Brian Nixon has spent most of his career working for major engineering contractors. Around 25 years of his career to be exact, roughly half of those years spent in the upstream, offshore sector, with the rest in the downstream, onshore market.

Everyone agrees that diamonds are special. De Beers is unlike other mineral extraction businesses in that, while it is involved in the familiar geological and feasibility work followed by mining and beneficiation, it follows that up with the production and marketing of a luxury end product. It deals in both rough diamonds and finished gemstones, but while diamond may be chemically simple, De Beers recognises 12,000 different categories of rough diamond alone – and that is before they are polished, cut, and set.

Montrealers have become accustomed to seeing the large building site in the heart of the city that will house the new hospital complex that is being built there. The new CHUM is bounded by Boulevard René-Lévesque, Rue Saint-Denis, Rue Sanguinet and Rue Saint-Antoine towering 20 storeys above ground. The City of Montreal will finally have one of the most advanced teaching hospitals and medical research facilities in the world.

The news comes after shareholders in Spirit Nextel, the third biggest wireless operator in the US, backed the company’s revised bid for a 78 percent stake in the business.

In taking control of this stake SoftBank will pay $21.6 billion, a figure that makes it the largest overseas acquisition by a Japanese firm in history.

"The transaction with SoftBank should enhance Sprint's long-term value and competitive position by creating a company with greater financial flexibility," Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint said in a statement.

No matter what corner of the planet you inhabit we all share the same amazement and wonder of the stars and planets above us. It is this wonder that has driven scientists and astronomers to try to gain an increasingly detailed understanding of the universe. In order to do so these experts strive to collect as much data and information as possible and one of the major ways of doing this is through the observations of the electromagnetic spectrum radiated by celestial sources.

No matter how efficient your organization, there will always be unplanned events that without co-operation across the supply chain, will negatively impact your business. The tsunami in Japan last year was an extreme example. Some organizations only became aware of their third or fourth tier suppliers and the impact they have on the business, because they were in the tsunami-affected area.

Let me set up a common (and alarming) scenario I’m seeing at more than a few enterprises: while IT is slow to move mission-critical applications to the cloud due to fears of security vulnerabilities, outages, or costs, business units within the same company are already procuring cloud applications without even involving IT - even for critical and sensitive applications. In fact, through a recent survey conducted by my company, SailPoint, we found the selection and deployment of cloud applications is increasingly becoming a business-led process.

The company will pay $1.52 billion for US firm Marathon Oil Corporation’s ten percent stake in the deepwater block. It comes after Sinopec purchased a five percent stake in the field from Total in 2011.

Sinopec, Asia's biggest oil refiner, said that the Angolan block has proven and probable reserves of 533 million barrels of oil. The deal is still subject to approval by Chinese and Angolan governments.