Tim Radford United States space scientists believe they will be able to conjure up refrigerator and furnace insulation tiles out of thin air. They are experimenting with a composite material called aerogel, the lightest solid known. A lump of this “frozen smoke” the size of a man would weigh less than 0,45kg, but could bear […]
Simon Caulkin Stock options have become the Nineties way of rewarding top managers. But as the number of options being granted has exploded, so the boom in share prices has inflated the value of those options. The sheer volume of stock options has achieved such scale that it threatens to undermine the validity of company […]
Arvind Ganesan In their search for finite resources, oil companies must partner governments who may have dismal human rights records – witness Total’s involvement with the Burmese junta in constructing the Yadana natural-gas pipeline. In Colombia the drive to develop oil fields has landed companies in the middle of a war zone. To ensure oil […]
Mail & Guardian reporter South Africa’s financial markets took a drubbing this week as the rand fell to an all-time low and the Reserve Bank raised its key lending rate by more than two percentage points to 18%. The rand dropped to R5,16 against the dollar on Monday after rumours in London and New York […]
Aventura bid Ann Eveleth Minister for Public Enterprises Stella Sigcau came under severe criticism this week for “acting beyond her authority” in the sale of tourism parastatal Aventura. A senior government official and a member of one of four consortiums expected to lose the bid this week said Sigcau and her privatisation advisers, HSBC Investment […]
Stefaans Brmmer: A SECOND LOOK Nicholas Biwott is Kenya’s political bogeyman. The minister of state in the office of President Daniel Arap Moi has a reputation that embraces ruthless murder, kleptomaniacal patronage and cynical manipulation. Any edition of one of Kenya’s more adventurous journals is as likely as not to make reference to what they […]
Ann Eveleth The development hopes of a poor rural community bordering the lucrative Sabi Sands game reserve have been delayed by bickering between conservationists vying for a slice of the community’s untapped treasure. The tiny community of Huntington in the fractious Bushbuckridge region in Mpumalanga plans to meet this weekend in an ongoing bid to […]
After nearly a decade of remaining in the doldrums, the motor sector of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange has doubled in less than two years, with some listed companies still showing upward growth potential. However, the ride to its present level of over 9 000 has been volatile. Before the 1994 election the index remained mostly […]
Chris Roper On show in Cape Town In the catalogue for his exhibition, Stuart Barnes states that ”in a university, library books on the subject of ambiguous sex have suffered a history of violence: they have been mutilated. Pages have been torn and images of intersex genitalia excised from them. As a preventative measure they […]
negotiations Thembela Kepe, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ben Cousins Despite the depth of the problems faced by the Wild Coast spatial development initiative (SDI), it has a great deal of positive potential – and it is not too late to correct the mistakes. However, the defensive response to our article (”Tempers flare on Wild Coast”, May […]