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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit on July 19 to the Indian city of Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi, was supposed to showcase the way India and the U.S. might work together to slow climate change. On the agenda was a tour of an ultra-energy efficient office building called ITC Green Center, which has earned the highest environmental rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. It was just the sort of project that exemplified how the world's second biggest carbon emitter (the U.S.) and the fourth biggest (India) could cooperate best - on high-tech projects...
...Jairam Ramesh, the Indian Environment and Forestry Minister, had other ideas. With Clinton standing by, Ramesh told reporters that India was in no position to reduce its rising levels of carbon-dioxide emissions, and that the West - which had polluted with impunity for decades - was in no position to dictate reductions to developing poor countries. "There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions," he said. (Read a story about how India's cows contribute to global warming...
Though Clinton assured her Indian counterparts that the U.S. "does not, and will not, do anything that would limit India's economic progress," the uneasy exchange illustrated a troubling reality: with less than five months to go before the crucial U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen, there remains a deep chasm between developed and developing nations on the issue of CO2. Unless that gap is narrowed - and the world can find a way to fairly reduce emissions from rich countries while making developing nations pay their fair share - years of global climate-change negotiations could finally collapse. (See pictures...
...Indians are no longer legally confined to the closet. In a landmark decision, New Delhi's highest court struck down a 150-year-old law that prohibited "carnal intercourse against the order of nature." Though it applies only to the nation's capital, the ruling is likely to prompt India's government to appeal to the Supreme Court or to change the law nationwide. Advocates say the decision could pave the way for better sex education in a country with one of the world's highest populations of people with HIV/AIDS...
Still, he won the vote and then a sweeping victory in India's general elections this year. It isn't Singh's speeches that win him followers; it's the fact that first as Finance Minister and since 2004 as Prime Minister, he has led India through a series of radical economic reforms that have made the world's largest democracy also one of its fastest-growing economies--and protected the poor too. It's Singh's actions that have changed tens of millions of lives for the better, not his words...