- Written by Dr Peter Edwards, Deputy Editor, Global Gypsum Magazine
2011 is still young, but already it has lived through enough big news stories to last a decade. Since the start of January there have been revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and other events of varying severity in other Arab states across the Middle East and North Africa have dominated the news. Then came the escalation of the situation in Libya, with updates every hour and the 6.3 magniude Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand. The earthquake took 182 lives, rendered vast areas of the city uninhabitable and turned life in this resilliant country, where earthquakes are a fact of life, upside down.
- Written by Dr Robert McCaffrey, Editor, Global Cement Magazine
At one recent event I attended, an unusual topic that came up (almost inevitably 'at the bar') was 'What would you do if you won £1m on the lottery?' For international readers, that's probably Euro1.2m or US$1.5m.
Well, nowadays, you can't do an awful lot with it: in fact, they have worked out that with the ravages of inflation, you need to have about UK£3m in the bank to be able to live the life of a millionaire (or at least a millionaire in the 1970s, the last time that a million pounds was really a lot of money). So, to give myself a little bit of leeway, I'd like to consider what I'd do with UK£10m. (The latest 'Rich List' for the UK requires that you have at least UK£70m to be in the top 1000 richest people in Britain, so £10m isn't that much).
