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Ships power into faster future

BBC News: The current expansion in world trade, particularly trade with China, is causing a rethink of the way goods are transported across the world's oceans. Almost all goods traded worldwide travel by sea...

Indian President rolls out reform agenda

The Independent Bangladesh: Rolling out the reform agenda ahead of the Budget, President A P J Abdul Kalama said yesterday that India will create a common market for agriculture and step up infrastructure development in...

Pak President promises protection to foreign investment

The Independent Bangladesh: General Pervez Musharraf yesterday assured full protection to foreign investment and said Pakistan's rapidly growing economy and friendly economic regime offers profitable business prospects...

Top Stories

Mahathir says East Asia summit misses the point

Swissinfo English: PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia (Reuters) - Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad pronounced scathing judgement on Wednesday on his own brainchild, the first East Asian summit. Mahathir, who f...

Intel feeds huge Chinese appetite for chips

Business Day: SAN FRANCISCO - Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, opened the company's fourth computer chip assembly and test plant in China to try to meet growing demand for microprocessors in the world's fastest-growing...

PBMR gives deals to Japan's Mitsubishi

Business Day: NUCLEAR company Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) has awarded two contracts worth $15m (R100m) to Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for the manufacturing of the core barrel assembly and the supply o...

SA growth 'boosts all neighbours' economies'

Business Day: GROWTH in SA's economy looked set to accelerate to 5% this year in an upswing that was having a tremendous effect on the rest of the world's poorest continent, the World Bank said yesterday. Ritva R...

Japan finally climbing out of mire of deflation

Business Day: TOKYO - Japan was finally rebounding after years of spiralling price falls, the country's top economy official said yesterday amid a flurry of reports showing robust consumer spending and corporate in...

Over 500 to take part in banking forum

Bahrain Tribune: More than 500 participants from 31 countries will take part in the World Islamic Banking Conference (WIBC), which is under the patronage of the Prime Minister, Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, at...

Business Headlines ...  

Christian Aid can damage your wealth

METAMORPHOSIS has been the trademark of the anti-capitalist movement. After each ideological defeat - from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the failure of third-world Marxism to the rise of capitalist India and China - it has changed its name, its tone and its target. Those who cheered on the so-called liberation movements and the rise of a new Marxist Left in the 1960s, the strikes which crippled Great Britain in the 1970s and the Europe-wide anti-Cruise missile protests of the early 1980s, went on, with a new generation of anti-capitalist protesters, to spend the 1990s fighting globalisation. Now the enemies of economic freedom have a new guise. The so-called Trade Justice movement is the latest evolution of the species. It can count on more middle-class do-Gooding sympathy than your average anti-capitalist yobbery, which seems incapable of making its point without smashing up a convenient McDonald's. The modern world's substitute for rigorous debate - celebrity endorsement - can also be counted on. But it is a peculiar creature nevertheless: a mixture of truth and profound error, which means it will almost certainly dupe gullible European governments, including the current floundering British one. Read

Clock is ticking at Time Warner

UNDER pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, Dick Parsons, Time Warner chief executive, relented last week and raised the number of shares in a buyback plan aimed at helping the media conglomerate's share price. But Parsons couldn't resist taking a swipe at Icahn in the process. Read

Vivendi's online game heroes

WOW is a crass word that might be used to describe the 200% jump in Vivendi Universal shares since the summer of 2002. It's also the acronym for World of War craft, the company's hit online subscriber role-playing video game. Read

The small screen just became a lot smaller

PUBLIC relations executive Heikki Lehmusto was driving along the Finnish motorway in his BMW 525 last May, heading to his summer house on one of the year's first warm, sunny days. Suddenly he decided to pull over to watch the noon news on television. Helsinki publisher SanomaWSOY was announcing stellar financial results, and Lehmusto wanted the full, visual story. Read

A watershed in British politics

Political history is punctuated with watersheds: the established order starts to decay and upstarts begin the march to power. We are not always aware of what is happening at the time. Sometimes we only come to appreciate the significance of developments with the benefit of hindsight and historical perspective. In the late autumn of 2005, British politics has reached such a watershed: we are starting to see the beginning of the end of the current Labour hegemony and the first stirrings of a Tory recovery. That does not mean Conservative Central Office should immediately lay down the champagne in anticipation of a victory celebration come the next general election night. The odds are still stacked against an outright Tory victory. But the political settlement that has dominated Great Britain still stacked against an outright Tory victory. But the political settlement that has dominated Great Britain for almost a decade "Labour dominant and domineering, Tories irrelevant and/or useless" is coming to an end. We are moving into uncharted territory and British political life is about to become deliciously unpredictable once again. Read

Why Black Monday could never hurt so much again

ON Monday 19 October 1987, stock markets across the globe crashed as Wall Street suffered panic selling after unexpectedly bad trade figures. In London the value of quoted shares fell by £50bn. The anniversary of Black Monday this year saw the London Stock Exchanges worst one-day performance of 2005, amid concerns of upward US interest rates, inflation and selling resource stocks. Read

The new Two Nations of Britain

N "Sybil", Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century Tory Prime Minister of Great Britain, famously described the British as "two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets: the rich and the poor." Today, the country remains starkly divided into two nations, though the causes and nature of this divide are radically different from Disraeli's time: there is the Britain of the South and East, which includes London and its Home Counties' hinterland as well as the East of England - a wealthy market economy which is individualist, cosmopolitan, internationalist and incredibly open and diverse - which we shall call Wealth-Creating Britain; then there is the rest of the country - a big-government collectivist society rather than a market economy, which has pockets of wealth generation (Edinburgh and its environs) but is overwhelmingly reliant on state spending and jobs, paid for from the taxes of Wealth-Creating Britain, to maintain its upkeep - which we shall call Dependency Britain. Let us look a little closer at both. Read

US economy weathers the storm

BY almost every account, Major General Ricardo Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer, the newly arrived administrator of the US government presence, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) did not get along. Sanchez was a relatively junior commander and a recent arrival in Iraq, who was put in charge. Then on 23 May, the US made what is generally regarded as a colossal mistake: Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and civil service on US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's orders. Read

Murdoch and his new lean mean internet machine

WE can’t say for certain which of his many tribulations was on Rupert Murdoch’s mind when he convened his lieutenants for a September offsite in Carmel, California. It may have been the son who got away – Lachlan, who had abruptly quit his post as News Corp’s deputy chief operating officer and moved to Australia, leaving a family feud, which saw Murdoch’s second wife fiercely guarding her children’s voting shares in the company while Rupert and his third wife tried to pry loose a stake for their young kids. Read