Media sources in India are following the Canadian government’s investigation of SNC-Lavalin with great interest.
Canada may blacklist SNC Lavalin – The view from India
Jewish (capital) flight from Europe
Over the centuries, Jews have periodically been sought — and shunned — as immigrants.
All-seeing, all-knowing
To some, the availability of big data in China signals a shift toward democracy. But technocrats within the government also see it as a way to create a more efficient form of authoritarianism. Aeon Magazine reports.
China dams on Brahmaputra pose huge ecological risk
The author of “Meltdown in Tibet” challenges China’s claims its cascade dams planned for the trans-boundary Brahmaputra River pose no impacts for downstream communities. “These dams are just the start of things,” he says. If all the proposed dams go into operation “the river will never be the same again”. Free Press Journal reports.
Will China’s dams control the Mekong’s flow?
Low water levels and stranded boats on the upper Mekong River — although, nothing new for a February in recent years — are once again stirring concerns over China’s dam-building program to the north. What is new is the apparent readiness of Chinese authorities to give an account of their actions to rectify the situation. The Lowy Interpreter reports.
Russia’s rise
Far from being marginalized, Russia is winning friends and trading partners around the world.
Taking the long view
Late last year, Mu Lan, the editor of Probe International’s Three Gorges Probe news service in Chinese, followed the central leg of China’s massive South-to-North Water Diversion Project with his camera as it made its way from Hubei Province to Beijing, the project’s ultimate destination.
Without corruption, some ask, can the Chinese Communist Party function?
Has President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign accelerated China’s economic slowdown? Some say officials are “engaged in a test of will” with Xi, delaying decisions that would promote growth to avoid risks and to punish Xi for taking “away their cheese without offering anything in return.” The Washington Post reports.
Good governance requires taxes, not foreign aid
New research provides more evidence that foreign aid undermines good governance.
Bombardier Transportation accused of corruption in South Korea
Canadian aerospace giant Bombardier accused by South Korean prosecutors of making gifts to local officials in relation to a multibillion dollar metro elevated train project described as “more like a bus” in reality, a bus expected to cost Yongin taxpayers $3.5 billion over the next 30 years, including maintenance. CBC reports.
Is China’s Internet becoming an intranet?
China’s ban on virtual private networks (VPN) prompts this ChinaFile conversation between global experts on the potential outfall from Beijing’s latest pullback on citizens’ online access. According to award-winning journalist George Chen: “These days, the government is keen to regulate everything it hates and promote everything it likes with new legislation or renewed enforcement. That’s what the rule of law Chinese-style is all about.”
The EU promoted reckless borrowing and spending. Now German taxpayers will suffer
It will now be the turn of Germany — more likely, individual German taxpayers — to take on the role of suckers.
Yang Zili and the paranoid regime
Xiao Shu in this piece comparing the 2001 incarceration of fellow Chinese journalist, Yang Zili, and his colleagues today from the Transition Institute, explores the deeper psychological cause driving the country’s “stability-obsessed regime”: a paranoia so institutionalized that it drives state power compulsively. A must read.
China: Update – Release of human rights defender Mr Huang Kaiping
After three months of ‘enforced disappearance’, Huang Kaiping, has been returned to his home in Beijing. Front Line Defenders reports.
Five years after earthquake, Haiti’s journalists show resilience amid threats to freedom of the press
Divided before the earthquake of 2010, the disaster united Haiti’s media landscape out of necessity and in the face of a strong adversary in the administration of President Michel Martelly. Nowadays, that landscape is facing a tight squeeze from a government opposed to press freedom and moneyed NGOs with communication agendas that outnumber the country’s news organizations 10 to 1. Shearon Roberts for Journalism in the Americas reports.
Probe International 