Diamonds Today (and Every Day)
This morning, the Today show took a look at a diamond’s journey from mine to market, tracing the pipeline from Jwaneng mine in Botswana (probably footage left over from Matt Lauer’s visit there a few years ago) to sorting at the DTC in London to cutting on 47th Street in New York. Although conflict diamonds are mentioned, they are mentioned in context. The piece says that diamonds should “bear a certificate that shows where they come from.” Neither the upcoming movie or the Kimberly process are mentioned. The obligatory happy couple is thrilled that their diamond takes a year to move from mine to market and is touched by so many people. A story on Blood Diamond this morning in Newsday newspaper in New York? Less positive: “The memory may be a decade old, but the hunk of glistening carbon on your finger reminds you, whenever it catches your eye, of that giddy little scene: the velvet box, the few portentous words. Would it taint the romance of the stone to think that a slave under the eye of an 11-year-old armed with an AK-47 might have scooped it out of the fetid black mud of Western Africa? That he might have handed it to overseers who exerted their control by hacking off miners’ limbs with machetes? Or that a smuggler might have slipped it into a condom and then swallowed it, only to be disemboweled by a rebel soldier determined to retrieve it?” Charming. Expect more of this each day, as we count down to the opening of Blood Diamond on December 8. One interesting event scheduled is a press conference on December 5 with Russell Simmons and Kimora Lee Simmons, co-owners of Simmons Jewelry Company (and not-so-happy couple) who will have just returned from a nine-day journey to South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique. Simmons will announce “major historic initiatives pertaining to Africa and the diamond industry by the Simmons Jewelry Company.”