In 2008, Lalit Modi was instrumental in launching the Indian Premier League (IPL), a league based around Twenty20 cricket, where each team is limited to batting for a maximum of 20 overs. he also engineered the Indian Premier League’s move to South Africa in 2009 after the dates of the tournament clashed with the Indian general election and the Union …

There is no hard and fast rule about choosing cricket colours. In most cases, the country adopts colours from their national flags – as Pakistan, Bangladesh, England, West Indies, Zimbabwe do. In some cases, the country wears the national colours – Australia wears green and gold, Holland wears orange, South Africa wears dark green and New Zealand wears black (silver …

Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was a South African architect who is best known for being a very close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, starting from the latter’s early days in South Africa. Kallenbach was born in 1871 in East Prussia to a German-Jewish family. He went to study architecture in Stuttgart and Munich. In 1896, he went to South Africa, where he …

Fiction’s most famous detective was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Born in Edinburgh in 1859 he decided to become a doctor, and it was when he was studying medicine at university that he met the man who was to later inspire him to create his most famous character. The man was his professor, Joseph Bell, who was particularly good …

It is not only animals and plants that are in a danger of disappearing from our planet in the face of the industrial ‘advanced’ nations. There are many races of people that have survived in a very simple, stable way of life for many centuries only to be threatened with destruction in the space of a few decades. A good …

Numerous fossil remains have been found of coelacanth fish which died over 70 million years ago. In fact the coelacanth is said to have first appeared some 350 million years ago. But to the amazement of experts the first living coelacanth was found in 1938 of the coast of South Africa. In 1952 a second one was caught on a …

A swallow builds its nest inside farm buildings and on ledges in old chimneys. The nest is made of mud, straw and saliva, with feathers and wool to line the inside. It takes a pair of swallows up to several weeks to make the saucer-shaped nest in the rafters of a barn. Swallows starts arriving in Europe at the end …

Conflict diamonds came to the attention of the world media during the extremely brutal conflict in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The UN, governments, the diamond industry and non-governmental organisations , recognised the need for a global system to prevent conflict diamonds from entering the legitimate diamond supply chain, which helped fund conflict. The Kimberley Process (the first meeting was …

A greenshank is a little bird with a long beak and olive-green legs – a member of a group of birds known as sandpipers. The greenshank breeds in Scotland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. It builds its nest on the ground, being content usually to settle in a small hollow, lined with heather or dry grass. The eggs are pale buff …

Yuvraj Singh (born 12 December 1981) is a cricketer from India, and the son of former Indian fast bowler and Punjabi movie star Yograj Singh. He has been a member of the Indian cricket team since 2000 (ODIs) and played his first Test match in 2003. He was the vice captain of the ODI team from late-2007 to late-2008. At …