A Brazilian Corruption Story Finally Stirs Outrage: Dom Phillips

TV Globo's Sunday-night news-magazine program, "Fantastico," is one of Brazil's most popular shows -- a breezy mixture of entertainment and in-depth reporting that is something of a national institution.

It's the investigative reports that grab headlines, and none more so than last Sunday's 22-minute expose of the fraudulent ways in which companies competed to get lucrative contracts with a public hospital in Rio de Janeiro.

On March 10, a passer-by in the Southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, population 500,000, heard faint moaning from a construction site and alerted a cop. The policeman climbed through a hole in the fence and found a sight he is likely never to forget: a naked girl somebody had tried to burn alive. Oksana Makar, 18, was barely hanging on to life: Doctors later estimated that her burns affected 55 percent of her body. She had also been raped and half-strangled.

Police acted quickly, and three suspects, all local men in their early 20s, were apprehended the next day. Among them was Maxim Prisyazhnyuk, the adopted son of a local government official. The police apparently let him go, along with another one of the young men. But news spread quickly, and in a matter of hours, the entire city, a center of the sagging Ukrainian shipbuilding industry, seemed up in arms. The suspects were promptly taken into custody again -- now they needed protection from an angry mob.

These are strange days for China’s netizens. On March 15, the Chinese Communist Party relieved Bo Xilai, the Chongqing Party Secretary, of his duties after his police chief allegedly attempted to seek asylum in the United States. It was arguably the biggest political story to hit China in two decades, and Chinese microbloggers embraced it with gusto. In the hours following the concise, two-sentence official statement the state media carried about the firing, citizens posted millions of tweets to Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog,  speculating about the causes and circumstances of Bo’s abrupt fall.

The Weibo frenzy lasted for roughly a day, but then, with ruthless efficiency, the censors that troll Chinese microblogs -- whether they represent the party or the controversy-averse microblog owners -- quickly vacuumed up most of those tweets, abolishing them from the site. Searches, too, for “Bo Xilai” on Weibo produced no results. The Chinese public knows nothing about what is happening between the factions who supported Bo, and those who opposed him.

India's ruling coalition government, the United Progressive Alliance, or UPA, advanced its fast-growing reputation for perverse populism and policy paralysis last week when it ratified the dismissal of its own railway minister, Dinesh Trivedi, shortly after he presented a fiscally prudent and forward-looking budget for India's railroad system.

Trivedi's offense was to propose a modest increase in passenger fares (currently subsidized by the government and cross-subsidized by freight fares) for the first time in nine years -- a necessary step to ensure the health of a network that ferries about 30 million passengers daily over routes totaling about 65,000 kilometers (39,000 miles). For this crime he was promptly yanked out of his job by his party boss, the firebrand Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamul Congress, who attacked the decision as "anti-poor" and sought to replace Trivedi with the presumably more obedient Mukul Roy.

A year after the start of anti-government protests in Syria, even media controlled by the militant Hamas movement, whose leadership until recently was based in Damascus, regularly publishes scathing attacks on President Bashar Al-Assad and his backers.

The United Nations now says at least 8,000 people have died in Syria, while thousands more have been wounded, tortured or imprisoned, most at the hands of the regime’s security forces. So it's little wonder that only media controlled by the regime itself or aligned with its closest ally, Iran, now shows any enthusiasm for Assad.

The news March 7 that Brazil's central bank had reduced its benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points, to 9.75 percent, took the market by surprise.

The cut wasn't unexpected. The bank has been trimming Brazil's Selic interest rate, one of the world's highest, since August. But the reduction was larger than expected, and the decision wasn't unanimous: Five members voted for it, two against.

Sometimes, Chinese netizens pay more attention to a U.S. news story than Americans do. President Barack Obama’s Feb. 23 decision to allocate $51.5 million to eradicate an invasive species known as the Asian carp is a prime example.

Outside of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, news of this carp-control strategy barely registered with the U.S. public. But on March 6, it hit China and, like a jazz trio riffing for an hour on just a few notes, microbloggers took to the minor news topic with gusto, using it to explore issues ranging from corrupt civil servants to U.S. sovereign debt. Soon it even had its own hash tag, roughly translated as #Asian Carp on an American Rampage#.

The mass protests that gave Vladimir Putin a wintertime scare may be on the wane, but many Russians' dissatisfaction with his regime is not. They are now looking for a way to express themselves more effectively.

On March 10, no more than 30,000 attended an opposition march down Novy Arbat, one of Moscow's central thoroughfares. That's less than half the turnout similar events attracted before the March 4 election. Some nationalists, who have been regulars at such events, made a show of splitting off.

The greatest Indian publishing project in the last decade has involved more than two dozen remarkable poets, prose writers and dramatists brought together for the first time under one roof.

Interest in the work of these writers was flagging until the intervention of an American patron, John Clay, made it possible to broadcast more widely the marvelous rhythms, narrative structures, and moral cruxes in their work to non-Indian readers. The books were published in the U.S., a country that none of the writers in the series had ever visited, owing to constraints they couldn't help. But the fact that none of the writers was able to do a book tour may have meant that the works didn't enjoy as much attention as they deserved.

For decades, residents of the oil-rich eastern province of Libya -- Barqah in Arabic and Cyrenaica in English -- were marginalized in favor of the western half of the country.

So with Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi gone and a constitution-drafting process slated for later this year, a contingent of Eastern leaders last week seized the initiative to make a bid for autonomy as the “Barqah Transitional Council.”