News highlights in brief

Emer Prof Solomon Benatar of UCT's Centre for Bioethics is the lead editor of Global Health and Global Health Ethics, launched at UCT in March. Comprising numerous essays from scholars around the world, the book sets out to address essential questions on global health from medical, philosophical and social-scientific perspectives.

A recent series of seminars, workshops and conferences drew the who's who of world human genome studies to Cape Town. Among them were Sir Walter Bodmer and Professor Sydney Brenner, two of the most respected scientists in the field. The two also visited UCT as guests of Prof Raj Ramesar.

UCT medical graduate Michael Hayden, now professor of human genetics and molecular medicine at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has been named the winner of the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award. The award is given to Canadians who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in medicine and medical science throughout their careers.

Dr Manya Mooya of the Department of Construction Economics and Management has landed a prestigious contract with Springer, one of the world's largest publishing houses, to release his first book. His work, Real Estate Valuation Theory: A critical appraisal, could be an answer to some of the challenges in real estate valuation.

Assoc Prof Rashida Manjoo of the Department of Public Law, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, will receive an honorary degree from Northeastern University in the US at the end of May, recognising her work in human rights.

UCT engineering students were among those presented with City of Cape Town Corporation Medals by Cape Town mayor Dan Plato. The medals are awarded to the top second- and third-year students and to the top students in their final year of study in each of the engineering departments.

Former Constitutional Court Justice Kate O'Regan believes that the appointment of Constitutional Court judges is a matter of great importance, given the powerful role of the court. O'Regan, a UCT alumna who now serves as an acting judge of appeal on Namibia's Supreme Court, was a guest speaker at a talk hosted by the UCT History and Current Affairs Society in April.

Advocate Menzi Simelane, director of the National Prosecution Authority, UCT's Prof Wouter de Vos and advocate Aifheli Tshivhase were panellists leading a discussion on the disbandment of the Scorpions and the establishment of the Hawks, a specialist investigative unit within the South African Police Service. The event, titled Catching the Scorpions' Tail, was organised by the UCT Black Law Student's Forum.

Social media played a pivotal role in the recent Egyptian revolution, and will be key in future mobilisation and pro-democracy activities, according to Prof Steven Youngblood of Park University in Missouri, US. Youngblood was delivering a public lecture, The Role of Social Networking in Democratic Movements, hosted by IAPO and the Centre for Film & Media Studies at UCT in May.

Human rights in South Africa were the focus of the Faculty of Law's second Rabinowitz Visitor Lecture, presented by Lord (Leonard) Hoffmann, a retired senior British judge, on 5 May. The combination of racialism and legalism which had distinguished the country's previous regime, followed by its sudden and peaceful abandonment, had no precedent, Hoffmann said.

Forerunners, a UCT Unilever Institute-produced film that charts the lives of four young black South African professionals, received a special jury award at the recent Cannes International Pan African Film Festival. Two years in the making, the full-length feature documentary follows the day-to-day lives of four South Africans in an attempt to understand what it means to be black and middle class in South Africa today.