"A Slow Boat To China" A Protest Against Robert Mugabe

Faatimah Hendricks

11 November 2009

---

• Email|
• Print|
• Comment

Share:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Cape Town — When Zimbabweans were being attacked and killed in political violence, a little-known South African musician was inspired to act by the stories she heard from refugees living illegally in South Africa.

Johanna Booysen of the Black Rose African Jazz Orchestra was particularly angered when she heard about a Zimbabwean who died outside an office of South Africa's home affairs ministry, which handles refugees.

She couldn't understand how this was "allowed" to happen. "Politicians and everybody were folding their hands and allowing everything to deteriorate," she said.

So she wrote a protest song. Over just a few days, she composed a reggae tune and wrote the lyrics of "Slow Boat to China." The idea stemmed from the appearance of reggae legend Bob Marley at Zimbabwe's independence celebrations in 1980.

The title has two meanings. The first refers to a Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe which South African civil society organisations managed to block before it was offloaded at a South African port.

Slowboat to China

Double click above to play, or download this mp3

"Slow Boat to China is pointing out to [President Robert Mugabe] that getting a shipload of weapons isn't the best way to resolve conflict in your country," says Booysen. "I was happy that the Durban harbour wouldn't offload the weapons."

The second meaning of the title derives from the slang name of a cannabis cigarette - a "slow boat". Booysen says the song also tells Mugabe to relax and to not take himself so seriously, and also that he shouldn't destroy his own country and kill his own people.

Booysen says the second verse of the song -- "If you love them let them speak their mind" -- refers to last year's elections: "Show your love by accepting the outcome of the election. [South African leader] Thabo Mbeki was a good example. He was removed [as president] and he accepted it. He didn't incite people to violence."

References to Moses and Pharaoh invite Mugabe to choose to be a liberator, not an oppressor. And a word play on the the bible verse, "there's a time to reap, a time to sow" suggests that "there was a time for him, to liberate his country," explains Booysen. "There was a time for him to lead them and to rule but maybe his time has come to step down. This thing of president for life doesn't work."

In the song, children appeal in a chorus to "Uncle Bob" not to be an obstacle to democracy; addressing him as "uncle" is a sign of respect, she says: "I respect Robert Mugabe for the positive things that he did... I don't see him as an enemy."

Slow boat to China lyrics

Slow Boat to China

• Audio: Slowboat to China

There`s an old saying, and it goes like this:
"If you love something, set it free"
If you love it, let it be
You`ll want it to exist, happily

If you love them let them speak their mind
If you let them you will find
Its not as dark as you think it would be
They just want to live in peace, and harmony

CHORUS

Uncle Bob, if you asked me
My advice to you would be:
"Take a slow boat to China
And walk along the Chinese wall"
X2

Every leader leaves a legacy
What is happening is plain to see
Rather a Moses than a Faroa be
Let yours be, that you set them free

The Preacherman in the Big Book says
"There`s a time to reap, a time to sow"
A time to cut, a time to grow
A wise man knows when its time to go

Life After FOreclosure-4 American Families Survive After Losing Their Homes To Foreclosure

After losing their homes, these 4 families thought they'd never recover. They've found it difficult to rent and their credit is wrecked, but life is looking up.

1 of 4

Stephanie Thomson

Stephanie and husband, Rich, with their eldest son, Mason, and the twins, Emily and Evan.

• Big cities: Big changes in foreclosure rates

City: Chicago

Price paid: $245,000

Current value: 175,000

Lesson: "My only regret is that ... we signed a contract and then we couldn't fulfill that contract."

Stephanie Thomson's troubles began when her husband Rich, a highly regarded hair designer, became disabled with neuropathy and could no longer work.

The income loss made it impossible for the couple to sustain the payments on their home in a Chicago suburb.

When they bought the house, they took out a hybrid ARM mortgage. The original bill was $1,400 a month. But it went to $1,900 after three years and more than $2,000 after the second reset six months later.

"With my husband unable to work, we could have paid the mortgage without the ARM reset but nothing more," says Stephanie, who tried for months to get help from her lender.

"They told me they would pray for me. That's an exact quote," she says.

The Thomsons decided to stop paying their mortgage last July -- their first time missing a payment. They didn't pay for 10 months, during which time YouWalkAway.com helped guide them through the foreclosure process.

In April, having saved what they would have paid in mortgage, they relocated to Elyria, Ohio, where Stephanie has relatives. Unfortunately, their credit scores had dropped so low that it was difficult to rent -- much less buy -- a new place. So Stephanie's mom bought a house and rents it to them.

"It's less expensive here; we were able to get a larger house in a wonderful neighborhood," she says. "My only regret is that I'm a proud person. We signed a contract and then we couldn't fulfill that contract because of my husband's illness. It was very difficult."

By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com staff writer

NEXT: Lori DiBacco

• 
  Stephanie
• 
  Lori
• 
  Ron
• 
  Marlene

Last updated September 16 2009: 12:46 PM ET

Email | Print |

Released British Mercenary Seeks Revenge And A Book Deal

An expensive round of score-settling and legal cases among the purported financiers and conspirators behind the 2004 coup plot in Equatorial Guinea is likely to be the immediate outcome of the release of convicted plotter Simon Mann, a dual British and South African national, in Malabo on 2 November.

Less formally, Mann has some settling up to do with the soldiers imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe. Mann was convicted in 2008 of leading a conspiracy to topple President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

He was sentenced to 35 years but had cooperated fully with the Equatorial Guinean regime, prompting speculation that he might benefit from clemency. Officials in Malabo add that Mann had been interviewed in prison since his trial by British anti-terrorist police officers.

The main targets, according to Mann, will be the businessmen Sir Mark Thatcher and Ely Claude Alan Calil, an oil trader who has dual Lebanese and British nationality (AC Vol 50 No 12). 'I'm very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others should face justice,' Mann said within hours of his release.

During his trial in Malabo, he accused Thatcher of financing and managing the coup plot against Obiang. Thatcher claims he is relaxed about Mann's release.

Mann has made conflicting statements about Calil's role in the affair, but after his extradition to Equatorial Guinea in 2008 he insisted Calil, whom he called 'the Cardinal', had been the main architect of the plot. Yet Calil told Africa Confidential that he welcomed Mann's release: 'Simon said a lot of things in detention in difficult places. He has been through such a lot, he might need a while to get over such an ordeal but whenever the time is right...I hope we can talk.'

A few weeks before the release, Calil told AC that there were some key questions about the plot raised in Mann's statements that needed answering: the role of Gabon's late President Omar Bongo Ondimba, whom Mann met in 2003 in the critical planning stages of the coup; the role of other business interests - aside from Calil and Thatcher - in financing the plot; and why the plotters carried on after they had received a clear warning from South African security services in late 2003 to abandon it.

These and other issues form part of the continuing investigation by Britain's anti-terrorist police. It is an offence to conspire on British territory to overthrow another country's government, but a successful case has never been prosecuted.

Equatorial Guinea attempted to sue Calil, Thatcher and British security consultant Greg Wales for coup-plotting through Britain's civil courts all the way to the House of Lords before dropping the case at the eleventh hour.

British officials may have little appetite for pursuing the plotters through the courts, even helped by a key witness such as Mann, given the subterfuge and betrayal that might emerge in a lengthy court case.

Some plotters claim that the South African, British, French, Spanish and United States governments were aware of the plot and offered tacit support. Almost all the material presented in the public domain in the last five years to support such allegations has been dismissed by courts in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Guernsey, Lebanon and London.

Yet if Mann wants to proceed, we understand he has access to archives of email correspondence with Calil and Thatcher, as well as bank records itemising transactions between front companies established in Guernsey and other tax havens to finance the plot.

Mann has said nothing so far about Wales, once accused by Malabo of being the 'political officer' for the plotters. According to Wales, he played a mediating role in securing Mann's release during several meetings with Malabo's diplomats in London. Severo Moto, the Equatorian opposition leader exiled in Spain whom Mann was meant to install, has welcomed the release but has otherwise kept silent.

Four South African special forces officers also convicted for the plot - Nick du Toit, George Alerson, Sergio Cardoso and José Sundays - were released on the same day as Mann (whose mother is South African). However, as Mann's private jet took off, they were left waiting in Malabo for South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs to organise their repatriation.

South Africa's mission in Malabo initially claimed to be unaware that Du Toit and the others had been freed on 2 November, but it seems that the release followed negotiations ahead of President Jacob Zuma's 3 November visit to Malabo. Zuma's political ally and former Intelligence Director Billy Masetlha had led the monitoring of the plotters' activities in South Africa. Other officials from Zuma's office had been involved in negotiations with Malabo for some time, after lobbying by white business interests close to the governing African National Congress.

Relevant Links

• Central Africa
• Southern Africa
• Equatorial Guinea
• Europe and Africa
• South Africa
• Zimbabwe
• Arms and Armies
• Conflict

Equatorial Guinea also wanted to draw a line under the affair. Obiang is certain to win another seven-year term in the 28 November elections but a diplomatic endorsement by Zuma would be useful. Malabo's relations with Pretoria, which flourished after the discovery of the 2004 plot, soured towards the end of Thabo Mbeki's presidency. Zuma, who has improved relations with Angola, wants to make more friends among Africa's oil and gas producers. His talks with Obiang centred on the plan to make Equatorial Guinea a regional hub for natural gas exports and joint ventures in agriculture, mining and tourism. Having Zuma as an ally will help Obiang in his periodic disputes with Cameroon and Gabon.

Aside from high-stakes diplomatic negotiations, there is a precedent in Equatorial Guinea for coup plotters being released after serving only short periods of long sentences. In 2003, Placido Miko of the opposition Convergencia para la Democracia Social was released barely a year into a 14-year sentence for plotting to assassinate Obiang.

America Suffered A Cyber Terrorism Pearl Harbor During The Bush Administration

Sunday's 60 Minutes featured a pretty terrifying report on the potential threat the United States faces from cyberterrorism. It's territory that the show has mined before.

As Steve Kroft pointed out at the outset of the report, the show had "less than a decade ago" gone to the Pentagon to learn more about how computers could be used by hackers "as a weapon." "Much of it was still theory," Kroft related, "But we were told that before too long, it might be possible for a hacker with a computer to disable critical infrastructure in a major city, and disrupt essential services, to steal millions of dollars from banks all over the world, infiltrate defense systems, extort millions from public companies, even sabotage our weapons systems."

Eep! Sounds like someone better get on that, before something terrible happens! Except guess what, something terrible already did. "Plus a lot that we don't even know about," Kroft said. Great.

Enter Jim Lewis, who directs the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who says that the United States experienced its "electronic Pearl Harbor" in 2007:

LEWIS: Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information.

Lewis goes on to point out that the entire Library Of Congress is the equivalent of 12 terabytes, so that sort of puts things in perspective, doesn't it? And it's not like hackers were making off with William Faulkner novels!

And last November, according to Lewis, "someone was able to get past the firewall and encryption devices of one of the most sensitive U.S. military computer systems and stay inside for several days." That system? The CENTCOM network, which you might know as "the people who are fighting all of our wars." The hackers were able to sit inside the network, tracking information and documents "like they were part of military command."

This, Lewis said, is the "most significant" breach of security ever "acknowledged by the Pentagon." Not acknowledging this, however, is the Bush administration, on whose watch all of this happened. Asked why the public was never told about the extent to which the United States had already suffered significant cyber-casualties, Lewis said: "You know, I've been trying to figure out why that is. And some of it is the previous administration didn't want to admit that they had been rolled in 2007." Worse yet, in Lewis' estimation, the seriousness of the threat, even now, "doesn't seem to be sinking in."

Hopefully, Liz Cheney will find some way to waterboard the Internet!

WATCH:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

RELATED:
Foreign Hackers Pulled Off 'Electronic Pearl Harbor' Under Bush/Cheney in 2007[Animal NY]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips totv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Will Earth One Day Be A Desolate Waste Land Like Mars?

A Tale Of Planetary Woe

Planetary scientists believe that waterfalls may have once cascaded down these steep cliffs at Echus Chasma on Mars. Mars has many desiccated landscapes like this one, thought to have been sculpted by abundant water in the distant past. Photo credit: Mars Express/ESA.

by Patrick Barry
Science@NASA
Huntsville AL (SPX) Nov 09, 2009
Once upon a time - roughly four billion years ago - Mars was warm and wet, much like Earth. Liquid water flowed on the Martian surface in long rivers that emptied into shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm. Living microbes might have even arisen, some scientists believe, starting Mars down the path toward becoming a second life-filled planet next door to our own.

But that's not how things turned out.

Mars today is bitter cold and bone dry. The rivers and seas are long gone. Its atmosphere is thin and wispy, and if Martian microbes still exist, they're probably eking out a meager existence somewhere beneath the dusty Martian soil.

What happened? Why did Mars dry up and freeze over? These haunting questions have long puzzled scientists. A few years from now we might finally know the answer, thanks to a new orbiter NASA will send to Mars called MAVEN (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution).

"The goal of MAVEN is to figure out what processes were responsible for those changes in the climate," says Bruce Jakosky, Principal Investigator for MAVEN at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

One way or another, scientists believe, Mars must have lost its most precious asset: its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide. CO2 in Mars's atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, just as it is in our own atmosphere. A thick blanket of CO2 and other greenhouse gases would have provided the warmer temperatures and greater atmospheric pressure required to keep liquid water from freezing solid or boiling away.

Over the last four billion years, Mars somehow lost most of that blanket. Scientists have proposed various theories for how that loss happened.

Perhaps an asteroid impact blew most of the atmosphere into space in one catastrophic event. Or maybe erosion by the solar wind - a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun - could have slowly stripped the atmosphere away over eons. The planet's surface might also have absorbed the CO2 and locked it up in minerals such as carbonate.

Ultimately, nobody knows for sure where all the missing CO2 went.

MAVEN will be the first mission to Mars specifically designed to help scientists understand the ongoing escape of CO2 and other gases into space.

The probe will orbit Mars for at least one Earth-year. At the ellipticalorbit's low point, MAVEN will be 125 km above the surface; its high point will take it more than 6000 km out into space. This wide range of altitudes will enable MAVEN to sample Mars's atmosphere more thoroughly than ever before.

As it orbits, MAVEN's instruments will track ions and molecules in this broad cross-section of the Martian atmosphere, thoroughly documenting the flow of CO2 and other molecules into space for the first time.

Once Jakosky and his colleagues know how quickly Mars is losing CO2 right now, they can extrapolate backward in time to estimate the total amount lost to space during the last four billion years. "MAVEN will determine if [loss to space] was the most important player," Jakosky says.

But just as important as "how much?" is the question of "how?"

Conventional wisdom holds that Mars's atmosphere is vulnerable because the planet lacks a global magnetic field. Earth's magnetic field stretches far out into space and envelopes the whole planet in a protective bubble that deflects the solar wind.

Mars has only regional, patchy magnetic fields that cover relatively small areas of the planet, mostly in the southern hemisphere. The rest of the atmosphere is fully exposed to the solar wind. So the loss could be caused by the slow erosion of the atmosphere in these exposed areas.

David Brain of UC Berkeley has proposed another, seemingly contrary possibility. These small magnetic fields might actually hasten the loss of Mars's atmosphere, Brain suggests.

The solar wind might buffet those magnetic field lines, occasionally pinching off a "bubble" of field lines that then drifts off into space - carrying a large chunk of the atmosphere with it. If so, having a partial magnetic field might be worse than having none at all. This possibility was described in a 2008 Science@NASA story, "Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere."

Some evidence from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft supports Brain's theory, but decisive measurements will have to wait for MAVEN, currently scheduled to launch in 2013.

The mission will be a big step toward understanding what happened to Mars - how it ended up so cold and dry after such a warm and watery beginning. After all these years, MAVEN could write the final chapter in a haunting tale of planetary woe.

Share This Article With Planet Earth

Better Nude than With A Fur!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/09/christian-serratos-naked_n_351096.html

Zimbabwe Economy To Grow 15% Per Year

Zimbabwe says economy to rebound, grow 15% a year

0 COMMENTS |

ADD A COMMENTPRINT EMAIL |

By: Reuters

9th November 2009

TEXT SIZE

Zimbabwe's economy may grow an average 15% a year for the next five years on a recovery in production and aggressive infrastructure development, Economic Planning Minister Elton Mangoma said on Monday.

Mangoma told reporters the economy - struggling to recovery from an economic meltdown - would expand 12,5% next year.

"During the period (till 2015), the economy is expected to grow by an average growth rate of 15% from a level of 3,7% in 2009," he said, after releasing a draft policy document.

"This will be achieved through the restoration of productive capacity and creation of new capacities, aggressive infrastructure rehabilitation and development."

The southern African country's economy went into freefall amid political upheaval and after the government seized white-owned commercial farms from 2000.

However, a unity government formed earlier this year has raised hopes of a recovery, although the bulk of hoped-for aid has not yet come. It managed to halt hyperinflation by scrapping the Zimbabwe dollar and allowing the use of several other currencies.

The Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries says factory output doubled in the first six months of the year and capacity utilisation had climbed to 32,3% from below 10%.

Mangoma said the government would sign an investment protection agreement with South Africa later this month and planned to increase mining royalty taxes and would hold auctions for mining claims.

"The bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement between Zimbabwe and South Africa is going to be signed here in Zimbabwe on the 27th of November. We've got an agreement ... which means there are no contentious issues," he said.

South Africa is one of the country's biggest investors but so far companies, from its southern neighbour and elsewhere, have been wary to move back into Zimbabwe.

Last week, the government proposed in a draft law that Zimbabweans would take 51% ownership of all foreign companies, including mines and banks.

"We want investors everywhere to feel secure. We believe the document is very good and I'm sure the South Africans feel it is very good, that's why we're going to sign it," Mangoma said.

The government would look to tighten its mining royalty regime and link it to local shareholding.

"Virtually all our mining resources have been claimed by somebody. We'll be bringing in the 'use it or lose it' principle on the claims and we'll also be moving to auctioning of claims, as opposed to the payment of a pittance for claims," he said.

Zimbabwe has the second highest reserves of platinum in the world, after South Africa, and their mining sector makes up a bigger proportion of exports after the agriculture sector collapsed.

Edited by: Reuters