Vladimir Putin has been ranked number 3 in the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world, President Medvedev comes in 43rd, after Deputy Prime Minister, siloviki chieftain and Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin at number 42. (See the editor's choice for Russia's top seven.) Forbes has got a special feature on the politician the Russian press apparently call 'the scariest person on earth'. There is little solid information about the man. Like many of Putin's cronies, Sechin is a St. Petersburg native. In the 1990s he worked in city government. Before that, it's widely believed he was a spy; Moscow sources confirm that he was a member of the GRU, the KGB's foreign-intelligence arm. ...

Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (APC) today drilled another appraisal well - Mahogany-4 well - in the West Cape Three Points Block offshore Ghana, in the eastern part of Jubilee field. The well witnessed more than 140 net feet of predominately oil pay in high-quality, stacked reservoir sands.  The Mahogany-4 appraisal well is a part of the company’s delineation program that extends the potentially productive area of the Jubilee field beyond the existing unit boundaries. The well intersected the main Jubilee reservoir and also encountered new deeper oil sands that the partnership plans to evaluate through future exploration and drilling activity.  The well was drilled to a total depth of about 12,000 feet in approximately 3,540 feet of water by the “Atwood Hunter" semi-submersible drilling rig. Following the completion of the Mahogany-4 well, the rig will drill a development well in the Jubilee field. Following that it will ...

Did you know that Igor Sechin allegedly worked with the famous arms dealer Viktor Bout back in Mozambique in the 1980s?  Neither did I, but you probably already know we have been watching all these orders coming for more Russian tanks from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez while at the same time more and more FARC links to Caracas are surfacing.  It's just so strange to think that the key individual who somehow allegedly ties together Russian weapons to the Venezuelans and then onward to FARC is in a Thai jail, where, apparently, the authorities are under the impression that FARC is not even a terrorist organization but rather a political party.  According to this editorial in the Washington Post, the ...

How many entrepreneurs have sat down and thought to themselves, “If only the Chinese would buy my product…Heck, if only one in 10 Chinese would buy my product, I’d be rich!”  Call it the China Dream. It has a long history.

James McGregor wrote a book in 2005 on doing business in China called One Billion Customers. If the title sounds familiar, it may be because a man named Carl Crow wrote a book called 400 Million Customers, back in 1937. You see, the dream only gets bigger over time!

For the most the part, this dream remains a mere dream. But sometimes, someone, somewhere, figures it out. Carl Crow was someone who figured it out, and it made him a rich man.

Carl Crow led an adventurous life. Born in Highland, Missouri, in 1884, Crow started out as a newspaperman. Eyeing his fortune, he started China Press in Shanghai in 1911. But

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Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production Commodities / Food Crisis Feb 09, 2009 - 07:11 AM By: Eric_deCarbonnel

After reading about the droughts in two major agricultural countries, China and Argentina, I decided to research the extent other food producing nations were also experiencing droughts. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. 2009 looks to be a humanitarian disaster around much of the world

To understand the depth of the food Catastrophe that faces the world this year, consider the graphic below depicting countries by USD value of their agricultural output, as of 2006.

Now, consider the same graphic with the countries experiencing droughts highlighted.

China

The drought in Northern China, the worst in 50 years, is worsening, and summer harvest is now threatened. The area of affected crops has expanded to 161 million mu (was 141 million last week),

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Kenmare Resources plc is quoted on the official lists of the Irish and London Stock Exchanges (London:KMR). Its principal activities center on the exploration for commercial deposits of natural resources and the development and operation of mines. For example, the firm’s main asset is the Moma Titanium Minerals Mine, located on the coast of Mozambique. The Moma Mine contains reserves of heavy minerals which include the titanium minerals ilmenite and rutile, as well as the high-value zircon mineral. In addition, Kenmare have acquired a Mozanbiquan uranium exploration license. Titanium is considered a valuable resource for industrial producers because it is added to paints and pigments to make the color more opaque. Currently, the titanium market is dominated by a small number of giant mining companies, such as Rio ...