Word: hugeness
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...debate also revolves around using information technology to figure out which treatments are most effective. This seems eminently sensible: might certain heart patients, for example, do just as well with clot-busting drugs as with more expensive angioplasty procedures? The drug route could save about $7000 a patient Crunching huge amounts of data from a wide cross section of patients could help us do better research than we are doing now. But what will happen when the new computerized research turns up a treatment that works a little better but costs much more? Will they tell us? What happens...
...just minerals Beijing is now frantic to buy. On March 3, China National Petroleum Corp. agreed to buy Calgary based Verenex Energy, which has a 50% stake in a huge Libyan oilfield, for $390 million. The China Development Bank and China Petroleum & Oil Corp. last month invested $10 billion in Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil company and the prime operator in one of the most promising new offshore fields in the world. The deal gives Petrobras capital to further develop the fields. In return, China will get 100,000 to 160,000 barrels of oil a day over...
...strategically significant agreement of all: Beijing agreed to lend $15 billion to cash-strapped Rosneft, Russia's oil major, and another $10 billion to Transneft, Russia's biggest pipeline company. The loans will be paid off not in cash, but in crude - 300,000 barrels a day from the huge east Siberian oil field. That's about 4% of China's current total demand for crude, secured on very favorable terms. Over the 20-year life of the deal, Beijing will effectively be paying about $20 per barrel. Crude prices, which last summer peaked at more than $140 per barrel...
...deals are not without controversy, particularly in Australia, where some are worried that control of vital resources is being handed over to the Chinese. Chinalco is a huge consumer of iron ore, and mining companies fear that the investment in Rio Tinto could give China more influence over the price of iron in global commodities markets. Every year, steel and aluminum producers worldwide dicker with the big raw-material producers over new contracts. During the boom years, when Chinese companies' appetite for virtually every metal was voracious, they got stuck with stiff price increases. But the deal could give Chinalco...
Brazil still faces huge challenges; its education system is dysfunctional, its political system squalid, corruption endemic. But consider: 53% of Brazil's 190 million people now occupy the middle class, up from 42% in 2002. This increased social mobility happened at the same time the country's main stock index soared some 480% before last fall's downturn. Lula seems to have cracked Latin America's chronic conundrum: how to expand underachieving economies while reducing epic inequality. In so doing, he's created a model that's "an insurance ticket, not a lottery ticket," says Marcelo Neri, head...