Electricity supply in South Africa is again under increasing stress and the outlook with winter approaching looks gloomy. With the prospects for this year already negative, recent events have knocked a large chunk of supply out of the system just before the annual peak demand of winter sets in, with very little spare capacity to deal with it.

Last week, the world’s attention was suddenly torn from Libya to the developing nuclear crisis in Japan. But the events in Libya and Japan have one thing in common. Each case serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of nuclear power and the short-sighted, irrational risk analyses of those pursuing the technology, write Dan Plesch and Harald Heubaum.

Consumerisation, cloud computing, tablet computing and mobile collaboration are among the major trends that will drive the market for enterprise mobility solutions over the next year in what is just the beginning of the mobile revolution in business, says an expert in the field.

“The appearance of millions of scams just hours after Japan's earthquake is obvious foreshadowing of the resource struggles (wars?) yet to come — for metals, oil, gas, money, corn, and much more — and an indication that the rules are quickly changing,” writes Nick Hodge in very sobering edition of his Energy & Capital news letter.

In an increasingly dangerous world, channelling significant amounts of humanitarian assistance toward disaster preparedness would pay really big dividends, Norway’s minister of the environment and international development, Eric Solheim wrote in an opinion piece recently published in the Bangkok Post.

South African businesses should re-examine the way their contracts are drawn up in order to avoid costly liability suits as a result of contravening the Consumer Protection Act (CPA) which comes into effect on 1 April 2011.

The South African cabinet last week approved an adjusted integrated resource plan (IRP2), containing a substantial nuclear energy component at a time when one commentator observed that what is happening at the Fukushima power station in Japan has brought the world to “the end of the nuclear era.”

All those who believe in constitutional democracy and the rule of law should rejoice in the decision by a 5 to 4 majority of the Constitutional Court that the 2008 act that abolished the Directorate of Special Operations (the Scorpions) was invalid, according to a statement last week by the FW de Klerk Foundation.

This is a bookmaker’s worst nightmare … betting on winners and losers in the quarter-finals of the Cricket World Cup starting this week Wednesday in Mirpur and finishing on Saturday in Colombo. Inconsistency of form by most contenders should cause bookies sleepless nights.

With the co-operation of the The LR Management Group, we can now bring you the leadership training tool 50 Lessons, which is a powerful force in the world of corporate learning. 50 Lessons is the worlds premier multimedia business resource, offering more than 1 000 personal and authentic video lessons from internationally respected business leaders. It can assist you to increase the utilisation and return on investment of your learning programmes immediately!

Doing the unthinkable and axing The Axe, the youth policy of the Bafana Bafana coach, Pitso Mosimane, the dubious match fitness of the Egyptians because of the political turmoil in their country, and the visitors’ obsession with retribution are all topics that will dominate Saturday’s Africa Cup of Nations qualifier between Bafana Bafana and Egypt.

Last week’s presidential summit on job creation did not deliver as much as could have been expected. Everybody agreed on the need to create millions of new jobs. Nobody could quite say how this was to be done. Instead fundamental differences remain between government and business pertaining to mining rights, certainty of land tenure and, especially, labour legislation.

Read the following sentence and then try to think where the word “stump” or the expression “stumped for words,” comes from before you read more: A politician on the stump, while speaking from his stump, was stumped by a question that was not quite cricket. Now think, and ….

Worth a read? is not your ordinary book review; it is a meta-review. It provides an overview of the opinions contained in a variety of book reviews published in the media at large. This week we take a look at Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York,  written by South African Jonny Steinberg and published in February 2011.