Good late morning, afternoon from Washington DC.  Before I make my way out to the airport to fly back home to London, I thought I would catch up on some of the weekend's news.Speaking of travel, over the years our correspondent in Russia, Grigory Pasko, has done an inordinate amount of reporting on this blog about the unfortunate conditions of the roads in so many parts of the regions.  Though perhaps peculiar to an outsider, anyone who has traveled to Russia and bothered to get outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, would understand our fixation on this routine minutae of transportation infrastructure. By comparison, I recall driving along ...

First Bank Nigerian shareholders will vote in August at their annual general meeting in Abuja on whether or not to raise a N500 billion ($3.4 billion) bond in support of domestic infrastructure financing under the country’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) program designed to fund and discharge governmental responsibilities while enabling the private sector take control and manage assets which it otherwise would be excluded from. If passed, the debt would be the country’s first corporate bond in three years, an absence that Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi attributed to the “high cost of issuing debt,” as well as “tax concerns.”

According to Remi Babalola, Minister of State for Finance, PPPs are vital for African countries to maximize the effectiveness of their “dwindling resources”. While presenting a paper in which he stated that the government was determined to rapidly grow

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On June 29, Sangamo BioSciences Inc. (SGMO) said it will receive a milestone payment from Genentech Inc., now wholly owned by Swiss drugmaker Roche, for a key research milestone achieved under the Research and License Agreement. However, the amount of the milestone payment was not disclosed.

As a reminder, Sangamo and Genentech entered into a Research and License Agreement in late April 2007 and expanded the agreement in February 2008. Under the deal, Sangamo will provide Genentech access to its proprietary zinc finger DNA-binding protein (ZFP) technology and will design and engineer ZFP nucleus (ZFN(TM)) for Genentech to evaluate and potentially use for generation of cell lines with novel characteristics for protein pharmaceutical production purposes.

We feel that the ZFP technology provides a platform for diverse drug research and development at the DNA level. ZFP technology is unique and differentiated from other technologies. ZFP can target any

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