China's Water Projects

The Three Gorges dam: a worrying precedent

Last year, for the first time in 140m years, the Chinese sturgeon failed to breed in the wild.

The danger to the sturgeon was one risk cited by opponents to the world’s largest hydropower project, the $26bn Three Gorges dam, whose approval in 1992 kicked off two decades of construction of mega-dams in China. Hydropower now accounts for 23 per cent of China’s installed generation capacity and the companies that cut their teeth on the Three Gorges project are now the world’s premier dam-builders.

Along the Yangtze, the world’s third-longest river that cuts through central China like a muddy highway, the costs of the dam are just beginning to be totted up. A landslide wiped out a power substation on the reservoir this summer, while the 1,300km stretch of water below the dam regularly experiences low levels that may be exacerbated by the separate project to divert water north. “Dam refugees” can be found in the slums of Shanghai and other eastern cities, after resettlement programmes proved inadequate and riddled with graft.

Senior officials responsible for the dam were reshuffled during China’s anti-corruption campaign, in a rare acknowledgement by Beijing of the problems that have plagued the project.

Bringing the Yangtze to help the Han River

The “Bringing the Yangtze to help the Han River” canal project is needed because of a much larger project, 250km to the north, that cuts the flow of the Han, a Yangtze tributary. About a quarter of the water in the Han will be reallocated to arid northern China in a $60bn engineering effort that critics say will create shortages in the south.

Buy Commodities, Sell Brands, Driverless Technology and Ebola

1. Buy Commodities, Sell Brands

Berkshire has a substantial interest in 10 of the top 100 most valuable brands in Millward Brown’s latest annual BrandZ survey, reflecting Mr Buffett’s penchant for enduring names such as Coca-Cola, American Express and Walmart. As he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders: “‘Buy commodities, sell brands’ has long been a formula for business success.”

Berkshire Hathaway was the name of the now defunct textiles company Mr Buffett acquired in the 1960s.

2. Driverless Technology

Driveless technology market is expected to grow rapidly. Exane BNP Paribas forecasts the market for automated and assisted driving technology will be worth some $25bn by 2020 and $57bn by 2025, compared with $6bn today.

3. Ebola

GENEVA (Kyodo) -- The death toll from the Ebola virus outbreak topped 4,000 by midweek, doubling in about a month, the World Health Organization said Friday.

     The pace of infection appears to be picking up in West Africa, while cases have been reported in the United States and Spain.

     The Ebola deaths totaled 4,033, up from the 3,000 threshold breached roughly two weeks earlier. Liberia reported 2,316 deaths, followed by Sierra Leone's 930 and Guinea's 778. Nigeria had eight deaths and the United States had one.

     The WHO counted a total of 8,399 cases. Senegal, Spain and the United States each reported one case and Nigeria had 20. The three most affected countries -- Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea -- accounted for the rest.