Quick notes: Cardinal sin, Free tuition...

• Connect the dots:
  

  o Dec 2013: Kerala cardinals meet Sonia over green recommendations: Church leaders have been spearheading agitations against restricting commercial activities in ecologically sensitive areas.
  
  
  o Jayanthi Natarajan loses job: "After my removal as Minister, there was widespread coverage in the Kerala media that my removal was because I had notified the order on protection of the Western Ghats, the Kasturirangan report, on Dec 19, 2013, (just one day before my removal).  My successor Shri Moily, put my orders on hold".
  
  
  o P T Thomas gets dropped: "I was dropped because I stood for Western Ghats conservation"




• Tamil Nadu's role:
  

  o Kerala tells Supreme Court: Sudden release of Mullaiperiyar waters by TN worsened floods
  
  
  o Cut the dam(n) height: Had TN started releasing water from the dam into Kerala when it had reached the critical level of 139 feet, the crisis could have been averted to some extent. “The 3 feet make a lot of difference. They contain 792 million cubic feet of water, which when released translates into a flow of about 9,000 cusecs, which got added to the flow caused by the rain”.
  
  
  o Second tunnel in Mullaperiyar dam? The maximum drawal from the dam through the tunnel is 2,300 cusecs. If this quantum is further increased with an additional tunnel, TN can evacuate more water during monsoons.
  
  



• This is what causes floods and droughts:

This is how India completes the unfinished colonisation mission the British left incomplete in 1947. This is what causes floods and droughts. This is what aggravates climate change. This is how contractors get rich and ordinary people get impoverished. https://t.co/LU4TTZp8IM

— Bittu Sahgal (@BittuSahgal) August 18, 2018




• NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students: School officials worry that rising tuition and soaring loan balances are pushing new doctors into high-paying fields and contributing to a shortage of researchers and primary care physicians.



• Australia grows balls: Bans Huawei and ZTE because of national security concerns.
  
  
  
• US tech giants plan to fight India's data localisation plans: They plan to intensify lobbying efforts against stringent Indian data localisation requirements, which they say will undermine their growth ambitions in India.
  
  
  
• Ganga drying up in summers due to groundwater depletion: “The trend can lead to disastrous effect on the riverine ecology and lead to food scarcity for 115 million people in the Ganga basin.”



• Belt and Road and Chinese imperialism: Instead of paying loans back gradually, Tajikistan is signing away land and mining rights. In 2011, Tajikistani ceded 1,100 square kilometers of land near the Afghan border to China. Not only was the land along the Wakhan Corridor— historically one of the most strategic junctions for Chinese access to the Indian Ocean and West Asia—it also purportedly contained gold and uranium deposits.
  
  That same year, Tajikistan allowed Chinese farmers to till 2,000 hectares of arable land—a scarce commodity in such a mountainous country—near the Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China. It is widely believed , albeit unofficially, that these deals were made in exchange for “hundreds of millions of dollars” in debt relief .