The situation for obtaining gasoline, diesel oil and other oil products in Costa Rica is not ideal just at present. Following an accident in 2011 it was decided that the country’s refinery at Moin, part of the Caribbean, or east coast, port of Limón, was too expensive to run, and since then the country has relied entirely on imported petroleum products.

It is hard to believe that it is only just 20 years since the Bharti group listed its telecommunications business on the Bombay Stock Exchange, soon after that bringing its cellphone operations together under the Airtel brand. At the time, just ten years from the founding of the business by Sunil Bharti Mittal, it had yet to extend its coverage to the whole of India, let alone the whole sub-continent, though by 2009 it had launched into international operations by launching a network in Sri Lanka.

Phalaborwa in Limpopo Province holds reserves of some 2.5 billion tonnes of phosphate-bearing ore, or five percent of proven world phosphate rock reserves. The Phalaborwa complex, within which Foskor’s operation is situated, is a geological intrusion caused by sub-volcanic activity approximately 2,000 million years ago. The complex is unique as it is host to many valuable minerals, the most relevant of which are phosphate, copper, zirconium, iron and vermiculite.

Topsy, one of only a handful of firms that has access to Twitter’s entire data stream, specialises in using data from the social media site to track customer sentiment. It has recently created a searchable database of all tweets sent - more than 400 billion - since Twitter's launch.

Apple did not say how much it paid for the firm, but it has been suggested the figure comes in at around $200 million.

On 26 December, 2012, Shinz┼ì Abe took office to become Prime Minister of Japan for the second time, and in doing so once again became head of government of the third largest world economy by GDP. In the year since his return to power, Prime Minister Abe has perhaps been most synonymous across the plant with the term ‘Abenomics’.

By beating off rival bids from Brazil, Turkey and Russia, Dubai will become the first Middle Eastern city to hold the expo, which attracts hundreds of countries every five years to show off the latest achievements in architecture and technology.

In what was seen as the last hurdle the two firms needed to clear for the merger to proceed, a US federal bankruptcy judge ruled in favour of the plan to bring the companies together. American Airways says it now expects the deal to be completed by 9 December.

Kevin James acquired CBH in 2003 when it was a small and struggling operation processing just 250,000 chickens a week at its Bloemfontein location. However, having just shaken the dust of Zimbabwe, where he had built up a thriving poultry business, he hit an auspicious moment for the South African market, with feed prices declining and chicken prices firm. A year later he and his partners were able to buy and restart an operation in Mafikeng turning out 400,000 birds a week.

The value of the virtual currency has been rapidly rising since a US Senate committee hearing earlier in November which described it as a “legitimate financial service”.