A study to calculate the economic risk US industries face from climate change is being funded by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, billionaire Tom Steyer and George W. Bush-era Treasury secretary Henry Paulson.

Widely divergent lifecycles for electronics products are creating increasing demand for obsolete and end-of-life components, which sometimes end up being sourced from the gray market. Let's look in detail why that is happening and how product lifecycles are creating a gap in the electronic components supply chain that is in danger of being filled by counterfeit components.

A note of caution was sounded recently after some intensive discussions between the EU Commission and various bodies who are stakeholders with regard to air cargo security.

In many ways, the fateful episode of the Costa Concordia provides a metaphor for the international shipping industry as a whole. Its image is hardly the best. Huge tankers plying the sea, belching noxious gases into the air from low-grade crude and pumping out invasive species when emptying their ballast-water tanks on shore. Oh, and a catastrophic oil spill every now and then. But that's not the whole story.