezaian an absurdity that violates Iran’s own laws, said in an editorial published Thursday that Iran should “pay a price” for its behavior, which called into question its credibility on international commitments, “including the prospective nuclear accord.” In what could become another problem for Iran’s credibility on the nuclear issue, Reuters reported Wednesday that a United Nations Security Council committee that supervises the Council’s sanctions on Iran had been informed of an Iranian nuclear procurement network linked to two blacklisted firms. While Iran has never regarded the Security Council sanctions as valid, the report suggested to Iran’s critics that it would not honor provisions of a final nuclear agreement. Spain leads the sanctions committee. Fernando Fernández-Arias, a spokesman for Spain’s United Nations mission, declined to comment on the Reuters report.



Malta Offers Citizenship and All Its Perks for a Price

VALLETTA, Malta — As wealthy foreigners rush to get citizenship in Malta under a new program, the residency requirement is taking many forms. Russians rent high-end villas, then stay in five-star hotels when they visit. An American financier plans to live in Switzerland but occasionally vacation in Malta. One Vietnamese businessman, eager to start the clock ticking on the 12-month timetable for residency, sent the necessary paperwork on his private jet to expedite renting a property he had never seen. “They come twice, once to get a residency card and once to get a passport,” said Mark George Hyzler, an immigration lawyer at a firm here. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Migrants were photographed and logged as they disembarked from an Italian Coast Guard ship on Friday at a port in Catania, Sicily.Migration Crisis Puts Europe’s Policy Missteps Into Focus, Experts SayAPRIL 24, 2015 A member of the Italian Coast Guard carried a young migrant rescued from the capsized boat early on Monday in Sicily.Rising Toll on Migrants Leaves Europe in Crisis; 900 May Be Dead at SeaAPRIL 20, 2015 Birds fly over Valletta, Malta's capital.Beneath Malta’s Beauty, a Tangled HistoryDEC. 6, 2013 Malta’s citizenship program, which offers a passport to those willing to pay 1.2 million euros, about $1.3 million, has been controversial since it was introduced more than a year ago. But the residency requirements, meant to make the program more palatable, are only increasing the consternation among critics, who say the program has resulted in the sale of citizenship to the global 0.1 percent. Photo
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Obama Nominates Gayle Smith to Lead U.S.A.I.D.


Gayle Smith, special assistant to President Obama and a senior director on the National Security Council, at a Society for International Development meeting in 2011.CreditJewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


WASHINGTON — President Obama nominated Gayle Smith, a senior White House official, on Thursday to be the next administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, administration officials said.

If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Smith, a longtime development and Africa specialist in the Clinton and Obama administrations, would succeed Dr. Rajiv Shah, who left the agency in February after five years on the job.

Ms. Smith, 59, who is well-known in Washington development circles, would be responsible for leading the government’s response to humanitarian disasters like the earthquake in Nepal, the refugee crisis in Syria and the receding Ebola epidemic in West Africa, as well as managing the agency’s $20 billion budget.

She would also have to figure out a way to duplicate her predecessor’s skillful managing of congressional Republicans. Dr. Shah was widely credited with successfully defending the agency’s budget at a time of belt-tightening and intense partisanship. He was also known for innovative programs that sought to tackle global health and development challenges in unusual ways.
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Gayle Smith, special assistant to President Obama and a senior director on the National Security Council, at a Society for International Development meeting in 2011.CreditJewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For instance, last fall, during the height of theEbola epidemic, Dr. Shah announced the Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge, in which the agency invited inventors to devise equipment for front-line medical workers fighting Ebola. The challenge produced an entry from Johns Hopkins University, with a team that included a Baltimore wedding dress designer, Jill Andrews. She designed a simplified protective suit that takes the wearer only eight steps to shed instead of 20, thus lowering the risk of exposure to the disease.

Ms. Smith should be able to match Dr. Shah’s success, said Liz Schrayer, president of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a group of businesses and nonprofits that supports development, in part because she has backed the same initiatives.

“Gayle supports prioritizing economic growth and making sure countries have skin in the game and are committed to real reform,” Ms. Schrayer said. “That’s where I think Republicans who have been supportive of Raj will be supportive of Gayle.”

But Dr. Shah had missteps as well. The Associated Press reported in 2014 that during his tenure, U.S.A.I.D. operated a social media account to encourage young Cubans to revolt against the Castro government. The secret program ran out of funds in 2012, after two years; Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, called it “dumb, dumb, dumb” after it was disclosed.

The Obama administration has since taken steps to normalize relations with Cuba. But Ms. Smith will inherit other efforts from her predecessor, in particular managing the end of the battle against the Ebola epidemic and trying to ensure that the next time the virus flares up, the world has a better and faster response.

She has experience in that area. As special assistant to Mr. Obama and senior director for development and democracy on the National Security Council, she helped coordinate the administration’s response to the epidemic last year, including Mr. Obama’s decision to deploy 3,000 American troops to Liberia.

Ms. Smith spent 20 years in Africa — Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya — first as a freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, Reuters, The Associated Press and The Boston Globe, and then with nongovernmental groups. She is a co-founder of the Enough Project to end genocide.






3 Ways Nepalis Are Using Crowdsourcing to Aid in Quake Relief

In the wake of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit their country over the weekend, many Nepalis at home and abroad have found a new way to help — as digital volunteers, spending hours hunched over their laptops, using crowdsourcing technologies and social platforms to participate in the relief effort. Here are three examples of initiatives led by Nepalis to assist their countrymen as they try to rebuild. Photo The Nepali-based group Kathmandu Living Labs has collected hundreds of reports from earthquake-affected areas to map where aid and relief is needed. CreditKathmandu Living Labs

The Nepali-based group Kathmandu Living Labs has collected hundreds of reports from earthquake-affected areas to map where aid and relief is needed. CreditKathmandu Living Labs

Open Mapping: Kathmandu Living Labs

Name: Nama Raj Budhathoki

Age: 45

Hometown: Born in Dhading, but living in Kathmandu.

Job: Executive director, Katmandu Living Labs; board of directors of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team


How has the earthquake affected your friends and family?Photo
Nama Raj Budhathoki created a detailed map of Katmandu using open mapping before the earthquake hit.CreditNama Raj Budhathoki





Fortunately, there were no deaths in my immediate family, but I’ve been sleeping in a tent with my family of five because we are too scared to go back into our home. I haven’t been able to get in touch with many of my friends, and since my work began, I’ve had no time to check in.

How are you using technology to help in relief efforts?

I’d say we have mapped about 70-80 percent of the earthquake-hit zones. Before the earthquake, I had 7 to 100 volunteers a day. Now I’m coordinating about 2,400 mappers, a majority of them international, from a situation room.

I started Kathmandu Living Labs, a Nepali-based nonprofit technology company focused on open-source mapping, in 2013 because I knew an earthquake would hit Nepal. We have been mapping the country usingOpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia of mapping where people can view, contribute and edit. For example, we use satellite imaging from companies like DigitalGlobe to identify displaced people. We also deployed a mobile app so people can report observations, which are plotted on a map. We also try to verify these accounts on the ground and through social media like Facebook and Twitter, though it is obviously hard to go on the ground to check each incident.

I studied the use of open mapping for my Ph.D. and saw how it was heavily used during the earthquake in Haiti. I came back to Nepal after finishing my studies in 2011, and started mobilizing an OpenStreetMap community of volunteers to map major points of interests like roads, buildings, schools and hospitals. Before the earthquake, we had the most detailed map of Kathmandu Valley in the country. After the earthquake, we expanded beyond Kathmandu and teamed up withHumanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a group of open mappers focused on humanitarian relief mainly from abroad.Photo
An image posted on Facebook of mappers at Kathmandu Living Labs on Sunday. Aftershocks forced the team to move outside. CreditKathmandu Living Labs

How do you measure your impact?

It is a bit too early to say since we went live on Monday, but we are working with several humanitarian groups on a daily basis, including the Red Cross and the Nepali Army, to provide maps of road blocks and displaced people.

What challenges are you facing?

It is hard to track satellite images outside of Kathmandu especially because of rain. It’s also hard to effectively mobilize so many volunteers across different time zones. We’re a small nonprofit, and we weren’t prepared for the scale of this disaster. The building we are working in is not very safe and we need more computers.

Expert’s Take:

Dale Kunce, a senior engineer at American Red Cross International Services, said Mr. Budhathoki’s project was providing data that the Red Cross gives to its relief staff on the ground. “We have a longstanding relationship with the team and we’ve been using them as a sounding board,” he said. The New York Times also used the Living Labs maps as a source.

Adele Waugaman, a former fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, said, “The open mapping community is a really wonderful resource. Kathmandu Living Labs was able to map all the health facilities in Kathmandu Valley before the earthquake, which will undoubtedly help the relief workers’ ability to deliver supplies and help save lives.”

“Success is being able to mount an effective response in coordination with a local community,” she said, “and I think the mapping work they are doing is a demonstration of how that can be done.”Photo
Lokesh Todi has been documenting the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake on his Facebook page, and has seen as many as 7,000 shares on his posts. He traveled with young volunteers and a nonprofit to Sindhupalchowk, where he took this image on Thursday. CreditLokesh Todi
Crowdfunding: Indiegogo

Name: Lokesh Todi

Age: 28

Hometown: Kathmandu

Job: Working in family cement business, Reliance Group Nepal

Education: M.B.A. from Yale University with a course on managing global catastrophes

How has the earthquake affected your friends and family?Photo
Lokesh Todi CreditReliance Group

Luckily for me and my immediate family and friends, nothing traumatic happened. We are lucky we are from good backgrounds in safe homes with access to food and drinking water. There’s guilt associated with that; it plays on your mind. People are mentally scarred. My 9-year-old nephew is still afraid to climb the stairs past the first floor in case something happens.

How are you using technology to help in relief efforts?

Indiegogo is a site much like Kickstarter, but people use it for fund-raising. The whole idea was to use me and my cousin Aditya’s network of friends in the United States to raise money. We raised $20,000 within the first 12 hours. Overnight, after I took photos of the destruction and shared them on Facebook, it shot up to $40,000. People are engaging with us because I’m posting video updates, responding to the press and connecting with individuals. (According to the site, in five days, 1,401 people have raised more than $112,000.)

I’m also working with Global Shapers, a network of young leaders, in partnership with Childreach, an NGO working in the Sindhupalchowk district. I’m posting on Facebook what they need and handling the logistics of getting the aid to them. I’m also working with Uber to pick up donations from people’s homes in India. A friend at an Indian airline was able to help me figure out how to get the aid here. I’ve had to tell people only to collect things I’m asking for on behalf of the NGO; we’d rather get cash than donations for things we don’t need. That’s the message the government should be telling people.

In Nepal, we don’t have a good, structured, central way of handling disasters, so we depend heavily on international aid and NGOs. The country needs to be thankful for them, but after they leave, the burden shifts to local NGOs who don’t have international connections to raise money. My aim is to get money for local NGOs to do relief work for the foreseeable future, one or two years. One hundred rupees, or one dollar, goes a long way in a small village in Nepal. That’s two or three big meals.

How do you ensure that your efforts make an impact on the ground?

We’ve identified three areas for the money to go: child care, women’s issues and sanitation. We have another 20 days or so before the funds are released from Indiegogo, but in the meantime we are vetting local NGOs: What is their history and do they have experience with the community and terrain?

Expert’s Take:

“I think this is a wonderful model,” said Ms. Waugaman. “These crowdfunding models take off when you have a relationship with someone in the affected area, who you trust and is endorsing a particular organization, especially a small one.”
Volunteer Coordination: Google Docs

Name: Ravi Kumar, who also goes by the name Ravi Nepal

Age: 27

Hometown: From Janakpur, living in Washington

Volunteer Effort: Co-founder of Code for Nepal

Education: M.S. in digital media from Columbia University

Q. How has the earthquake affected your friends and family?Photo
Ravi Kumar CreditApril Allen

My parents had been sleeping outside their house in a nearby open space. They recently moved back inside. My uncle and aunt live with their two children in Kathmandu. They have minor injuries. They lived in a shared tent with neighbors for two days. Due to rain, I was told their son got sick. Our house has some cracks. Nothing life-threatening though.

How are you using technology to help in relief efforts?

I’m using technology to do three things:

1. Create low-tech solutions to connect volunteers and people affected, and vice versa. Our#Nepalquake resource doc, which disseminates information about food, shelter, clean water and medicine for victims of the earthquake, has been shared more than 7,000 times on Facebook, and more than 50 volunteers actively curate, verify and connect people using that document. Because many Nepalis are on Facebook, and it’s easy to use it even with slow Internet in Nepal, we have been using Facebook ads to inform people. Facebook is kind of like radio for us.

2. We are using Viber to get latest status updates on volunteers, or at times to help with urgent needs, blast those needs via Twitter and/or Facebook and do our best to find volunteers who can help people.Continue reading the main story

3. We are using social media and data to dispel rumors. A map we published this week is a good example that shows most of the country, in fact, is intact and with everyone’s help, we will recover, rise, and rebuild.

How do you measure success?

It’s hard to say exactly how many people are benefiting from our initiative. The document has been shared roughly 8,000 times on social media. A local group of volunteers and people in need are using this document to coordinate. A group reached out to me saying they want to use our doc to build an app. Our Facebook ads have reached at least 70,000 people. I get 4 to 8 calls a day about coordination. From the response, I believe many people are using this document.

How do you ensure that your efforts make an impact on the ground?

We do our best to follow-up. For example, a young woman based in Virginia called me using Viber about a victim trapped on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

When she called me, she sounded very worried. I assured her that if she sends me more details, I’ll work with contacts and will do our best to help. I sent out information to our contacts, and we were told volunteers were dispatched who were already in the area. After 24 hours, I contacted the woman again and she told me the victim got some help. And also told me that people in nearby area need more help.Continue reading the main story

Our volunteers also call people listed on the document about their latest status and what they need. They then update the document reflecting any changes on the ground.

That being said, we don’t know if all of the information is accurate, since it’s a publicly crowdsourced document. Anyone can comment and few, around 20, super users have full access to edit, and some of us call to verify information.

Expert’s Take:

Dr. Madhur Basnet, who is working in the Gordkha district, said he would have used the work by Code for Nepal and Kathmandu Living Labs if he had Internet connectivity. Instead, when he does have Internet access, he saves screenshots of maps on his cellphone to use offline.

Ms. Waugaman said, “This kind of open approach to gathering information and analyzing information can be incredibly valuable in a resource-constrained context where there are not enough responders on the ground, though you need some degree of verification.”

“Often times the problem is not the technology,” she added, “but the personal and institutional barriers, including whether the tool is capable of functioning offline in hot zones.”






In Iran, Fatal Porsche Crash Unleashes Middle-Class Anger at Elites



The fatal crash of a Porsche has drawn scorn, not sympathy.

TEHRAN — It was 5 o’clock on a recent morning as the canary yellow Porsche raced up the treelined Shariati boulevard in Tehran. The young woman at the wheel, it later emerged, came from the poorer south side of the city. The young man next to her, the nouveau riche grandson of an ayatollah, had bought the car just two days earlier.

Streetlights flashed past like flickering strobe lights as the Boxster GTS accelerated to 120 miles an hour in just under 10 seconds, the high-pitched roar of its six cylinders reverberating in the empty morning streets.


To that point, the scene could have passed for normal in North Tehran, where increasing numbers of thechildren of the well-connected live their lives as if the country’s restrictive Islamic laws were written for someone else. Their luxury cars have become symbols of a growing inequality in Iran, where a new class of untouchable one-percenters hoards money, profiting from sanctions and influential relations, leaving Iran’s middle classes to face the full force of the country’s deepening economic woes.Photo
Parivash Akbarzadeh, 20, has drawn scorn in Iran after the crash of a luxury car she was driving killed her and the car's rich young owner, Mohammad Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi.

Instead of ending the night parking behind the closing gates of an uptown villa, however, the first-time Porsche driver, Parivash Akbarzadeh, 20, lost control of the car, slamming into the curb and hitting a tree. She was killed instantly, and the car’s owner, Mohammad Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi, 21, died hours later of his injuries, the Afkarnews reported on April 23.

Not long after, pictures appeared on social media of the wreckage of the sports car, lying mangledin one of Tehran’s most prominent streets. Almost as quickly, the identities of the two victims were revealed: A young, big-eyed beautyand a grandson of a prominent cleric, who to make matters worse, was engaged to be wed, but not to Ms. Akbarzadeh.

In Iran, where the state news media eagerly report on the growing inequality — but always omitting personal details about the wealthy — the crash unleashed a storm of comment on social media, the majority of it very nasty.



“Good riddance,” someone wrote on Ms. Akbarzadeh’s Instagram page under a picture of her posing with a ring studded with diamonds in the shape of a dollar sign. “This girl set fire on normal people, now she set fire to herself.”

What angered many was not that Ms. Akbarzadeh was in a car with a man about to be wed, though that is illegal under the country’s selectively enforced Islamic laws, which prescribe that unmarried men and women must be segregated.

What rankled most was the cocktail of double standards that the crash symbolized, particularly the intertwined issues of rising corruption and inequality.

During the tenure of the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a select few, often well-connected, individuals were catapulted into fabulous wealth after having been granted rights to sell oil, dollars and gold. These “middlemen” started venturing into other businesses, often spreading a culture of corruption, economists and government, officials say.

Many of these middlemen continue to sport their three-day revolutionary beards, in a sign of their loyalty to the system. But their children shop in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for designer clothes, and tool around in expensive cars in a country where prices for everyday goods have tripled or more and many can no longer afford a new car, even locally produced.

In contrast, the semiofficial Mashregh news website reported in September that nearly 100,000 luxury cars had been imported since 2009, even though the owners have to pay a tax of 140 percent. So a Porsche like the 2015 Boxster GTS that was wrecked in the crash, selling for about $75,000 in the United States, would cost at least $178,000 in Iran, depending on availability.

Many of the car owners drive around town picking up girls, in a practice locally called “dor, dor,” the Shahrvand newspaper reported on Wednesday.

“The nouveaux riches dress, speak and act differently, in contempt of urban and social rules,” said Nader Karimi Joni, a journalist and activist, explaining the rage provoked by the crash. “They show off their privileged situation and enjoy humiliating others.”

Even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who promotes a pious and sober life, felt compelled to comment on the uproar. “Some young people, highly proud of their wealth, take over the streets with their expensive cars,” he said this week, addressing a meeting with police officials. This, he said, “creates psychological insecurity in the society” and called for action by the police.

Ayatollah Khamenei also urged the government to step up efforts to deal with nepotism and fraud. “There is no use in speaking about corruption. Shouting, ‘Thief! Thief!’ does not stop the thieves from stealing,” he said in another speech. “Officials are not newspapers to merely speak about corruption. We should take measures and prevent corruption in its true meaning.”

In the past two years, several business tycoons have been arrested, and in 2014, a billionaire named Mahafarid Amir Khosravi was executed after courts found him guilty of embezzlement.

Among the thousands of comments on one of Ms. Akbarzadeh’s pictures on Instagram, people criticized her as an “upstart” and an “opportunist,” stressing her origins in the lower middle-class neighborhood of Jannatabad.

Bill Gilwood 33 minutes ago

" children of the well-connected live their lives as if the country’s restrictive Islamic laws were written for someone else."The laws are...
j. von hettlingen 2 hours ago

I have taken a look at Parivash Akbarzadeh on Facebook. I wouldn't have thought that she lived in Tehran, because she had been able to dress...
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The political power of Iran are leaming from their mistakes and will assume its global security responsabilities and of peace and the...


Ashamed of the vile comments against her, others defended Ms. Akbarzadeh, criticizing those making fun of her death.

Some said that “unfortunately” the only way for an attractive young woman in Tehran to get married, very expensive in Iran, is to mingle with the sons of the wealthy.

Mr. Rabbani-Shirazi was mocked for being the grandchild of an important aide to the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but driving a Porsche and, in some of his online pictures, wearing a black cap backward, decorated with silver studs.

His family has denied that the car was his, telling the Haft-e Sobh newspaper that Mr. Rabbani-Shirazi did “not even own a bicycle.” The family reminded people that the young man’s grandfather also died in a car crash, in 1982, though under far different circumstances: The authorities said he was being chased by terrorists, and have labeled him a martyr, an honorific for those who died defending the cause of the revolution.

Nevertheless, for the public, the verdict over the grandson and Ms. Akbarzadeh is clear.

“Thank God that even when there is no justice in this world in distributing money and wealth, there is justice in death,” one user, Lili.asayesh22, wrote in an Instagram comment on Monday. “I love God’s justice that rich and young people also die along with the desperate poor people who have no hope in life.”

In Amir Abad, a neighborhood where luxury cars are sold at every street corner, often crammed into tiny showrooms, it appeared to be business as usual on Wednesday, even though the police have promised to impound the cars of anyone arrested for excessive speeding.CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY40COMMENTS

“Of course when the leader talks against these cars, it will affect our business,” said Habib Razmandan, a former wrestling champion who said he had been selling cars for years. In his showroom stood Porsches, including a vintage one listed at well over $300,000, and high-end Japanese cars.

But not for long.

“The children of those with money will keep on buying these cars because they crave attention of others,” he said, adding that the cars are also considered to be a good investment. “When you are rich here, you like to stick out from the crowds, be special.”