For the cool price of $83 million, well-known New York diamond cutter Isaac Wolf purchased the diamond known as the Pink Star.

Measuring 2.69 centimetres by 2.06 centimetres and set on a ring, the diamond, now renamed the Pink Dream by its new owner, was mined by De Beers in 1999, in an unspecified African country. The winning bid, which includes the cost of auctioneer Sotheby’s commission, far surpasses the $46.2m paid for the Graff Pink diamond three years ago, which was half the size of the Pink Star.

“While the theme of the conference remains mostly the same, the finale of a year’s worth of hard work, what we do hope to do is mature the event and the presentations that take place each year,” states Lean Program Director, Glenn Uminger. The conference he is referring to is the University of Kentucky’s Lean Systems Program, 2013 Users Conference, held on 10-11 September, 2013.

Construction of one of the world's largest uranium mines was officially inaugurated on April 18 this year, with fireworks, foot-stomping, marimbas and a fountain that danced to classical music, when a ground breaking ceremony took place at the mine site in the desert near Swakopmund in Namibia.

SEAMIC traces its origins back to the late 1970s with the establishment of the Eastern and Southern African Mineral Resources Development Centre (ESAMRDC), supported by UNDP and various bilateral support programmes from the UK and Japan. Its headquarters were established in Dodoma in central Tanzania, and in those days its remit was principally to carry out regional geological surveying and to provide consulting services for programs of its founding member states, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Mozambique.

Rwanda may be one of Africa’s smallest nations, and one with an unenviable recent history to say the least, but since its now President Paul Kagame was elected in 2003 it has experienced a decade of relative peace and security. This has enabled Rwanda to take advantage of its strategic location within the African continent. ‘Landlocked’ can also mean ‘central’: Rwanda is situated at the heart of Africa, and therefore well placed to act as a hub for regional air traffic.

First listed on the AIM in 1997, with a market capitalisation of £10 million, Petra Diamonds has since grown into a leading independent diamond mining group and an important supplier of rough diamonds to the international market.

The professional services landscape is changing – and fast. Professional services firms are embracing the opportunity to tackle new markets, finding economies of scale in larger operations that align well with international clients. However, with increased complexity comes greater difficulty in managing the business effectively. Expansion must not come at the cost of efficiency and responsiveness. As a result of this, it’s clear that the human shape of these organizations is also changing significantly.

Britain’s new global shipping port welcomed its first scheduled vessel, the ‘MOL Caledon’ from South Africa on Thursday, November 7.  After more than a decade of planning and construction across three square miles of development, DP World London Gateway deep-sea port is now open, providing British exporters and importers with a more efficient way to ship globally, at less cost. The £1.5billion facility at Thurrock, Essex, is 20 miles downriver from London.

Having started the day priced at $26 each, Twitter’s share closed at $44.90, giving the microblogging site a value of just over $31 billion.

With more than 13 million shares traded in the first hour after the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opened alone, it was far and away the biggest technology listing since that of Facebook in 2012. Twitter’s choice of exchange ahead of the technology-rich Nasdaq exchange proved somewhat surprising, however as a way of avoiding the technical glitches and delays that Facebook’s IPO launch experienced it clearly worked.