IHT Quick Read: Feb. 5

NEWS Gen. Moisés García Ochoa was blocked from becoming defense minister of Mexico after American officials expressed their concern that he had ties to drug traffickers. Ginger Thompson reports from New York, Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

On Monday, confirming what many historians and archaeologists had suspected, a team of experts at the University of Leicester concluded on the basis of DNA and other evidence that the skeletal remains were those of King Richard III, for centuries the most reviled of English monarchs. John F. Burns reports from Leicester, England.

In a major victory fr feminists and the rule of law, a Beijing court has granted a woman a divorce on grounds of abuse and made history by issuing a three-month protection order against her ex-husband â€" a first in the nation’s capital, Beijing, according to lawyers and the Chinese media. Didi Kirsten Tatlow reports from Beijing.

The Thai government faces the quandary of what to do with all the creatures it has saved â€" a sort of Noah’s ark of endangered species. Thomas Fuller reports from Khao Pratubchang, Thailand.

A strike by garbage collectors in Seville, Spain, is entering its second week and threatening to turn int! o a health and safety issue in one of Spain’s most touristic cities. Raphael Minder reports from Seville, Spain.

Days ahead of a summit meeting where leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states are to wrestle again with a proposed seven-year budget, a spokesman for the bloc’s executive body was forced to defend the salaries of some officials. James Kanter reports from Brussels.

It was only a few years ago that some economists were arguing that Europe was “decoupling” from its long dependence on trade with the United States, but German carmakers proved otherwise. Jack Ewing reports.

FASHION This month Natalie Massenet, the founder of Net-a-Porter and Internet guru to the fashion world, will throw her might behind London Fashion Week. Suzy Menkes reports from London.

ARTS Song Dong gathered multitudes in Hong Kong and asked them to help complete his autobiographical “36 Calendars” project. Joyce Lau reports from Hong Kong.

SPORTS A 19-month investigation found that criminal groups had infiltrated European and international soccer with hundreds of people involved in match-fixing, global law enforcement officials said. Sam Borden reports.

It would be naïve to believe that soccer is beyond corrupting, or to doubt that the allegations by police investigators in the Netherlands on Monday are anything but the smallest ripples on an enormous global pond. Rob Hughes reports from London.

IHT Quick Read: Feb. 5

NEWS Gen. Moisés García Ochoa was blocked from becoming defense minister of Mexico after American officials expressed their concern that he had ties to drug traffickers. Ginger Thompson reports from New York, Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

On Monday, confirming what many historians and archaeologists had suspected, a team of experts at the University of Leicester concluded on the basis of DNA and other evidence that the skeletal remains were those of King Richard III, for centuries the most reviled of English monarchs. John F. Burns reports from Leicester, England.

In a major victory fr feminists and the rule of law, a Beijing court has granted a woman a divorce on grounds of abuse and made history by issuing a three-month protection order against her ex-husband â€" a first in the nation’s capital, Beijing, according to lawyers and the Chinese media. Didi Kirsten Tatlow reports from Beijing.

The Thai government faces the quandary of what to do with all the creatures it has saved â€" a sort of Noah’s ark of endangered species. Thomas Fuller reports from Khao Pratubchang, Thailand.

A strike by garbage collectors in Seville, Spain, is entering its second week and threatening to turn int! o a health and safety issue in one of Spain’s most touristic cities. Raphael Minder reports from Seville, Spain.

Days ahead of a summit meeting where leaders of the European Union’s 27 member states are to wrestle again with a proposed seven-year budget, a spokesman for the bloc’s executive body was forced to defend the salaries of some officials. James Kanter reports from Brussels.

It was only a few years ago that some economists were arguing that Europe was “decoupling” from its long dependence on trade with the United States, but German carmakers proved otherwise. Jack Ewing reports.

FASHION This month Natalie Massenet, the founder of Net-a-Porter and Internet guru to the fashion world, will throw her might behind London Fashion Week. Suzy Menkes reports from London.

ARTS Song Dong gathered multitudes in Hong Kong and asked them to help complete his autobiographical “36 Calendars” project. Joyce Lau reports from Hong Kong.

SPORTS A 19-month investigation found that criminal groups had infiltrated European and international soccer with hundreds of people involved in match-fixing, global law enforcement officials said. Sam Borden reports.

It would be naïve to believe that soccer is beyond corrupting, or to doubt that the allegations by police investigators in the Netherlands on Monday are anything but the smallest ripples on an enormous global pond. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Worse than Poisoned Water: Dwindling Water, in China\'s North

BEIJING â€" When 39 tons of the toxic chemical aniline spilled from a factory in Changzhi in China’s Shanxi province at the end of December, polluting drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people downstream along the Zhuozhang river and dangerously fouling the environment, it seemed a grave enough disaster. And it was.

So it’s hard to believe, perhaps, but in mid-January, just days after local officials belatedly revealed the spill to the public, a “rapid response team” sent by Greenpeace China to investigate found something even worse than the spill, the blogger Zhou Wei wrote in chinadialogue, an online magazine about China’s environment. Greenpeace found that the fast pace of water consumption by coal and chemical industries in the area is drying up all water resources further downstream. In fact, by 2015, water consumption by col and chemical industry in China’s dry, western areas is set to use up a whopping quarter of the water flowing annually in the nearby Yellow River, which snakes through Shanxi province and is popularly known as China’s “Mother River,” wrote chinadialogue.

As chinadialogue wrote, citing Greenpeace, “Even more worrying than the chemical leak is the high water consumption of the coal and chemical industries in the area.”

The blog post, which chinadialogue says hasn’t been translated into English yet, cited Tong Zhongyu of Greenpeace’s East Asia office as saying that the situation was “growing more severe by the day.”

None of this may be news to hardened followers of China’s crumpling environment, but the scale of the wat! er consumption in the water-scarce area is nonetheless shocking: the Tianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, which caused the spill, consumes water equivalent to the consumption of about 300,000 people per year, chinadialogue wrote, citing the Greenpeace investigation.

The coal and chemical industry is simply “a major water-eater,” the post said.

Water is a key challenge for the country as the racing economy guzzles it faster and faster. In the last 40 years, 13 percent of China’s lakes have disappeared, half its coastal wetlands have been lost to reclamation and 50 percent of cities left without drinking water that meets acceptable hygiene standards, the World Wildlife Fund said, according to another article in chinadialogue. The United Nations has singled China out as one of 13 countries with extreme water shortages.

“By any measure, the situation is bleak,” chinaialogue said. For now, the government is split between small-scale, practical solutions to the problem and huge engineering projects, such as the South-North water diversion scheme, which aims to transfer water from the rainy south to the dry north but has been widely criticized by environmentalists as too big, inefficient and ultimately unworkable.

“My heart is really out for the leadership trying to come up with solutions because China’s just so maddeningly complex,” Michael Bennett, an environmental economist, was quoted as saying. As evidence of serious efforts to solve the problem, Mr. Bennett pointed to widespread, small-scale, government-approved water conservation programs taking place around the country.

Will China solve its really serious water problems

“The trend is in the right direction, the question is whether it’s going to be fast enough,” Mr. Bennett said.

Pressures Mount on European Media

The euro crisis is damaging Europe’s media. In Germany, a leading newspaper closed and another newspaper has been placed in receivership. Many newspapers are cutting back on staff for lack of advertising. Reporting will suffer, say editors.

The media face similar economic difficulties in other countries. But media owners and journalists are coming under another kind of pressure too in Europe: political pressure.

In my latest Letter From Europe, I write about the threat that corruption poses to Europe, and the news media are not immune.

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was accused of trying to rein in newspapers that criticized him. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire continues to exert an immense influene on public opinion.

In the Balkans, journalists regularly complain about the local business bosses threatening to withdraw advertising if papers criticize their companies or uncover corruption.

Interference is prevalent in Latvia and Ukraine, according to Thorbjorn Jagland, secretary general of the Council of Europe, the pan-European human rights organization.

In both countries, oligarchs, who are also parliamentarians, own the media, dictate the editorial line and do everything possible to prevent investigations into corruption.

Even if corruption cases are published, in Ukraine, the courts will not take action. ‘‘The judiciary is not independent enough,’’ Mr. Jagland said. That, he added, makes it even more difficult to deal with corruption, the subject of my latest Letter from Europe.

So what can be done to preserve the independence of the media and ensure competition

The European Commission recently set up a panel to see how newspapers and media groups! could be protected from political influence. It is also charged with finding ways to ensure that the media do not abuse their power.

Mr. Jagland believes the E.U. is taking the wrong path to reform. Self-regulation is preferable to control or bureaucratic oversight, he said, lest press freedom be undermined.

Self-regulation is easier said than done. It can work in strong democracies. But in Ukraine, Latvia and indeed, Italy, the power of the oligarchs or big media conglomerates negates self-regulation.

Some analysts say the time may have come to shift some attention away from the traditional media and look at how citizens and nongovernmental organizations effectively use the Internet to disseminate information and organize protest. What do you think Let us know in the comments.

How Green Is My Hotel

The Hague â€" seen from the outside, the Court Garden Hotel, with its 1970s utilitarian commercial exterior, doesn’t appear particularly green.

But the certification plaques in the LED-lit, ultra modern lobby tell a different story. This hotel is one of the premier eco-friendly lodgings in the Netherlands.

The hotel is Green Key certified, one of only three hotels in the country to be given the Ecolabel by the European Union and the first hotel to be given an A+ by the Dutch minister of the environment. And it is the only hotel in the Netherlands to serve 100 percent organic food, according to the owner.

“We tried to apply all the possible things we could do to make it sustainable,” said the hotel’s owner, Achou Zhang.

As interest in sustainably rises and as more and more people travel, the market for genuinely eco-friendly accommodtion is growing. But eco-friendliness is a matter of degrees and finding a night’s stay that is actually green is not always easy.

2012 marked a milestone in travel and tourism: for the first time, international arrivals topped one billion. There were 39 million more international travelers than in 2011, the United Nations World Tourism Organization announced last week. As we previously reported on Rendezvous, accommodation and activities are estimated to make up 25 percent of all the CO12 emitted by the tourism industry, or roughly 1 percent of the world’s total, according to the UNWTO.

The Court Garden Hotel opened a year and a half ago, after extensive renovations to an existing building. The redesigned building alone does much to make the hotel it houses eco-friend! ly.

The floor of the spacious basement is made from recycled PET bottles. So are all the headboards in the 70-room hotel. Furniture is made from recycled wood. The building has no air conditioning, but relies on a heat pump and triple pane windows to keep the rooms cool, or as is more often needed in southern Holland, warm.

The building is powered by green electricity. Specially designed faucets, shower heads and toilets limit water waste.

Motion detectors, daylight sensors and key card readers ensure that electricity for lights and appliances is only on when needed.

The hotel estimates that the setup reduces its electricity bill by nearly 60 percent and its gas usage by more than 52 percent. The hotel scored 49 of the 55 possible points on the Green Key certification process.

“Oh, everyone has Green Key certification,” said Ms. Zhang, adding that it is the combination of certifications, plus the citation from the environment mnster that shows her hotel is even greener then the rest.

As we’ve reported on Rendezvous, certifying sustainability is never simple. And accrediting eco-friendly accommodation is no exception. Different programs cover different regions and different features, for example, LEED certifies the design of buildings, other processes, such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (or GSTC), certify social as well as ecological sustainability. More importantly, some certifications are more rigorous than others.

The EU Ecolabel is better known for its certification of hardwood floors or TVs than for its hotel recommendations.

Besides the proper certification, these niche hotels also rely on the eco-conscious travelers to find them. Book! Different! .com, a hotel search engine that donates part of its commission to charity has started listing environmentally friendly hotels.

“We believe there is a strong green awareness among leisure and business travelers alike, and this will continue to grow,” Bastiaan Fronik, who runs the company, told the International Business Times. The site uses data from the Green Globe and the Dutch Green Key program.

The popular travel booking site, Travelocity.com, lists hotels certified by the Global Sustainably Council criteria in its green hotel directory.

The eco-friendliness of Court Garden Hotel plays a role for 75 percent of its guests according to surveys, said Ms. Zhang. 

As the category grows, Ms. Zhang says she is not worried about the competition.

“We are the first one, but it is better if there are moe coming,” she said.