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“Worth a read?” is not your ordinary book review; it is a meta-review. In other words, it provides 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 “Three-Letter Plague”, written by Jonny Steinberg and released in South Africa in February 2010. The book unpacks the complexities surrounding South African attitudes toward HIV/Aids and related issues

Over the last few months there has been a public debate, be it a low key one compared to some others, developing around the need to reconsider the way in which affirmative action or employment equity is being implemented in the country. Considerable new momentum is likely to be injected into this debate by a landmark decision last week in the Labour Court that the refusal of an appointment to one of its members by the South African Police Service (SAPS) was both unfair and also not a rational method of implementing the government’s Employment Equity Plan.

The marriage between the partners in the governing ANC-alliance seems to be heading for the rocks with an ugly divorce becoming increasingly more likely. While the fight over the assets created by and for the partners over a more than 15-year union steeped in a system of patronage can be expected to turn it into a drawn-out and messy affair, results of local government by-elections last week seem to suggest that the “children have noticed.” Dangerous times seem to lie ahead for the South African family.

Google has finally launched its social networking utility called (yes, you guessed it) Google Buzz.  And get this, it’s already bigger than Twitter. If you have a Gmail account you automatically get a Buzz account and the integration is seamless. So the launch base in the US alone is over 38million users, not to mention the other tens of millions of non-US users, like us South Africans.  This is where the flood of questions started; what is it?  Will it kill Facebook and Twitter?

For consumers and especially home-owners who are worried about the security of electricity supply in the short to medium term there are options available to ensure that they do not end-up in total darkness if or when Eskom supply should fail. Bar saving on consumption there don’t seem to be any really viable options in terms of alternative sources of electricity. At the same time the latest increase has been especially bad news for sectors like commercial agriculture.

Maybe the planned publication of an improved National Integrated Resource Plan for South Africa (IRP2) by June this year will bring more clarity, but for now the announcement last week of a 24.8% increase in April of Eskom’s electricity tariffs, followed by increases of 25.8% and 25.9% for the following two years has , if anything, left the picture surrounding the country’s  power security murkier than ever. Individual consumers and business sectors have little room to effectively cushion themselves (for related article click here) and in the meantime Eskom’s financing plans for more coal-powered electricity  have become the focus of opposition by environmental groups internationally.

As the world faces a serious threat to its economic way of life in the aftermath of the 2007/08 financial crisis, the term “too big to fail” often is used in reference to the huge financial institutions who brought the globe to the brink of collapse of its financial system. Are we now facing a question of “too big to control” as the world's largest internet search engine, Google, increasingly  comes under pressure from authorities around the world over content control.

With their flashing high flying lifestyles, that have been so prominently in the spotlight off late, the African National Congress (ANC) alliance’s governing elite and its phalanx of bureaucraticly deployed cadres might be creating an explosive powder keg. That is one of the underlying implications of the findings of a just release international report on poverty and income inequality in South Africa indicating that while the country, a decade an a half after the advent of democracy,  remains one of the most unequal societies in the world.

With the national spotlight firmly focused on job creation there has been unprecedented interest this year in the upcoming Skills and Training Summit and its Achiever Awards ceremony - a leader in the field in South Africa.

While economists say the lack of skills is the greatest challenge to economic growth, delegates from all over the country will converge on the CSIR Convention Centre in Pretoria on 9-10 March to listen to expert speakers, to share experiences and seek solutions.

Hundreds of young executives, selected by their organisations  as future CEOs, will meet at the Sandton International Convention Centre on 18 March to attend the Tomorrow's Leaders Convention 2010, the third of these annual events  hosted by Leadership magazine which have become a highlight on the corporate calendar.