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02-03-2012 06:04 Expats Living Rough In The Philippines Part 4

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Expats Living Rough In The Philippines Part 4 - Video

The timely revelations by Global Witness of unspecified amounts of diamonds cash being hidden in tax-free-havens of Mauritius, Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands vindicate our earlier concerns.

The diamonds report caught Mugabe's militarised loyalists unawares, in the wake of a major propaganda campaign about "how sanctions were causing typhoid".

The inner circle has try every trick in the book to be de-listed by the EU and the US, especially after SADC colleagues led by Zuma failed to sway the EU Parliament, the 2 million signature petition flopped and Tomana's litigation of the EU appears to have died a natural death.

The expose shows the devastating power of information over propaganda and its serious implications for the Mugabe regime and the Kimberley Process.

The busting of the regime's alleged secret diamonds looting spree sounds like "The Emperor's New Clothes".

According to Answers.com, the story by Hans Christian Anderson goes like this. An emperor hires two tailors who promise to make him a set of remarkable new clothes that will be invisible to anyone who is either incompetent or stupid.

When the emperor goes to see his new clothes, he sees nothing at all - for the tailors are swindlers and there aren't any clothes.

Afraid of being judged incompetent or stupid, the emperor pretends to be delighted with the new clothes and "wears" them in a grand parade through the town.

Everyone else also pretends to see them, until a child yells out, "He hasn't got any clothes on!"

In this case, as some NGOs are reportedly pleading for 'Mugabe's bail', Global Witness has pointed out the emptiness of the pretensions of the regime's propaganda about Marange diamonds being "clean" and "knocking down world prices".

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Zimbabwe: Diamond Cash Hidden in Tax-Free Havens

02-03-2012 22:46 Artist B Dot Jack: Label Swaga Entertainment: http://www.swagaent.com Directed & Edited by Calvin Evans | DP Camera Work: Jaime Schirmer http://www.calvinevansphotography.com Swaga Entertainment's Artist B Dot Jack Shoots with Celebrity Photographer Calvin Evans. Be on the look out for the release of his "Hit Single Shake Somethin" video coming soon.

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B Dot Jack Behind The Scenes of "Shut It Down" - Video

March 03, 2012 17:41 PM

Expanded Offshore "Cash Pool" Needed To Internationalize China's Yuan: Expert

BEIJING, March 3 (Bernama) -- An expanded offshore "capital pool" of China's yuan, or renminbi, is needed to promote wider international use of the currency, a senior investment banker who is also a member of China's top advisory body has suggested.

To increase the amount of yuan offshore, the Chinese government needs to create more channels for investing in yuan overseas and offer varied yuan-denominated investment products, Fang Fang, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and vice chairman of J.P. Morgan Asia Investment Banking, told Xinhua news agency on Friday.

"Last year, I submitted a proposal aimed at facilitating the transfer of yuan between domestic and offshore markets, including expanding the yuan pool in Hong Kong," said Fang, who will attend the annual session of the CPPCC National Committee starting on Saturday.

"Some of my advice has been put in place since then, but more efforts remain to be made in expanding the offshore pool of Chinese currency," he said, adding that his proposal this year will mainly focus on this issue.

Fang said that as one of the most important offshore yuan markets, Hong Kong saw a slowdown in the growth rate of its renminbi deposits, which increased less than one-fold last year, compared with fourfold in 2010.

There were three reasons for the slowdown: reduced expectations for the yuan's appreciation, a decline in trade settlement due to slowdown in growth of Chinese exports, and limited investment opportunities in the offshore yuan market, Fang said.

As for how to increase the yuan pool, he proposed bolstering investment channels and options for the currency so as to attract more investors to put money into the offshore yuan market, thus securing a sufficient supply of the yuan.

This entails allowing investors to use the yuan for direct investment overseas and adding variety to yuan products, including introducing yuan-denominated assets and bulk commodities, the senior banker said.

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Expanded Offshore "Cash Pool" Needed To Internationalize China's Yuan: Expert

Enlarge Uwe Meinhold/AFP/Getty Images

Ramona Markstein and her cat Fritz wearing a mini-camera around his neck sit in front of a laptop where pictures taken by Fritz are displayed on Jan. 21, 2008 in Hartenstein, eastern Germany. Cats have long been popular on the internet.

Ramona Markstein and her cat Fritz wearing a mini-camera around his neck sit in front of a laptop where pictures taken by Fritz are displayed on Jan. 21, 2008 in Hartenstein, eastern Germany. Cats have long been popular on the internet.

Perry Stein is an intern at The New Republic.

Cats may not be man's best friend, but they're arguably something even better: man's key to instant Internet pageviews. It's a long-established fact that Internet content whether it's a cutesy video, a photoshopped inside joke, or a longform public health article has a better chance of achieving coveted "viral" status if it somehow evokes the sound of purring.

But if we've come to accept that cats play an outsized role on the World Wide Web, our understanding of why that's the case still lags. Most of us would simply plead that we happen to think of cats, and their various digital reproductions, as "cute," but the sheer magnitude of their popularity suggests that there's something more than a purely subjective phenomenon at work. Fortunately, natural and social scientists have managed to shed some light on the mystery.

The first thing to acknowledge is that there was a deep interest in cats long before there was an Internet. Miles Orvell, a cultural historian at Temple University who specializes in visual culture, said that what the Internet has done is leverage a preexisting fascination. "There's a contagious effect of the Internet where something that is there as a latent possibility can emerge at large in society," Orvell said. "It's not so much creating this interest in cats, it's more exploiting this interest that was already there."

Orvell pointed out that Western culture's interest in cats extends as far back as the ninth century, when an Irish monk wrote a poem about his cat called "Pangur Ban." It would prove a lasting trope. Nine-hundred years later, Christopher Smart would write the poem "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry;" in the 1930s T.S. Eliot wrote his famed Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which later became the basis for the musical CATS. Outside of literature, cats became a staple of American popular imagery in the twentieth century, from television advertisements to Tom and Jerry. Cat videos on the Internet that garner millions of hits, Orvell says, should be thought of as an animated extension of the cat calendars of yesteryear.

But why have cats specifically been so successful at soliciting our attention? One hypothesis is that there is a fateful link between cats and human babies that explains their Internet stardom. According to Michael Newall, a philosopher of art at the University of Kent, our inordinate interest in cats may derive from their formal resemblance to our offspring their big eyes, smallish noses, and dome-shaped heads trigger the evolutionary nurturing instincts that we have evolved toward babies. There may even be a multiplying "superstimulus" effect at work: Newall posits that the exaggerated proportions of cats' baby-like features prompt an exaggeratedly intense, and involuntary, response in people.

But the reason that cats have catapulted to cyber-fame isn't purely biological: There are social factors at play as well. Steve Dale, a cat behavior consultant and pet journalist, told me that cat aficionados have been particularly drawn to the Internet because they lack other public safety valves where they can express their affection. "In the world of cats, there is no dog park," Dale says. "For cat owners, the dog park is the Internet."

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New Republic: Why Do Cats Run The Internet?