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WEST PELZER - Three people were killed when a single-engine corporate plane crashed about 10:20 a.m. in bad weather Thursday in a residential area outside Williamston, authorities said. The flight plan of the plane, a Diamond A40 model registered to Accu-Pad, Inc., a silicone products manufacturer located at 1324 Harris Bridge Road in Anderson, remains unclear. The plane clipped power lines and hit trees around an abandoned home on Hardwood Road before it began to disintegrate and hit the ground inside a field with a "catastrophic impact," Anderson County Public Safety Director Tommy Thompson said. Identities of the three victims...

ByCONAKRY, Guinea (AP) - There's lucky: Finding a diamond when you're a young miner sweating it out in the west African forests of Guinea. And there's too lucky: finding a 182-carat stone, that everyone - starting with the government of Guinea - wants a piece of. Result: the stone - four times the size of the famous Hope diamond - was tucked away Monday deep in the vaults of Guinea's Central Bank, no pictures, please. And the 25-year-old miner who found it, if not exactly in hiding, was making himself scarce. No interviews, please. State radio in impoverished, mineral-rich Guinea...

Nearly $5 million was raised for John Kerry's presidential bid and the Democratic National Committee Thursday night at a star- studded concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond performed together for the first time in 24 years. They were expected to sing their 1978 hit duet, "You Don't Bring Me Flowers." Willie Nelson and Billy Crystal were also scheduled to perform. Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro were among those in attendance. The concert was originally scheduled for June 7 but postponed because of the death of former President Ronald Reagan two days...

-- Researchers synthesize gem-sized diamonds of natural colour and exceptional hardness using Chemical Vapour Deposition. -- WITH U.S. GOVERNMENT DEBT now topping US$7 trillion (about US$100,000 for each family of four), and interest rates at historic lows, new life is beginning to breathe through the Canadian resource sector. One sign of this renewed vigor is a sudden surge in prospecting claims being staked throughout vast tracts of the Canadian Arctic. Over 1,500 new permits have been issued this year for Nunavut alone, compared to 190 last year. And according to the Nunavut Mining Recorder’s Office in Iqualuit, the largest number...

The biggest ever diamond has been found floating in space. The gem, estimated at close to 10 billion trillion trillion carats, is at the core of a dead star (BPM 37093) - a crystallised white dwarf. The newly-discovered diamond in the sky is a whopping great chunk of crystallised carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is 2,500 miles across (the moon is approximately 2,200 miles across) and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds. It has been dubbed "Lucy" in reference to the Beatles' song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Diamond specialists told the research...

Readings at the New Glasgow, N.S., public library are usually tame affairs, but then it is not every day an author appears who has written that the local population acts like it is stunned by chloroform. When Dawn Rae Downton read from her new memoir, Diamond, she was met by about 10 hecklers who did not appreciate her unvarnished portrayal of Pictou County, their rural corner of northern Nova Scotia. Ms. Downton never dreamed her book, which is essentially the story of 100 days spent caring for a dying friend, would make her Nova Scotia's own Salman Rushdie. But after...

A physicist in South Africa claims to have created a new superconducting state of matter at room temperature. Johan Prins of the University of Pretoria observed the superconducting state in experiments with diamonds that had been doped with oxygen (Semiconductor Science and Technology 18 S131).Diamond is a semiconductor and Prins has long been interested in using n-type diamond as a "cold" cathode to replace the "hot" cathodes found in television tubes and many other devices. Moreover, he believes that the results of his experiments on n-type diamond surfaces - made by exposing the diamond to energetic oxygen ions - can...

Artisanal mining was not illegal in the DRC prior to the 1980s, but diamonds could only be sold within the mining zone, or in adjacent villages. It was illegal to sell diamonds in Kinshasa and in the main urban areas in the Kasai provinces, although this was not fully respected. Corrupt officials allowed a limited trade to exist, but government attitudes vacillated and harsh measures were taken intermittently to purge the diamond fields of prospectors, especially in areas around or within the concession of La Société Minière de Bakwanga (MIBA), the diamond mining parastatal. MIBA provided the bulk of Zaire’s...

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (Reuters) - Sierra Leone has put border guards on alert after hearing rumors that a massive diamond was unearthed this week and that dealers may smuggle it out of the country, senior government officials said Thursday. "The Ministry of Mineral Resources has put all security measures in place to trace the whereabouts of an alleged 1,000-carat diamond said to have been found on April 22," a senior official at the ministry told Reuters. If true, the gem would be the second largest ever found. The biggest would remain the 3,107-carat "Cullinan" diamond found in South Africa in...

JOHANNESBURG, April 20 — The collapse of peace talks to end Africa's biggest war in the Democratic Republic of Congo could doom the former Zaire to prolonged conflict or even partition, analysts warned on Saturday. Worse still, they said, the crisis in the mineral-rich state would re-ignite tensions and probably more direct fighting between neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, who each support rival rebel factions in Africa's third largest country. On the economic front, failure to achieve peace in Congo would stunt economic development and deter badly-needed foreign investment in poverty-stricken and war-ridden Africa. Talks to end the war and chart...