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Thursday, January 8, 2009.

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Shannon O'Donnell.

Making headlines today:

The global airline industry racked up losses of almost $4-billion in the first three quarters of 2008. Share prices for airlines also suffered further falls in December.

The International Air Transport Association further reported that with additional hedging losses, and recession due to seasonal weakness expected in the fourth quarter, the associations prior forecast of industry losses at $5-billion for the full year, remained.

The organisation recently forecast that industry losses for 2009 would be half of that expected for 2008. The global industry was expected to suffer losses of $2,5-billion this year.

On Wednesday, State-owned power utility Eskom said that it was doing as much maintenance as possible before demand started to pick up again from next week.

Spokesperson Fani Zulu said Eskom carried out its highest level of maintenance in its planned summer maintenance season during December. The power utility's capacity under maintenance peaked at almost 9 000 MW during that month.

Zulu said that Eskom didn't anticipate the high levels of planned maintenance to continue past the second or third week of January. He said Eskom would continue with its maintenance activities until May, although at a slightly reduced rate compared to December.

Also making headlines:

Technology group Altech withdraws its intervention in the MTN-Verizon merger.
A worker at oil company PetroSA is killed at the Mossel Bay refinery.
Tanzania says its inflation fall is slower than expected.
And, the US trade chief urges a review of the Doha talks.

That's a round up of news making headlines today. For more on these and other stories please visit engineeringnews.co.za.

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