The strike at Impala Platinum’s Rustenburg mine has continued for more than a month. Two people are dead. Many more are injured. At least 32 shops have been looted. Implats has lost 80,000 ounces of platinum worth more than R1.2-billion. On Wednesday, after Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi asked employees to return to work, a boardroom was set alight. Why has it come this far and who is responsible? By GREG NICOLSON.

It’s on. China Minmetals Group, the Hong Kong listed Chinese state-backed mining company, has been trying for years to buy themselves an African mining company. Last week, they just did that. Anvil Mining is the first shining jewel in the Chinese parastatal’s mining crown. It won’t be the last. By RICHARD POPLAK.

The idea for many a start-up has often been born out of the need to resolve an everyday problem. Two entrepreneurs needed a flexible and user-friendly billing system for their business and simply couldn’t find one. So they built one instead. Online billing platform, Snapbill, is one of those ideas where frustration evolved into inspiration. By STYLI CHARALAMBOUS.

Drawing the ire of South Africa’s financial giants is nothing new for Christo Davel. He did it with 20twenty and is doing it again with 22seven. His new venture, however, requires their cooperation. Can he get it and will 22seven be more stable than its predecessor? By GREG NICOLSON.

The 2012 edition of the Cape Town Mining Indaba is winding down. With 7,200 delegates, the majority sporting Australian accents, we learnt that no matter the political situation on the ground, the entire industry wants you to come and dig. Just bring a shovel. And a cheque book. By RICHARD POPLAK.

It’s been two weeks since former Competition Tribunal chairman David Lewis put his shoulder to the boulder by becoming executive director of the Cosatu-inspired Corruption Watch. As part of an ongoing series on corruption, MANDY DE WAAL spoke to Lewis about the massive task of stemming SA’s graft tsunami.

Ever since the nationalisation ramblings of soon-to-be former youth league leader and professional loudmouth, Julius Malema, mining CEOs have kept their bottles of Valium close at hand. Since then the ANC has commissioned a study into state intervention in mining, the outcome of which appears to make nationalisation an attractive alternative. By STYLI CHARALAMBOUS.

As surfers wax their boards and parliamentarians hum and hah about returning to work, Cape Town, queen of African cities, welcomes 7,200 delegates to  the Mining Indaba. It’s quite a show. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Mick Davis, CEO of Xstrata, was an accounting lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand when Ivan Glasenberg, CEO of Glencore, was a student. Back then, nobody would have guessed that these two would one day team up to create an entity that could move global markets. Problem is, the real student-teacher relationship was between Glaseneberg and the fugitive trader Marc Rich. By KEVIN BLOOM.

When Facebook filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, confirming its IPO intentions, financial data about the company was made public for the first time. STYLI CHARALAMBOUS waded through 200-plus pages of numbers and legalese to make sense of it all.

Retail giant Woolworths was dealt an embarrassing blow on Wednesday, which resulted in a product being discontinued when it was ruled that they had imitated Frankie's Olde Soft Drink Company. By GREG NICOLSON.

It’s official, Facebook has finally filed for a public stock offering. But does the company’s revenue-generating model justify its expected valuation of $100 billion? Will anybody aside from the investment bankers and industry insiders benefit from the listing? KEVIN BLOOM considers the question.

If this isn’t a sign of how far the USA has fallen, I don’t know what is. Twenty years ago it would have been American workers targeted by rebel groups. But the times they are a-changing, and two kidnappings in the last week suggest China’s increasingly dominant role in the world – and especially Africa – is being recognised. And not in a good way. By SIMON ALLISON.

When Vodacom’s business partnership in the Congo fell apart at the seams, and the company’s directors in the DRC were about to land in jail, the mobile giant’s chairman phoned Moto Mabanga, a fixer with firm ANC connections. Mabanga fixed the problem all right, but he and Vodacom had a difference of opinion on a little matter of a multi-million dollar success fee. No problem for Mabanga; he’s managed to get a Kinshasa commercial court to make a $21-million award against Vodacom. Now if only Vodacom would recognise the DRC’s jurisdiction. By MANDY DE WAAL.

Many NGOs are on the brink of financial collapse and they’ve laid the blame squarely at the feet of the department of social development and the new Lottery Board. Now they’re turning to the media and public at large, hoping somebody will finally pay attention. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Americans will soon begin to groan under the weight and information overload of politically-charged advertising, broadcast media commercials, Internet-based messages and targeted, automated phone calling in favour of candidates and policies. The superPACs are taking the presidential campaign trail by storm. By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

The truth about reality television is that there’s nothing real about it, writes MANDY DE WAAL.

The team who a decade ago transformed South African online banking with 20Twenty are back, this time with an online financial services tool that’s “guaranteed” to save you money. By GREG NICOLSON.

Yada yada yada yada yada. Talks about talks about talks about talks. So far, the World Economic Forum in Davos, which kicked off on 25 January, seems to be more of the same. Except this time, there really doesn’t seem to be much of a “forum” to speak of—mainly because the “world” part isn’t being bought by the 99%. By KEVIN BLOOM.

With just a month to go to the budget speech, we really don’t envy the Treasury budget team – but it’s not just the number crunchers who have been fretting the prospects for 2012. Economy voyeurs, that curious species who thrill at the subtle curvature in a line graph, have also been in heated debate about exactly what this year portends for South Africa. By SIPHO HLONGWANE and KHADIJA PATEL.

For those who believe there is no solution to the regular carnage on South African roads – a thousand or so killed this past holiday season, by way of example – think again. Google’s driverless car is here to save us. It has a couple of twists and turns to manoeuvre before we’re out of the driver’s seat, though. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, was until his arrest last week the kingpin of one of the largest piracy networks the Internet has yet seen. But the misdirected “libertarian” hacker group Anonymous supported him anyway. What does this have to do with the two pieces of anti-piracy legislation that have just been shelved by the United States Congress? And how can artists, writers and musicians make a living in the face of a populist call for online anarchy? By KEVIN BLOOM.

Ever since the death of feudalism, the captains of capitalism have churned the wheels of spin to have us believe that free markets are free, globalisation is good, capitalism is fair and other fairy tales. Cambridge development economist Ha-Joon Chang says it’s high time we stopped drinking the pro-capitalist Kool-Aid. By MANDY DE WAAL.

How many companies can claim that Paul Simon once wrote a song about it, without being paid—or even asked—to do so? Not many. But on Thursday 19 January, as Kodak files for chapter 11 bankruptcy in Manhattan, the last line of the chorus from that tune is something the directors (and perhaps the founder, from his grave) are going to be forced to weep over… “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away…” By KEVIN BLOOM.

The man who brought mobile telephony to South Africa through Vodacom is Cell C’s new Chief Executive. Analysts predict that the move will be great for consumers while Knott-Craig said the first thing he would fix was Cell C’s platform so that the mobile operator could “deliver on its promises.” By MANDY DE WAAL.

Boekehuis, a well-loved bookstore in Johannesburg, is set to shut its doors this month after Media24 Books, a subsidiary of Naspers, decided the store’s failure to turn a profit could not be sustained any longer.  KHADIJA PATEL spoke to manager, Corina van der Spoel, about the store’s legacy.

Almost a year since President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation unemployment address, we have a new job-creation proposal. Incentives for special economic zones (SEZs) will be expanded and areas of advantage prioritised. By GREG NICOLSON.

A group of US lawmakers have asked the state department to investigate whether Chinese technology firm Huawei Technologies Co. has violated US sanctions on Iran by supplying Tehran with sensitive communications technology used for censorship. Iran is of course the bogeyman en vogue and Huawei is a soft target undermining the reliance of Western technology for government-level filtering in repressive nations. By KHADIJA PATEL.

The government of South Sudan has put pen to paper on the first oil contracts to be signed since independence, giving four companies access to the new country’s lucrative oil fields. That these companies all have a distinctly Asian flavour might show that the west doesn’t have as much influence in South Sudan as they’d like to think. By SIMON ALLISON.

Eskom’s warning of possible renewed rolling blackouts is enough to chill the heart of any South African. It’s a grim prospect – we remember the (ironically) hellish time of “load shedding”, with billions of rands lost. As dark predictions of shedding resurface, we wonder if the lessons of 2008 were completely lost? By SIPHO HLONGWANE.