These are some of the things that have caught my atten­tion lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news busi­ness, but then so’s life:

• A Tycoon Tweaks Putin, and Gets Away With It | NYTimes.com — Mr. Lebedev, 48, has always seemed to oper­ate from his own play­book. A former lieu­ten­ant col­onel in the K.G.B., he was pos­ted in Bri­tain when the Soviet Union fell, and returned to Rus­sia as an expert in emer­ging mar­ket debt, to become pres­id­ent of the National Reserve Bank. He speaks flu­ent, London-accented Eng­lish and, though his white hair and slightly cher­ubic face recall an eco­nom­ics pro­fessor rather than a cor­por­ate pred­ator, favors stovepipe pants, leather jack­ets and dark glasses, some­times when he is indoors.

  Sev­eral times in recent years Mr. Lebedev has found him­self in hot water with Russia’s lead­ers. This occurred most not­ably in April, when a news­pa­per that Mr. Lebedev owned, Moscov­sky Kor­res­pond­ent, repor­ted that Mr. Putin planned to divorce his wife and marry Alina Kabayeva, a 24-year-old cham­pion in rhythmic gym­nastics. The art­icle set off a flurry of spec­u­la­tion in Moscow, but Mr. Lebedev said he was not behind it: He pub­lished an art­icle say­ing that he had been fishi

• China spends 45 bil­lion to extend media’s global reach | zhong­nan­haib­log — China could open a hun­dred news organ­iz­a­tions and blanket the world with China’s point of view, but it would be greeted with just as much sus­pi­cion as it is now because China, des­pite all of its advance­ments, remains a one-party state with abso­lute con­trol over all domestic media.  This invest­ment in more cov­er­age may help to a degree: sure, we all know that China Daily is a gov­ern­ment mouth­piece, but we read it because we get to know what the gov­ern­ment thinks and it provides a decent (I’m being gen­er­ous) roundup of what’s going on in the coun­try. A new Xin­hua TV Chan­nel or Global Times news­pa­per may provide the same.  But at the end of the day, it’s a lot of money being thrown at the symp­tom. China can’t buy itself cred­ib­il­ity.  Not even for 45 billion.
• Chinese Media Giants Look to Expand Over­seas | NYTimes.com — The country’s increas­ingly wealthy media giants, all of which oper­ate under gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship rules and pro­pa­ganda motives, are look­ing to acquire inter­na­tional media assets, to open more over­seas news bur­eaus and to pub­lish and broad­cast more broadly in Eng­lish and other lan­guages. Many of them have already announced plans to hire English-speaking Chinese and also foreign-media specialists.
• Paul Offit’s Book “Autism’s False Proph­ets” Is Ral­ly­ing Res­ist­ance to the Anti­vac­cine Cru­sade | NYTimes.com — A new book defend­ing vac­cines, writ­ten by a doc­tor infuri­ated at the claim that they cause aut­ism, is gal­van­iz­ing a back­lash against the anti­vac­cine move­ment in the United States.

  Ryan Collerd for The New York Times
  Paul A. Offit, pedi­at­ri­cian.
  Related
  Global Update: Erad­ic­a­tion Goal for Measles Is Unlikely, Report Says (Janu­ary 13, 2009)
  Health Guide: Aut­ism | Vac­cin­a­tion
  Web Link
  Read an Excerpt of “Autism’s False Prophets

  Mike Cassese/Reuters
  Amanda Peet, act­ress.
  But there will be no book tour for the doc­tor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Proph­ets.” He has had too many death threats.

• Secret inquest plans brought back | BBC NEWS — Plans to exclude rel­at­ives, jur­ies and the press from some inquests — on national secur­ity grounds — are being brought back by min­is­ters.
  They come in a new bill cov­er­ing cor­on­ers, murder laws, wit­ness pro­tec­tion and sen­ten­cing. Just months ago, sim­ilar plans were shelved.
  The gov­ern­ment says secret inquests, which many oppose, would pre­vent intel­li­gence details from leak­ing out.
• Tobacco Industry Efforts to Under­mine Policy-Relevant Research — Land­man and Glantz 99 (1): 45 | Amer­ican Journal of Pub­lic Health — The tobacco industry, work­ing through third parties to pre­vent policy-relevant research that adversely affected it between 1988 and 1998, used coördin­ated, well-funded strategies in repeated attempts to silence tobacco researcher Stan­ton A. Glantz. Tac­tics included advert­ising, lit­ig­a­tion, and attempts to have the US Con­gress cut off the researcher’s National Can­cer Insti­tute fund­ing. Efforts like these can influ­ence the poli­cy­mak­ing pro­cess by silen­cing oppos­ing voices and dis­cour­aging other sci­ent­ists from doing work that may expose them to tobacco industry attacks. The sup­port of highly cred­ible pub­lic health organ­iz­a­tions and of research­ers’ employ­ers is cru­cial to the con­tin­ued advance­ment of pub­lic health.