This story by Jason Overdorf originally appeared in Global Post.

There’s still a chance that Delhi will pull off the Commonwealth Games next month. In India, anything is possible. There’s even a chance that people will call this futile exercise in mismanagement a success. But that would be a real shame.

Shame is the word of the week here, with 10 days left before the scheduled opening ceremony of what the erstwhile jewel in the British crown once hoped would be the largest and most impressive Commonwealth Games ever. Now, the growing fear is that the event may not come off at all, as the threat looms of a boycott by England, Scotland and Wales.

Even as organizing committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi struggled to persuade a skeptical and hostile press that the city and venues would be ready, the seemingly endless problems mounted.

Gunmen on a motorcycle shot two Taiwanese tourists in a possible terrorist attack over the weekend. On Tuesday a footbridge attached to one of the entrances for the showpiece Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium collapsed, injuring 27 workers and leaving three laborers in critical condition.

As unusually persistent monsoon rain pounded on, a section of the ceiling fell in a few hours later. An epidemic of dengue fever, exacerbated by the delayed construction work, overwhelmed area hospitals. And, horror of horrors for India’s fastidious Hindus and their stiff-upper-lipped onetime rulers alike: Inspectors discovered human excrement in some of the posh flats of the hastily built Games Village.

The following article by Silvia Marchetti first appeared in GlobalPost.

ROME, Italy — “Exploit your holidays to discover your unique, magical Italy,” intones Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a new TV ad encouraging Italians to vacation at home this year.

For those Italians still unsure of exactly why they should “discover” Italy — according to Berlusconi, a land not just of “sky, sun and sea but also of history, culture and art — the state has thrown in a sweetener: it will help pay for citizens’ summer or winter breaks by granting “holiday vouchers.”

Berlusconi’s government believes that tourism can be a strategic tool in Italy’s economic recovery, but only if Italians spend money for vacations at home instead of abroad.

The coupons are available to all low-income families, especially those with many children, who wish to go to the seaside or mountains but can’t normally afford it. If the state has its way, visits to sunny beaches or historical cities will no longer be a privilege for the few, but a right of the many.

The following article by Silvia Marchetti first appeared in GlobalPost.

ROME, Italy — Ischia and Capri, two tiny islands in the Gulf of Naples, are fighting over big money. That is, Russian money.

Ischia, a thermal baths and spa destination, complains that its Russian clients prefer shopping on the neighboring isle because it has a wider choice of luxury boutiques. On both islands, nearly all hotels and restaurants have menus written in Cyrillic and employ waiters whose mother tongue is Russian, while shops display price-tags in both euros and dollars.

It’s indeed worth the trouble. Luring tourists from Russia is a lucrative pursuit in Italy. Many of the most breathtaking and expensive locations have been virtually colonized by them.

They’re the former Soviet Union’s new nobility — billionaire businessmen, bankers and investors who travel across the peninsula in limousines, yachts and helicopters (for 2,000 euros an hour), picking the most romantic scenery for the purchase of dreamlike castles and sea manors.

The following article by Krista Kapralos first appeared in GlobalPost.

FRANKFURT, Germany — It wasn’t too long ago that apartment dwellers in Germany assumed that someone, somewhere in the building, was taking notes on everything they did. Even people who owned their own homes could never be certain whether a government mole was listening in on their conversations.

“Making sure the law was kept,” said Jobst Krause, a 67-year-old Frankfurter, of the surveillance during the Nazi era.

Krause is too young to have experienced the worst of Nazi surveillance, and he lived in West Germany when the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police force, kept tabs on citizens. But he understands the pang of worry that shot through the hearts of many Germans last week when Google, the American search engine giant, announced that it would launch its Street View application in Germany before year’s end.

Google began sending camera-equipped cars throughout Germany’s 20 largest cities in 2008. Once launched, the Street View program will offer panoramic, ground-level photographs of most streets in those cities, allowing Web surfers to virtually tour those cities as if they were walking or driving.

The program was launched in the U.S. in 2007, and has since spread through 23 countries. But Google found fierce resistance in Germany, where strict privacy laws and suspicion about the company’s reasons for widespread data collection have led to a handful of investigations.

– This story by Theodore May originally appeared in Global Post. –

In the small central Gaza town of Deir el Belah, one family has made a cottage industry out of green innovation.

“There was a period in Gaza when there was no gas or you had to wait for hours in line to get gas. So we made the oven according to our needs,” said Maher Youssef Abou Tawahina, who, along with his father, runs a hardware shop in town.

Abou Tawahina is referring to a solar-powered oven that he and his family invented two years ago. The oven, which sits in the family’s backyard, takes five minutes to heat up using electricity. Then, its glass ceiling uses the sun to continue the heating process. The oven is not quite hot enough for baking bread, he said, but it’s perfect for roasting chicken.

The idea of the solar-powered oven was so well received around Deir El Belah that orders poured in from around the neighborhood. Abou Tawahina said that he and his father built over 30 of them until the insulating glass became unavailable on the market.

A dozen miles up the road, in northern Gaza City, high energy costs also drove Waseem El Khazendar to innovate for his own survival.

This article by Ioan Grillo originally appeared in GlobalPost.

Caption: A police man walks at a crime scene where three people were gunned down in a drive-by shooting in downtown Ciudad Juarez April 28, 2010. REUTERS/Claudia Daut

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — At less than 5 feet 6 inches with acne and a mop of curly hair, 17-year-old Jose Antonio doesn’t look particularly menacing.

But in his tender years, he has seen more firefights and murders than many soldiers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Indeed, Jose Antonio has come of age in a war zone. And he has served as a soldier, siding squarely with the insurgent drug gangs of Juarez.

He said he first picked up a gun at 12 years old, when he joined the calaberas, or “skulls,” one of the gangs that rule the slums that climb up sun-baked hills on the west side of this sprawling border city.

This article by Kathleen E. McLaughlin first appeared in GlobalPost.

BEIJING, China – Ten suicides this year at Foxconn’s electronics factory in southern China have cast a renewed spotlight on China’s migrant workers, who staff the production lines that make iPads, mobile phones and just about everything else for the world’s electronics consumers.

In an open letter this month, prominent Chinese sociologists called on the government to reform the country’s production model, which depends on churning through low-paid quasi-legal migrants. China has an estimated 150 million to 200 million domestic migrant workers.

“We have made them live a migrant life that is rootless and helpless, where families are separated, parents have no one to support them, and children are not taken care of,” the scholars wrote. “In short, this is a life without dignity.”

Meanwhile, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wandered into the suicide fray Tuesday, telling a customer by email that Apple is “all over this.”

To help make sense of the controversy, here are five things you need to know about China’s wandering masses of migrants, living in the shadows of the country’s economic boom:

1. What’s so unique about migrant workers in China?

This article by Stephen Kinzer originally appeared in GlobalPost.

YAZD, Iran —“You are American?” a surprised Iranian asked me as I sat down near him in a restaurant famous for eggplant and pomegranate stews. “How did you get a visa?”

Ever since 2002, when U.S. President George W. Bush named Iran a member of the world’s anti-American “Axis of Evil” — or perhaps since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the searing hostage crisis that followed — the idea that American tourists would visit Iran has seemed to border on the bizarre. Yet an adventurous few do come, and most find a welcome far beyond what they had imagined.

In no other country is there such an imbalance between the wealth of tourist attractions and the dearth of tourists. If Iran were a fully open country, sites like the awe-inspiring ruins at Persepolis or the dazzling mosques of Isfahan would be jammed with visitors from around the world. Instead they are all but empty, offering visitors one of the world’s richest travel experiences.

During a two-week trip through Iran in May, I ran across groups of intrepid travelers at almost every stop. All marveled at what they saw.

“It’s great to be here before the crowds come,” Jamie Whittington, who came with a tour group from California, said as she surveyed an ancient Zoroastrian “tower of silence,” where corpses were once placed on ceremonial slabs for vultures to consume. “This place is waiting to be discovered.”

This article by Julia Kumari Drapkin originally appeared in Global Post. The views expressed are her own.

The quake that hit China Wednesday was the latest in a string of earthquakes in the news lately. Many people are wondering what’s going on, so we decided to ask NASA. Eric Fielding is a geophysicist who uses satellites to study earthquakes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California.

GlobalPost: So first question is the one on everybody’s mind. What on earth, literally, is going on? What’s up with the earthquakes?

Eric Fielding: The most important thing to remember is there are earthquakes all the time, someplace in the world. In a normal year, there are around 16 earthquakes with magnitudes 7 or higher. So far this year we’ve had six earthquakes like that. So we’re well within the expected range for a three or four month period.

Is there ever a pattern to a series of earthquakes?

This article by Saritha Rai originally appeared in Globalpost.

BANGALORE, India — Six days a week in the wee hours of the morning, Saswati Patnaik logs into her home computer. The homemaker — and tutor for a Bangalore company called TutorVista — rises early to help American high school students write English term papers, prepare S.A.T. essays or finish homework assignments.

Outsourcing, of course, started as a way for American companies to lower costs by shifting work to cheaper locations. After nearly two decades, that practice has become so mainstream that hundreds of U.S. businesses — from Wall Street banks to law firms, architects and others — routinely outsource to India.

But now a growing number of individual Americans are following in the footsteps of businesses — and outsourcing homework. For $99 a month, American customers of TutorVista get unlimited coaching in English, math or science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors. Similar personalized services in the United States charge about $40 an hour.

“The economic downturn has pushed education to the top of the average American family’s monthly household budget,” said Krishnan Ganesh, CEO and founder of TutorVista. “More Americans feel that education is their only safety anchor, the only thing that can help them stay competitive in this world.”

The company’s customers are overwhelmingly from the U.S., but Canadians, Koreans, British and Australians also sign up for lessons. To meet this growing demand, TutorVista is adding another 1,500 teachers across India in the next few weeks. To be sure, homework outsourcing is no longer a novelty. Several Indian companies offer the service, operating like call centers with tutors sitting in a common office. But companies like TutorVista are now extending the trend directly from the homes of Indian tutors to those of American students.