Backlays Banks Keeping mugabe Afloat

I know most of us have heard the madness going on with our comrade Robert Mugambe. After about 24 years on the driving seat at his tender age of 87, the young comrade believes that all what he needs if five more years.
The inflation of Zimb (as it's commonly known) it's about 3,000%. In short, when you go to buy bread, you need a sackload of money. In fact, 7,000 Zimbs dollars equate to 25 cents of a dollar. But how is mugambe able to keep the police, the army happy?
You guessed it, the fat corporate bank called Backlays.
Barclays Bank, which owns the naming rights to an Atlantic Yards area: "BARCLAYS is bankrolling President Robert Mugabe’s corrupt regime in Zimbabwe by providing substantial loans to cronies given land seized from white farmers. The British bank lent £750m to the country’s new landowning elite in the first half of this year, mostly through a government scheme to boost farm productivity. This weekend Barclays was under pressure to say whether it had lent money to five of Mugabe’s ministers — each named in European Union sanctions."
That's how this regimes stay afloat, through financiers who just care about the simplle bottom line. Shame on you.

Have you ever heard of Breast Ironing?

The people of Cameroon are really losing it. Apparently, there is an old preactice there where the young women breasts are flattened in clude wepons so that they do not look sexy and for fear of being raped.
The UN says that 3.8 million West and Central African girls are at risk of a painful form of body mutilation know as 'breast ironing'.
http://current.com/items/88852332_breast_ironing

In Cameroon where the practice is most widespread, 50% of adolescent girls in cities and a quarter of all girls nationwide have their breasts 'ironed,' often by their mothers.

The 'ritual' is performed by massaging the girls' chests with heated objects like stones, in order to reverse their pubescent development. The mums say it's driven by fear of unwanted male attention, rape and pre-marital pregnancies.

According to UNFPA, breast ironing exposes girls to numerous health problems such as abscesses, infections, dissymmetry of the breasts, cysts, and even the complete disappearance of one or both breasts.

Nevertheless breast ironing is widespread and interestingly, the high prevalence in cities attributed to the effects of urbanization.

In Cameroon, the Network of Aunties Association, RENATA, made up of members who have undergone the practice, is trying to stop breast ironing by drawing public attention to its dangers in radio and television spots and by disseminating leaflets

death of Patrice Lumumba

January 17 marks the forty-first anniversary of the brutal assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The murder of the leader of the Congolese independence struggle and one of the most impassioned critics of the colonial oppression of Africa continues to haunt governments in both Europe and America.

In November, an all-party commission of inquiry formed by the Belgian government released a report acknowledging that Belgium played a role in the murder of the Congolese leader.

The admission was far too little and came far too late. The Belgian government decided to launch the commission as a show of repentance for past crimes. Its aim was to smooth the way for increased involvement in its former African colony following the fall of the Mobutu dictatorship and to improve its bargaining position vis-à-vis the United States, its principal economic rival in the region.

If we want to engage in frank dialogue with our former colonial partners, then we have to also consider some painful periods from our colonial past, said a Foreign Ministry spokesman of the commissions findings.

At the same time, the limited admissions served as a means of whitewashing the growing revelations about the assassination in the last few years, in both the book by Flemish historian Ludo de Witte published two years ago, De Moord Op Lumumba, and by journalists who interviewed Belgian officers and soldiers who participated in the killing.

Focus has been further brought to the assassination by the recent film Lumumba, directed by Raoul Peck, which recreated the horrific murder.

The film begins with the nightmarish scene of Belgian soldiers unearthing the remains of the Congolese leader and one of his comrades who were shot to death by a firing squad just days before. Determined to deny supporters of Congolese liberation even a corpse around which they could rally, the order was given to obliterate every physical trace of Lumumba. Thus, with axes, saws, acid and firealong with ample quantities of whisky to dull their sensesthe soldiers set about their grisly task.

The commissions report concluded that authorities in Brussels and Belgiums King Baudouin knew of plans to kill Lumumba and did nothing to save him. It insisted, however, that there is no documentary evidence that Belgium ordered the Congolese leaders death.

It did acknowledge that the government covertly channeled funds and arms to regional secessionist groups within the Congo that were violently opposed to Lumumba. The report put much of the blame on Baudouin, who died, in 1993, alleging that the King pursued his own post-colonial policy behind the backs of elected officials. Some parties within the Belgian government have responded by calling for a debate on the future of the royal family.

In fact, earlier investigations have uncovered ample proof that the assassination of Lumumba was the direct result of orders given by the Belgian government and the Eisenhower administration, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and local clients financed and advised by Brussels and Washington.

De Wittes book cited a telegram sent three months before Lumumbas death from Count Harold dAspremont Lynden, then minister for African affairs, to Belgian officials in the Congo:

The main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium is clearly Lumumbas definitive elimination, said the memorandum. Given that the Congolese leader had already been deposed from power and placed under house arrest at the time, there was no mistaking the meaning of these words.

Similar revelations have surfaced from the US side. Last year, the government released archive material related to the Kennedy assassination that included an interview with the White House minute-taker under the Eisenhower administration, Robert Johnson.

In a meeting held with security advisers in August 1960, two months after Congo achieved its formal independence from Belgium, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to eliminate Lumumba, according to Johnsons account.

There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued, Johnson recalled.

The CIAs director, Allen Dulles, referred to the Congolese leader as a mad dog.

Among the American agents on the ground in the Congo was a young CIA man working under diplomatic cover, Frank Carlucci, who tried to work his way into Lumumbas confidence in the months before the murder. Carlucci went on to become national security advisor and defense secretary in the Reagan administration and is today the chairman of the Carlyle Group, the influential merchant bank that includes George Bush Sr. among its directors.

According to Larry Devlin, then the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (Kinshasa), the agencys chief technical officer arrived in the African nation shortly after the elimination order from Eisenhower. With him he brought a tube of poisoned toothpaste that was to be placed in the Congolese leaders bathroom. The improbable plot was dropped, however, in favor of a more direct method. Lumumba was delivered into the hands of his bitterest political enemy, Moises Tshombe, the secessionist leader of Katanga.

The assassination took place less than seven months after the Congo had declared its independence, with Lumumba as its first prime minister.

Lumumba was among the most courageous and principled figures in a generation of young nationalist leaders who came forward in the second half of the twentieth century to claim freedom from European colonialism.

These forces were ill prepared for the challenge of leading the immense eruption of social struggle that swept the continent. Moreover, both those who were murdered, like Lumumba, and those who survived were handed a poison chalice by the old colonial powers in the form of the arbitrary borders that they had drawn in the nineteenth century scramble to divide and conquer Africa.

In the Congo, in particular, Belgian colonialism had deliberately kept the African population untrained and uneducated, reduced to the status of beasts of burden for the extractive industries that looted the countrys vast mineral and other natural wealth.

On the eve of independence, the Congo, a territory larger than Western Europe, was seriously underdeveloped. There were no African army officers, only three African managers in the entire civil service, and only 30 university graduates. Yet Western investments in Congos mineral resources (uranium, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese, zinc) were colossal. These investments meant that the West was determined to keep control over the country beyond independence. The Belgians organized the transfer of power in deliberate manner to ensure that independence would at best be a formal fiction.

Following widespread rioting and strikes in 1959, the colonial power surprised all of the nationalist leaders by scheduling elections for May 1960. In a chaotic rush to take advantage of the fruits of independence, 120 different parties were formed, most of them regionally or ethnically based. Only one, the Mouvement National Congolais or the MNC, led by Lumumba, favored a centralized government and a Congo united across ethnic and regional lines.

Lumumbas rise and fall was meteoric. Plucked from a Belgian colonial jail where he was beaten and tortured for advocating independence, he was flown to Brussels to participate in round-table discussions that were aimed at smoothing the way to a peaceful and smooth transition to a regime that would leave Belgiums financial interests in the Congo intact, while transferring the trappings of state power from the white colonialists to a new native elite.

Pecks film Lumumba acutely captures the immense social contradictions underlying the independence movement and the class position of Africas new petty-bourgeois nationalist rulers. A scene portrays Lumumbas speech before the independence day celebrations attended by the Belgian king and his ministers as well as the collection of black opportunist politicians into whose hands Belgium intended to entrust the new independent state.

In the midst of a ceremony in which the Belgians had congratulated themselves on successfully civilizing the Congolese and preparing them for self-rule, Lumumba spelled out in graphic terms the reality of colonial oppression, describing it as 80 years of humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force:

We have known harassing work, exacted in exchange for salaries which did not permit us to eat enough to drive away hunger, to clothe ourselves, or to house ourselves decently, or to raise our children as creatures dear to us.... We have known ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon and night, because we are negroes.... We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws, which in fact recognized only that might is right.... We will never forget the massacres where so many perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown.

Pecks camera cuts between the stunned anger on the faces of the Belgians listening to this speech and the elation of crowds of Africans gathered around radios cheering Lumumbas courage to honestly portray their existence.

Lumumbas forthright demands for economic independence, social justice and political self-determination, and his hostility to a political setup based upon tribal divisions, which the colonialists had effectively used to divide and rule Africa, sealed his fate. His threat to appeal for Soviet aid as a last resort in his effort to free the country of the continuing domination of the Belgian mining interests and Belgian troops, who continued to intervene in the aftermath of independence, gave Washington the pretext for allying with the old colonial power in seeking his elimination.

Where did AIDS come from????

I know what you are thinking.... Gay men, monkeys. What about our own R&D research labs funded by tax payers money?

Where did HIV originate? Prominent cancer virologists and government epidemiologists have theorized that HIV originated in African green monkeys. Purportedly the monkey virus "jumped species" and entered the black population. From there it migrated to Haiti and Manhattan. After the virus entered the black heterosexual population in the late 1970s, it rapidly spread to millions of blacks because of transfusions with HIV-infected blood, dirty needles, promiscuity and genital ulcers — or so the experts said.

Not all scientists believe the official monkey story, although it is rare to find people who express this view publicly. One persistent underground rumor is that AIDS is biological warfare. Proponents of the AIDS conspiracy theory believe that AIDS has nothing to do with green monkeys, homosexuality, drug addiction, genital ulcerations, anal sex or promiscuity, but that it has to do with scientists experimenting on blacks and gays: in short, AIDS is genocide. Most African-Americans have heard the story that HIV is a manufactured virus genetically-engineered to kill off the black race. Thirty percent of New York City blacks polled by The New York Times (October 29, 1990) actually believe AIDS is an ethno-specific bioweapon designed in a laboratory to infect black people.

Despite the general acceptance that HIV came from monkeys and the rain forest, there is no scientific evidence to prove that HIV and AIDS originated in Africa. What is true is that the first AIDS cases were uncovered in the U.S. in 1979, around the same time that AIDS cases were discovered in Africa. In addition, no stored African tissue from the 1970s tests positive for HIV. And scientists have a hard time explaining how a black heterosexual epidemic centered in Africa could have quickly transformed itself into a white homosexual epidemic in Manhattan.

Is your Mutual fund investing in Child Soldiers

The Save Darfur Coalition today launched the latest phase of its divestment advertising campaign with provocative national television and online advertisements targeting genocide-linked investments held by firms Franklin Templeton, JP Morgan, Vanguard, Fidelity Investments, and Capital Group. The coalition also unveiled new "station domination" divestment advertisements in San Francisco's Montgomery Street BART Station specifically targeting San Mateo-based mutual fund company Franklin Templeton. To view the television or online ad, click here: http://www.savedarfur.org/divestment/presskit .

"This phase of the Divest for Darfur campaign urges every American to ask their financial advisor and mutual fund company one simple question: ‘Am I invested in genocide?'" said coalition spokesman, Allyn Brooks-LaSure. "Because firms such as Franklin Templeton are so heavily invested in Chinese oil company PetroChina, the answer too often will be ‘yes.' American mutual fund companies must shed their ties to investments that extend the suffering and misery for millions of Darfuris, because American investors don't want to bankroll genocide."

Divestment activists said the five firms are the largest U.S. mutual fund company investors in Chinese oil company PetroChina. According to the targeted divestment model developed by the Sudan Divestment Task Force, PetroChina through its parent company CNPC, is the worst of the "highest offending" companies helping to fund the genocide in Darfur.

Are you wearing a Blood Diamond??

How cute are Diamonds really? I wish we can ask these Liberian kids

Anachy in Kenya

Tiomin wants Sh200 million suit cost from farmers

Tiomin wants Sh200 million suit cost from farmers

This is the lesson for eight Kwale farmers, who went to court last year challenging the Government's move to acquire their land for tiominium mining.

Tiomin Kenya Limited, a party to the suit, has requested the High Court to order the farmers to pay it Sh200 million approximately 1.8 million pounds sterling] as the cost of litigation.

The company wants the payment after the eight farmers lost in their bid last December to stop the Canadian firm from extracting the mineral.

In a suit before Mr Justice Joseph Nyamu yesterday, Tiomin Kenya Limited is demanding the amount on grounds that orders issued against it last November affected its operation. The orders for injunction were later quashed.

Last December, after a full hearing, Mr Justice Nyamu dismissed the suit filed by the farmers and ordered them to pay costs to Tiomin Kenya Limited and other respondents. On the cost of litigation, the Canadian firm argues that orders barring mining that were later lifted, resulted in losses.

At the time the injunction was issued, the firm had moved heavy machinery in Maumba and Nguluku in readiness for the first phase of mining.

Tiomin Kenya says the eight farmers, led by Mr Rodgers Muema Nzioka, had filed the suit with a view to killing the multi-billion-shilling project.

Entitled to pay

However, through lawyer Gibson Kamau Kuria, the farmers have raised a preliminary objection arguing that they were not entitled to pay Tiomin Kenya Limited any amount. They argued further that no certificate of cost had been issued so far by the court.

However, Tiomin Kenya's ability to get this amount appears remote, considering that the only asset the farmers had was their land, which is valued at Sh20 million.

Further, the farmers claim the cost demanded by Tiomin Kenya was likely to contravene their fundamental rights.

Mr Justice Nyamu adjourned that case to allow the parties to research on the issue. The case will be mentioned in 21 days time.

Last December, Justice Nyamu ruled that the Government was justified in forcibly taking over land to allow for titanium mining.

Have you ever heard of Tiomin?

We have an environmental monster we are fighting in Kenya, called Tiomin. They are a based in Canada, thanks maple leaf; and they are known to be in the business of total disregard of environment especially when the mining rights are in Africa.
The company happens to but they hands on Titanium which is abundantly found on Kenyan Coast. Here is the interesting part, they are willing to pay the farmers 5 US dollars per acre of hand for them to mine titanium on their land. No loyalties, nadaa, five backs for your land, or they grab it by force. Guess the method they prefer to mine... trip mining. After they are done with the land, you can't even grape your goats, because all the fertile soil is gone.
I know you are wondering, where is the government; they are part of the kickback system. Long live the queen.

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=1581

Is your Mutual fund investing in Child Soldiers

I just returned from a trip across Africa. I moved from north of Sinai, where our buddy Hosni mu barrack is President of life to Kenya where they are sawing each others heads off. I had a stop in Juba, which is the economic hub of southern Sudan. I witnessed women who have been raped and left for the dead with bottles and sticks left in their private parts, so that they can be traumatized and move away so that BP oil and Chevelon can drill for oil.
We are talking about pharmaceutical companies experimenting with our children under the cover of NGOs and enslaving children in the name of diamonds. We may not all do much, but we will do our part to inform, advise and shame the offenders.