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/ 18 December 2007
Home for Jon Adams is a Randburg suburb no different to hundreds of thousands of comfortable northern suburbs residents. There are even a couple of solar collectors on his roof that provide hot water for the house. But here the similarities stop, because the roof also has 36 solar panels each generating 80W peak power to provide electricity for his home.
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/ 18 December 2007
Rather like a traffic fine — if you ignore it chances are that you’ll get away with it — employers are increasingly ignoring the orders of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), the country’s labour tribunal. CCMA chief executive Nerine Kahn believes that the huge increase in CCMA awards being ignored by employers is because of a realisation that they can drag out the process for such a long time.
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/ 18 December 2007
The Federal Reserve this week cut interest rates for the third time this autumn as the United States central bank sought to prevent the rapidly deteriorating housing market from dragging the world’s biggest economy into recession. Fearful of inflationary pressures from rising oil prices and a falling dollar, the Fed limited itself to a quarter-point cut. Share prices fell sharply in the wake of the Fed’s cutting its Fed funds and the discount rate by a quarter point.
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/ 18 December 2007
Once seen as a "green solution" for the planet’s oil woes, biofuel has been branded a red herring at the United Nations climate conference in Bali. Over the past two weeks organisations at the conference have been spelling out the pitfalls of biofuels, amazed that it could ever have been considered green.
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/ 18 December 2007
Regulated petrol prices have long been a feature of the government’s fuel strategy, but this is starting to change. The draft biofuels strategy, approved by Cabinet last week, proposes that petrol containing bio-ethanol should retail at a deregulated price, writes Jocelyn Newmarch.
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/ 18 December 2007
As the fallout from the bread price-fixing scandal grows, consumers are still not sure exactly what happened, who was responsible and what is being done about it. The executives of Premier Foods and Tiger Brands will have us believe that they knew nothing about the price-fixing and that disciplinary action is being taken against those involved, writes Lloyd Gedye.
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/ 18 December 2007
Climate wars are coming and Southern Africa will be one of the areas most at risk. As environmental resources dwindle because of global warming, people will begin fighting over scarce resources, particularly water and agricultural land. These predictions are contained in a report titled <i>Climate Change as a Security Risk</i>.
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/ 18 December 2007
I call her "the torturer" to her face, as do most of her clients, but that never elicits anything other than a broad smile and a smug nod. She’s diminutive, has delicate features and a soft nature, yet the pain she inflicts easily brings tears to the eyes of her many clients. Three years after being a regular customer of hers, I still wriggle and scream out loud.
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/ 18 December 2007
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, set at the turn of the century, made up the most aspirational development programme ever devised. But a progress report published recently by Unicef says that even though more babies are surviving, more children are in school and fewer families live in poverty, urgent action is needed if the goals are to be met by the target date of 2015.
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/ 18 December 2007
Conrad Black was sentenced on December 10 to six-and-a-half years in a United States prison for abusing shareholders’ trust money through a sophisticated plot to embezzle $6,1million from his Hollinger media empire.