Christian Aid Worker Is Shot in Pakistan

HONG KONG - A Swedish woman doing charity work through her evangelical church was shot outside her home in Lahore on Monday, according to news reports from Pakistan. A gunman riding a motorcycle attacked the woman, 72, as she got out of her car in the upscale Model Town neighborhood.

It was not immediately clear whether the attack was sectarian in nature or was perhaps linked to another incident Monday in Model Town in which masked gunmen vandalized a cemetery.

Reports differed about the name of the shooting victim - Bargeeta Almby or Bargetta Emmi - although the Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed to The Associated Press that a Swedish woman had been critically wounded in an attack. Some reports said she had been shot in the chest, while another said she had been hit in the neck.

News reports said the woman has lived in Pakistan for nearly 40 years and works with the Full Gospel Assemblies Church, although
Simeon Strauser, a pastor and the chairman o f the Pennsylvania-based ministry, told Rendezvous in an e-mail message on Tuesday that she was not affiliated with his church.

Christian groups in Pakistan and the national Human Rights Commission condemned the shooting.

Model Town, a well-tended suburb of Lahore, is home to judges, politicians, business leaders and celebrity athletes. Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister, has a home there.

But early Monday morning in Model Town, gunmen tied up the caretakers of an Ahmadi cemetery and desecrated more than a hundred grave markers, the Express Tribune newspaper reported.

A picture of broken and uprooted headstones accompanies the article here.

The Ahmadi sect is considered heretical by mainstream Muslims.

“The perpetrators removed and broke the tombstones of graves,” the paper said. “They also told the caretakers that they were not suppose d to write the Kalima or Bismillah on the tombstones because ‘Ahmadis are infidels.' ”

Kalima are Islamic religious declarations. Bismillah means “in the name of God.”

“ ‘You can't inscribe verses from the holy Koran on the graves. You are Ahmadis. You are not Muslims,' ” one of the attackers told the caretakers, according to a police official who spoke to The Associated Press.

An excerpt from the A.P. article:

Parliament amended Pakistan's constitution in 1974 to declare that Ahmadis were not considered Muslims under the law.

Ahmadis believe their spiritual leader, Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who died in 1908, was a messiah - a position rejected by the government in response to a mass movement led by Pakistan's major Islamic parties.

The Ahmadis' plight - along with that of Pakistan's other religious minorities, such as Shiite Muslims, Christians and Hindu s - has deepened in recent years as hard-line interpretations of Islam have gained ground and militants have stepped up attacks against groups they oppose. Most Pakistanis are Sunni Muslims.

“The men were wearing black masks and were speaking Punjabi and Urdu,” The Express Tribune reported. “Their ‘leader' had long hair, a beard and traces of Pashto in his accent. They told the guard and others that they belonged to a banned organization and the Taliban.”

In May 2010, a coordinated attack on two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore left more than 80 people dead. The police said the assault had been carried out by six men linked to the Pakistani Taliban.

In August of 2011, Warren Weinstein, an American consultant working with Pakistani dairy farmers, was kidnapped from his home in Lahore. He is being held by Al Qaeda, and in May of this year he appeared in a video from As Sah ab, the Qaeda media wing. The video is here.

As my colleague Declan Walsh reported in May:

Mr. Weinstein, sitting cross-legged behind a table with books and food, said in a monotone voice: “My life is in your hands, Mr. President. If you accept the demands, I live. If you don't accept the demands, then I die.”

Those demands, as Declan reported, include the cessation of all U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the release of several men convicted in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Mr. Weinstein, now 71, also appeared in a video in September, appealing for U.S. acceptance of the Qaeda demands. At one point he addresses Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, saying:

Therefore, as a Je w, I'm appealing to you, Prime Minister Netanyahu, the head of the Jewish state of Israel, one Jew to another, to please intervene on my behalf. To work with the mujahideen and to accept their demands so that I can be released and returned to my family.

Choosing Sides on Regulating the Press

LONDON - When the final report of the nine-month Leveson inquiry into the ways of the British press was published last week, it came as a boxed set - four chunky volumes totaling just shy of 2,000 words encased in brown cardboard and tipping the scales at about the same weight as a good-sized Thanksgiving turkey. (Read the 48-page executive summary.)

As I write in my latest Letter From Europe column, a possibly flippant question was whether, lobbed into the ever-churning pond of British public life, the report would make waves or sink without trace.

For the political elite, if not for every single reader of the newspapers under scrutiny, the answer seems to be th e former. The mini-tsunami, moreover, seemed to flip the stereotypes, offering a counter-intuitive line-up of foes and friends of statutory regulation of the press. Unusually, the opposition Labour Left was in favor of legalized regulation of the free-wheeling press, while much of the Conservative Right, including Prime Minister David Cameron, broadly opposed the kind of legal underpinning of stricter controls advocated by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson.

But there are sub-divisions, even among those who functioned as assessors in Sir Brian's panel as it heard the sworn testimony of 337 witnesses in the long months of televised hearings.

Shami Chakrabarti, the head of the Liberty advocacy group and one of six assessors, said the main division lay in what should happen if the British press did not take steps to clean its own house along the lines suggested by Sir Brian to create an independent board with real power to order penalties of up to a million pounds and o rder other censures of arrant newspapers.

“Leveson doesn't want compulsory regulation of the press but he says if they don't play ball politicians may have to consider it,” she told the BBC. “That is where I get off the bus.”

David Hunt, a Conservative member of Britain's House of Lords who heads the current self-regulatory Press Complaints Commission â€" widely dismissed as obsolete and ineffective â€" and who was not an assessor, said 120 publishers, representing 2,000 editors had “all told me they will sign up” to a new independent regulator, making legislation unnecessary.

But that is not what campaigners in favor of legal constraints want to hear. Hugh Grant, a prominent member of the pro-regulation lobby who has complained about intrusions into his privacy, said Mr. Cameron's opposition to regulatory legislation was “very close to disgraceful.”

Trust Women Conference Live: Aung San Suu Kyi and Shirin Ebadi

Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi from Iran and Aung San Suu Kyi, by video from Myanmar, kick off the first Trust Women conference held by the International Herald Tribune and ThomsonReuters Foundation.

The aim of the two-day gathering is to examine how law can be used to further the empowerment of women and enhance gender diversity. Lawyers, aid organizations and government officials from all over will meet representatives of women from all over who need either the existing laws of their countries actually to be enforced in their favor, or to get laws passed that will bolster the advancement of women.

Join the conversation live here on Tuesday, Dec. 4 at 10:00 AM London time.

How Much Homework Does It Take to Educate a Nation?

Finland and South Korea's school systems are practically polar opposites.

The former is typically Scandinavian â€" relaxed, humane, egalitarian and state-funded. Kids have short school days, minimal homework and a balanced view toward extracurricular activities. Public schooling is free, even in university and even for foreigners. Private tutors are usually only used for students who genuinely need the extra help.

South Korea is draconian by comparison. For 90 percent of primary school students, long school days are followed by tutoring. (This is typical in affluent parts of East Asia. The same goes for 85 percent of Hong Kong students and a staggering 97 percent of young Singaporeans).

The focus is on exam results, rote learning, discipline and even punishment. For years, some summer cram schools have kept students working from 6:30 a.m. until midnight.The system is also money-driven. After the United States, South Korea has the world's most expensive u niversities. The cost of celebrity private tutors puts pressure on both the parents who pay for them, and the kids who feel they must perform to get their money's worth.

There can be another price paid. As my colleague Mark McDonald reported last year, student suicides roiled the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the prestigious university known as Kaist. “Day after day we are cornered into an unrelenting competition that smothers and suffocates us,” the student council wrote at the time. “We couldn't even spare 30 minutes for our troubled classmates because of all our homework.”

But somehow, through entirely different means, Finland and South Korea have achieved the same end: excellent education systems.

On the latest IHT education page, I report on new research by Pearson and the Economist Intelligence Unit, which selected Finland and South Korea as the only two countries in the top band of its Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment.

“It is hard to find two education systems more different,” the report said.

The ranking is based on test scores, literacy and graduation rates. Here are the top 10:

1. Finland
2. South Korea
3. Hong Kong
4. Japan
5. Singapore
6. The United Kingdom
7. The Netherlands
8. New Zealand
9. Switzerland
10. Canada

East Asian states â€" with their obsessive, high-stress approach toward education â€" dominated the top five. The United States ranked 17th.

Which system is better: a European model that encourages equality, creativity and a healthy lifestyle or an Asian model that focuses on technical skills and concrete results? Students: Where would you rather study? Parents: Where would you want your kids to be?

What the Doha Climate Talks Could Do for Sustainable Development

While participants at last year's climate meeting in Durban agreed on an extension of the troubled Kyoto Protocol, it is at this year's meeting in Doha that policy makers have to agree on the pesky details, including long-term emission reduction goals.

As my colleague John Broder reported last week, the outlook is not entirely rosy. And the stakes have grown even greater as scientists report record CO2 emissions in 2011 that are growing so rapidly that an international goal of limiting the ultimate warming of the planet, established three years ago, is on the verge of becoming unattainable.

Some of the major industrial players - and heaviest polluters - such as Russia, Canada and Japan have already made known that they will not re-up on the climate deal. The United States never ratified the protocol and China - currently holding the title as world's number one climate polluter - is listed as a developing country and therefore not yet subject to binding emissi on caps. (Our colleagues at India Ink reported on India's role in current and the Kyoto Protocol negotiations).

But activists and some green business people are calling attention to an oft-forgotten mechanism that allows emission-reducing development projects in non-Kyoto compliant countries to earn carbon credits.

The so-called Clean Development Mechanism (or CDM for the initiated) can benefit projects from the development of clean-burning ethanol stoves in Mozambique to wind farms in China. Because credits earned by building these green projects in the developing world can be sold on the open market, it is often the very thing that allows such projects to exist.

“It's selling those offset credits that balances the books,” said Assaad Razzouk
, CEO of Sindicatum Sustainable Resources, one a group of green energy companies lobbying to keep the Clean Development Mechanism on the agenda in Doha.

At its Deurping project in Shanxi Province in China, Sindicatum has invested some $60 million to help convert methane gas - the very polluting byproduct of coal mining - into electricity. While the electricity itself can be sold back to the grid, it isn't enough to cover the cost of the investment, according to Mr. Razzouk.

Under the UN-supervised CDM system, projects are awarded Certified Emission Reductions (or CERs), which can then be sold to the European Emissions Trading System, for example, to offset, say, airline pollution in Europe.

The UNFCCC claims that the system has helped offset over one billion tons of CO2 pollution since it was put into place in 2004 by accrediting CERs produced by more than 5,000 development projects worldwide that range from reforestation in the Guangxi watershed in China to waste-to-energy projects in Cote d'Ivoire ( see some compelling projects - for a map of the registered projects receiving CERs go here - for extensive stats on the CDM click here).

“It has created the first global environmental currency,” said David Abbass of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat in a telephone interview from Doha.

For Sindicatum's methane-converting venture in Duerping, the certified CERs generates some 40 percent of the revenue, which helps to make the sustainable project financially viable too, explained Mr. Razzouk.

However, this month the price of a single CER has dropped well below 1 euro, or $1.3, from one-time high of nearly 14 euros in early 2010 (for more market numbers, check here). There are myriad reasons for the precipitous drop in price. Corporate buyers, for example, can only use a certain percentage of CDM-generated carbon offsets to balance their pollution, limiting the demand for CERs. With Russia and other eastern European countries possibly being able to sell their overstock of old carbon-offset credits, they are available cheaply elsewhere, increasing the supply.

However, the fact that the future of a global emissions cap-and-trade system is at a crucial point in negotiation is perhaps the most responsible for bringing down the price of CERs, say experts. But the growing need to offset carbon emissions may ensure a future for this “environmental currency” and work for sustainable development projects.

IHT Quick Read: Dec. 3

NEWS Despite solid credentials, college graduates cannot find permanent jobs that gets them on the path to the taxpaying, property-owning French ideal that was once the norm. Steven Erlanger reports from Lille, France.

“Now we have become a state!” Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, announced Sunday to a crowd of thousands in the courtyard of his headquarters in Ramallah. But at least in the short term, with Israeli elections scheduled for January, things are likely to get tougher for the Palestinians before they get better. Isabel Kershner reports from Ramallah, West Bank.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011 and are likely to take a similar jump in 2012, scientists reported Sunday - the latest indication that efforts to limit such emissions are failing. Justin Gillis and John M. Broder report.

EDUCATION This has been a terrible year for the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, the elite institu te for political studies known as Sciences Po. D.D. Guttenplan reports.

Pearson College, the newest institution of higher education in Britain, based at the headquarters of Pearson, a publishing and educational conglomerate that owns Penguin Books, The Financial Times newspaper and a 50 percent stake in The Economist magazine, promises courses designed with direct involvement of business and industry. D.D. Guttenplan reports from London.

ARTS Design and architecture create atmosphere and mood, often subtly so. Alice Rawsthorn writes from Venice.

SPORTS Nothing in the 140 years of the F.A. Cup, the oldest knockout tournament of them all, could have been more of a grudge match than the one played Sunday between the Milton Keynes Dons and A.F.C. Wimbledon soccer teams. Rob Hughes writes from Milton Keynes, England.

New Zealand's All Blacks are used to rewriting rugby's record books, just not in the way that happened when their unbeaten streak came to a crashing end with a 38-21 loss here to England. Huw Richards reports from Twickenham, England.

IHT Quick Read: Dec. 3

NEWS Despite solid credentials, college graduates cannot find permanent jobs that gets them on the path to the taxpaying, property-owning French ideal that was once the norm. Steven Erlanger reports from Lille, France.

“Now we have become a state!” Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, announced Sunday to a crowd of thousands in the courtyard of his headquarters in Ramallah. But at least in the short term, with Israeli elections scheduled for January, things are likely to get tougher for the Palestinians before they get better. Isabel Kershner reports from Ramallah, West Bank.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011 and are likely to take a similar jump in 2012, scientists reported Sunday - the latest indication that efforts to limit such emissions are failing. Justin Gillis and John M. Broder report.

EDUCATION This has been a terrible year for the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, the elite institu te for political studies known as Sciences Po. D.D. Guttenplan reports.

Pearson College, the newest institution of higher education in Britain, based at the headquarters of Pearson, a publishing and educational conglomerate that owns Penguin Books, The Financial Times newspaper and a 50 percent stake in The Economist magazine, promises courses designed with direct involvement of business and industry. D.D. Guttenplan reports from London.

ARTS Design and architecture create atmosphere and mood, often subtly so. Alice Rawsthorn writes from Venice.

SPORTS Nothing in the 140 years of the F.A. Cup, the oldest knockout tournament of them all, could have been more of a grudge match than the one played Sunday between the Milton Keynes Dons and A.F.C. Wimbledon soccer teams. Rob Hughes writes from Milton Keynes, England.

New Zealand's All Blacks are used to rewriting rugby's record books, just not in the way that happened when their unbeaten streak came to a crashing end with a 38-21 loss here to England. Huw Richards reports from Twickenham, England.