The excitement about the eminent Fifa Soccer World Cup in less than four months in South Africa, combined with the increased Internet bandwidth available in the country (courtesy of the recent launch of the undersea Seacom cable at the end of last year), has left the country’s 10 million Internet users markedly more vulnerable to attacks from cybercriminals.

The government will be establishing an independent system operator (ISO) for the provision of electricity in South Africa, President Jacob Zuma promised in his State of the Nation Address to parliament on 11 February – only days after a reputable business risk consultancy warned that energy, or the lack thereof, has emerged as one of the top three risk factor for potential investors into South Africa.

In the clear light of early 2010, we know that the United States and the United Kingdom have emerged from recession, realising along the way that there was not, in fact, a global credit crunch, only a Western credit crunch. Much of the East was just fine, thank you very much. South Africa also has emerged tentatively from recession, but is there an aftershock on its way?

“Worth a read?” is not your ordinary book review; it is a meta-review – providing an overview of the opinions contained in a variety of book reviews published in the media at large.

This week’s meta-review is on the book “To the End of the Earth”, written by Tom Avery and released in South Africa in May 2009.  In 1909, after 37 days on the ice, American explorer Robert Peary became the first person to reach the geographic North Pole. Or did he?

The seven-minute power cut on Friday night at Vodacom Park in Bloemfontein during the Super 14 rugby encounter between the Cheetahs and the Blue Bulls was a serious PR blunder. The Super 14 tournament has an international audience, and the blackout forced the 2010 Fifa Soccer World Cup Local Organising Committee to issue a statement to allay fears of power outages at South African stadia in June and July this year.

One of the clearer but somehow least noticed messages from this year’s budget, introduced this week in Parliament by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, is that fiscal measures increasingly will be used to dampen South Africans' thirst for oil-based fuel – and in the process, change their commuting patterns.

The South African taxpayer is still bruised and not yet recovered from the recession, and Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan wisely realised that it would not be in the interest of the economy to squeeze an extra few billion out of empty pockets that in the end are providing jobs for those who are clinging to it for dear life, writes Hein Kruger, financial markets analyst and managing director of Kruger International Wealth Management, as well as author of "Budgeting".

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