When the bustle went out of fashion, the average woman must have felt joyously liberated, permitted as she was to stand and sit without a huge lump of horsehair wedged above her bottom. And when corsets were released, so that underwear no longer meant asphyxiation, she would doubtless have embraced the liberty bodice as a symbol of emancipation.
When Stephen Lussier, head of marketing at De Beers, visited China in 1989 to see if this could be the new market for diamond jewellery, he found it a depressing experience. ”There were no shops selling diamond jewellery. When I talked to people they had some vague knowledge of American film stars wearing diamonds. I left thinking it was going to be a long haul,” he says.
In less than five years, what started out as a small side project with a budget of a few thousand dollars has grown into one of the web’s greatest success stories. Wikipedia, the open, editable encyclopedia, and its sister projects have gone from absolutely nothing to 22-million entries in less than half a decade.
The Mail & Guardian stopped just short of buying two tame cheetahs for a ”canned” hunt this week. The deal came to an end when we refused to fork out about R100 000 and failed to produce a letter from a European embassy approving the export of the cheetahs’ heads.
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Embattled South African Rugby Union (SARU) president Brian van Rooyen will face new questions at a president’s council meeting on Friday over his leadership style, following the resignation of Saru deputy president André Markgraaff. Markgraaff quit in an apparent power struggle over who holds the strings of Springbok coach Jake White.
The nationwide strike at South African gold mines is over, the Chamber of Mines said on Thursday. A spokesperson said the National Union of Mineworkers and Solidarity trade union have accepted an offer of a pay increase of between 6% and 7%. The agreement covers two years and the minimum increase for the second year must be 5,5%.
Israel’s military on Thursday banned visitors from Gaza Strip settlements to try to stop the influx of pull-out protesters who plan to reinforce settler resistance to their evacuation. Police estimate that 2 000 opponents have sneaked into Gaza to back the 8 500 settlers, but settler leaders put the number at 5 000.
The body that was exhumed earlier this week in Umlazi, south of Durban, is not that of missing police Constable Frances Rasuge, KwaZulu-Natal police said on Thursday. ”Our pathologist says it is the body of a 60-year-old woman,” police spokesperson Director Bala Naidoo said.
Hollywood star Forest Whitaker, who is playing Idi Amin in the screen version of the acclaimed novel The Last King of Scotland, says the late Ugandan dictator was no saint, but was not the monster that has been portrayed in the West. He says his research for the role in the film has changed his perception of Amin.