What the world is reading

An editorial compares the handling of the BP oil spill to the Bhopal gas disaster. It says,BP is being rightly held to account for cleaning up the biggest oil pollution in US history,but just imagine if the blowout on the drilling rig had caused not 11 but up to 25,000 US deaths; that the compensation Washington finally accepted fell far short of that required even to cover the medical bills of the survivors; that 26 years on,BP had still to clean up the site of the accident which was poisoning the local water supply; and that Britain refused to extradite to a US court the main BP executives responsible. Unthinkable?,it concludes. The newspaper blames the Indian authorities for the difference between the two cases as successive national and state governments in India have rolled over time and time again to the realpolitik of dealing with Dow Chemicals other investments in India.

The Financial Times

Ruling heightens sense of betrayal

The Financial Times visits the site of the Bhopal tragedy,talks to the victims,one of whom,Abdul Jabbar Khan,calls the area a graveyard. We should make this a big memorial like the Nazi concentration camps or Hiroshima nuclear bomb site, says Khan who lost three family members and suffered damage to his eyesight. The piece says the recent court verdict brought the accidents sorry history sharply to light. It also quotes Satyanath Sarangi,president of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action,who attributes renewed interest in the accident to the debate about corporate liability in light of BPs oil spill: If European companies are held accountable in the US,why not US companies when they are abroad?

The Independent

Far too little,far too late

The Independent is critical of the light sentences on the seven defendants: It is shamefully obvious that both the charges,which were scaled down over the years,and the penalties,are derisory. It adds,Two years imprisonment and a fine a quarter of a century on bear scant relation to the toll. It criticises the fact that only Indian nationals,who were down the pecking order of responsibility,have been convicted. The US chairman of Union Carbide at the time was charged,but never faced the court. This leaves the deeply unpleasant impression that rich,white industrialists can ruin a much poorer land with impunity.

The Newsweek

Worse than the deepwater horizon spill

Newsweek counts the Bhopal gas tragedy among the four environmental disasters worse than the deep water horizon spill and calls it the deadliest man-made environmental disaster in history. It says the BBC returned to the site 20 years later and found dangerous chemicals still stored at the former factory. The groundwater was also contaminated but locals were and apparently still are drinking water they believed to be toxic because they had no other choice.

The Daily Telegraph

What is Obamas view?

The newspaper wonders how Barack Obamas views the Bhopal disaster: President Obama who has hammered British Petroleum sic repeatedly since the Gulf oil spill,said8230; that the hardship suffered by fishermen and other businesses along the Gulf coast was brutally unfairits wrong. How. then,would this most eloquent of Presidents describe what happened in Bhopal because of the negligence of an American company?