Tourists Stay Away From Taj Mahal, Other Indian Attractions As Protests Against Citizenship Law Flare

India's tourism industry has been hit by a wave of violent anti-government protests against a new citizenship law that have rocked several cities this month, with at least seven countries issuing travel warnings.

At least 25 people have been killed in clashes between police and protesters, and demonstrations against the law continue.

Officials estimate about 200,000 domestic and international tourists cancelled or postponed their trip to the Taj Mahal in the past two weeks, one of the world's most popular tourist attractions.

Read more:’ Now we have woken up’-Indias protests: why now?
“There has been a 60 per cent decline in visitor footfalls in December this year,” said Dinesh Kumar, a police inspector overseeing a special tourist police station near the Taj Mahal who has access to visitor data. He said the decline was compared to December last year.
“Indian and foreign tourists have been calling our control rooms to check security. We assure them of protection, but many still decide to stay away,” said Kumar.
The 17th century marble monument is in Uttar Pradesh, the northern state that has witnessed the highest number of deaths and intense bursts of violence in two weeks of unrest.
Read more: Indian officer tells those protesting new law to go to Pakistan
A group of European tourists travelling in a group across India said they now planned to cut short their 20 day trip.
“We are all retired folks, for us travel has to be slow and relaxing. The newspaper headlines have led to a sense of concern and we will leave sooner than we had planned,” said Dave Millikin, a retired banker living on the outskirts of London, who spoke to Reuters from the capital New Delhi.
The Taj Mahal, situated in the town of Agra, attracts over 6.5 million tourists every year, generating nearly $14 million annually from entrance fees. A foreign tourist pays about $15 to enter the grounds, although nationals from neighbouring countries get a discount.
Managers in luxury hotels and guest houses around the Taj Mahal said last minute cancellations during the festive season have further dampened business sentiment at a time when the country's economic growth has slowed to 4.5pc, its slowest pace in more than six years.
In a bid to clamp down on violence and unrest, authorities have suspended mobile internet services in Agra.
“Blocking the internet has affected travel and tourism in Agra by about 50-60pc,” said Sandeep Arora, president of the Agra Tourism Development Foundation that groups over 250 tour operators, hotels and guides.
The United States, Britain, Russia, Israel, Singapore, Canada and Taiwan have issued travel advisories asking their citizens to either refrain from visiting or to exercise caution when visiting regions embroiled in India's protests.
Jayanta Malla Baruah, the head of the Assam Tourism Development Corporation, said the state, home to the world's largest concentration of one-horned rhinoceroses, is visited on average by 500,000 tourists during December.



Blast outside main US base in Afghanistan wounds five




A suicide bomber in Afghanistan detonated explosives on Wednesday outside the United States' (US) main military base of Bagram in an attack that wounded five people, Afghan and Nato officials said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.
All five wounded in the attack at the southern entrance to the base were Afghans, said Wahida Shahkar, a spokeswoman for the governor of Parwan province, where the base is located.
“A 30-minute clash also happened between the attackers, who obviously wanted to enter the base, and foreign forces,” she told Reuters.
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The attack was “quickly contained and repelled” and there were no US or coalition casualties, but a medical base being built for locals was badly damaged, Resolute Support, the Nato-led mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement.
Wednesday's attack comes as the US looks to revive stalled peace talks with Taliban militants who control more territory than at any point since being ousted from power by coalition forces in 2001.


New Zealand police open criminal probe into deaths on volcanic island


New Zealand police said on Tuesday they were opening a criminal investigation into the deaths of tourists on a volcanic island where a powerful eruption of ash and scalding steam occurred as dozens of people were exploring the barren landscape.

Five deaths were confirmed after Monday's eruption of the White Island volcano. Eight other people are feared dead, but unstable conditions on the island were continuing to hinder a search.
Police Deputy Commissioner John Tims did not go into details of the criminal investigation but said it would sit alongside an investigation by health and safety regulators. The announcement indicates authorities are concerned safety standards may have been breached.
Many people are questioning why tourists were still allowed on the island after seismic monitoring experts raised the volcano's alert level last month.
"These questions must be asked and they must be answered," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in Parliament.
About 47 people were on the island at the time of the eruption, and some of those evacuated suffered critical burns.
"To those who have lost or are missing family and friends, we share in your grief and sorrow, and we are devastated," Ardern said.
Experts said they thought there was still a 50 per cent chance of another small eruption taking place within the next day, making it too dangerous for search teams to return to the island.
Ardern said aircrafts have not seen survivors, and Tims said attempts to send up drones were prevented by windy conditions.
The eruption on Monday sent a plume of steam and ash an estimated 3,660 metres into the air. Helicopter crews landed afterward despite the danger and evacuated many survivors. One of the rescue boats that returned from the island was covered with ash half a metre thick, Ardern said.
Russell Clark, an intensive care paramedic worker, said the scene looked like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, just blanketed in ash.
"It was quite an overwhelming feeling. There was a helicopter on the island that had obviously been there at the time, with its rotor blades off it,” Clark told New Zealand broadcaster TVNZ. "I can only imagine what it was like for the people there at the time they had nowhere to go.
"We didnt find any survivors on the island,” Clark said. "It would've been quite traumatic for them.
Many of the visitors on the island at the time were Australian, and Ardern said New Zealanders and tourists from the United States, China, Britain and Malaysia were also affected. Some of the visitors were passengers from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Ovation of the Seas.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said 11 Australians are unaccounted for and 13 were hospitalised.
"Three Australians were suspected to be among the initial five confirmed dead," he told reporters in Sydney. "I fear there is worse news to come," Morrison said.
Relatives of a newlywed American couple say the husband and wife were severely burned. Barbara Barham told The Washington Post that her daughter Lauren Urey, 32, and son-in-law Matthew Urey, 36, from Richmond, Virginia, were on a honeymoon trip.
A few locals laid flowers on Tuesday at a fence on the waterfront near where the rescue boats had returned with the injured, many of whom were flown to burn units at hospitals around New Zealand.
White Island, also known by the indigenous Maori name Whakaari, is the tip of an undersea volcano some 50 kilometres off New Zealand's main North Island.
New Zealand's GeoNet seismic monitoring agency had raised the volcano's alert level on Nov 18 from 1 to 2 on a scale where 5 represents a major eruption, noting an increase in sulfur dioxide gas, which originates from magma. It also said volcanic tremors had increased from weak to moderate strength. It raised the alert level to 4 for a time after Monday's eruption but lowered it to 3 as the activity subsided.
Richard Arculus, an Australian National University volcanologist who has made numerous visits to White Island, said the eruption likely sent a ground-hugging lateral blast from the crater to the jetty, as well as blasting rock and ash vertically skyward.
"In that crater, it would have been a terrible place to be," Arculus said. “There would have been nowhere safe for you to be hiding, thinking that: Oh well, if it explodes, it just goes straight up in the air."
White Island is New Zealand's most active cone volcano. About 70pc of the volcano lies under the sea.
Twelve people were killed on the island in 1914 when it was being mined for sulfur. Part of a crater wall collapsed and a landslide destroyed the miners' village and the mine itself.
The remains of buildings from another mining enterprise in the 1920s are now a tourist attraction. The island became a private scenic reserve in 1953, and daily tours allow more than 10,000 people to visit every year.



US losing Afghan war for lack of clear objectives, says report




WASHINGTON: Hundreds of pages of official documents, obtained by The Washington Post show that the United States is losing the war in Afghanistan because it never had clear objectives, says a report published on Monday.
“Some US officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia,” the Post observed.
The Post spent months investigating this report, which is based on 2,000 pages of unpublished documents, 600 interviews and thousands of previously classified memos dictated by former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The confidential documents — obtained through lengthy litigation — reveal that top US officials misled the American public about the war in Afghanistan in order to conceal the likelihood of failure in the nearly 20-year effort.
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The documents also show how US military commanders struggled to define who they were fighting and why. The answered questions included: “Was Al Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll?”
The 40-page report by Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Mr Rumsfeld, identified corruption and incompetence as the main reasons or the “enormous popular discontent” against the Afghan government.
The documents were part of a lengthy government report titled “Lessons Learned” that examined “the root failures” of the war effort through interviews with more than 600 people.
The interviews show US officials acknowledging that “their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed, and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money — almost a trillion dollars — trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation”.
“Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public,” the Post reported. “They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”
Douglas Lute, “a three-star army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar” under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told interviewers that “we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing”. Mr Lute asked: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
Published in Pasia Kamao Dost
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Democrats lay out case for formal Trump impeachment



WASHINGTON: The House Judici­ary Committee received a detailed summing up of the impeachment case against President Donald Trump on Monday as Democrats prepare formal charges against him. Trump and his allies lobbed fresh assaults on the proceedings they dismiss as a hoax and a sham.
Democratic lawyers outlined the findings so far, saying Trump’s push to have Ukraine investigate rival Joe Biden while at the same time withholding US military aid ran counter to US policy and benefited Russia as well as himself. A committee vote is coming, possibly as soon as this week, on two or more articles of impeachment on charges of abuse of power, bribery and obstruction against the Republican president.
Trump quickly began tweeting anew against the Witch Hunt! and deriding Do Nothing Democrats.” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler was blunt as he opened the hearing, saying, President Trump put himself before country.
The top Republican on the panel, Rep. Doug Collins said Democrats are racing to jam impeachment through on a clock and a calendar ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
They can’t get over the fact that Donald Trump is the president of the United States and they don’t have a candidate that can beat him,” Collins said.
The Republicans tried numerous times to halt or slow the proceedings, formally objecting several times that the committee’s Democratic counsel was impugning Trump as he spelled out potential charges. Nadler responded that negative comments about Trump might well be expected in listing reasons to impeach him. The Republicans still demanded votes on taking down the negative comments, defeated on party-line votes.
The hearing was briefly interrupted by a protester shouting We voted for Donald Trump! and decrying Democrats as the ones committing treason. The protester was escorted from the House hearing room by Capitol Police.
The hearing sets off a pivotal week as Democrats march towards a full House vote expected by Christmas. In drafting the articles of impeachment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing a legal and political challenge of balancing the views of her majority while hitting the Constitution’s bar of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Published in Paisa Kamao Dost
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