(January 7, 2006) Anti-debt campaigners and some U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Bush administration to return debt arrears owed by Nigeria and to let the African nation spend the funds on health and education through a World Bank-sponsored fund.
Is China ready for more floods?
Some experts believe China’s big-dam projects are an inefficient use of the funds set aside for flood prevention, BBC News Online reports. ‘Give the people in the villages more money,’ it quotes water specialist Wang Weiluo as saying.
Green dawn
(January 5, 2006) Environmentalists are becoming more active in China but they are forced to keep their activities to a small scale, John Gittings writes.
Legislators to Bush administration: let Nigeria spend money on health, not debt
(January 5, 2006) “Much of Nigeria’s debt can be considered odious given the fact that the original loans were made to authoritarian regimes – many of which were then looted while interest and penalties accumulated.”
Fine words but corruption soars
(January 5, 2006) Corruption deals in Africa are getting bigger. The crooks are getting smarter and doing ever greater damage to Africa’s economies – sucking out resources meant for health, education and clean water.
Cuba waging fight against corruption
(January 5, 2006) Some predict that the anti-corruption campaign will be a watershed in the history of the Cuban Revolution.
China launches site to report corruption
(January 5, 2006) China is putting its marathon anti-graft crackdown online, launching a Web site for the public to report corrupt officials.
Floods ravage north-western China
At least 205 people are dead, and hundreds more are missing, in catastrophic floods in north-western China that local reports describe as the worst in the area for more than a century.
Odious debt: the terms of the debate
(January 1, 2006) View report
Bono aid is making Africa sick
(January 1, 2006) Andrew Mwenda’s position echoes the concerns of an opinion piece written earlier this year by href=”http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1964947,00.html”, the travel writer and novelist. Theroux, who worked as a Peace Corps teacher in Malawi during the early 1960s, maintains that despite years of foreign aid the once promising country of Malawi is now a failed state.
Congress should investigate the United Nations tsunami relief effort
(December 30, 2005) A recent investigation by the Financial Times has raised serious questions regarding the U.N.’s handling of the tsunami relief effort, in particular the way in which it has spent the first $590 million of its $1.1 billion disaster.
Only white dolphin in captivity dies
Qiqi, the only captive example of the world’s most endangered dolphin species, died yesterday, Xinhua reports. Yangtze River pollution and development projects, including dams, have been blamed for the species’ decline.
Cultural relics face submersion in central China
(December 26, 2005) As with the Three Gorges project, China’s south-north water transfer scheme would endanger a vast number of cultural relics. Sites to be submerged contain dinosaur-egg fossils dating back 60 million years and human skeletons from the Stone Age.
China detains 40 farmers on protests ahead of dam project
40 migrant farmers, forced from their villages by construction of the Three Gorges Dam, have been detained by police after protesting discrimination and hardship in their new homes in Qingdao, reports the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
Little clarity on how aid gets spent
(December 23, 2005) When Jan Egeland, the United Nations top disaster official, announced in March that PwC, the professional services firm, would help monitor the expenditure of funds collected under the UN’s $1.1-billion tsunami “flash appeal” he offered a simple gauge for what would result.
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