This is dedicated to His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Honourable Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and his coterie of sycophantic, obsequious ingrates:

1.Queen Elizabeth II is the fortieth monarch since William the Conqueror obtained the crown of England.
2.In 2002, aged 76, she was the oldest monarch to celebrate a Golden Jubilee. The youngest was James I (James VI of Scotland) at 51 years.
3.Since 1952, she has conferred over 387,700 honours and awards.
4.Elizabeth has personally held over 540 Investitures.
5.She speaks fluent French and often uses the language for audiences and state visits. She does not require an interpreter.
6.The Queen has received over 3 million items of correspondence during her reign.
7.Over the course of the reign, around 1.1 million people have attended garden parties at Buckingham Palace or the Palace of Holyrood House (Elizabeth ended Presentation Parties in 1958).
8.Over the reign, she has given regular Tuesday evening audiences to 10 British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill 1951-55, Sir Anthony Eden 1955-57, Harold Macmillan 1957-63, Sir Alec Douglas-Home 1963-64, Harold Wilson 1964-70 and 1974-76, Edward Heath 1970-74, James Callaghan 1976-79, Margaret Thatcher 1979-90, John Major 1990-97, Tony Blair 1997-present. There have also been 10 US Presidents during her reign.
9.Tony Blair was the first Prime Minister to have been born during her reign. He was born in early May 1953 - a month before the Coronation.
10.The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh introduced small, informal luncheon parties at Buckingham Palace to meet distinguished people from all professions, trades and vocations. The first was held on 11th May 1956 and the tradition continues to this day. There are usually 6-8 guests and two members of the Household attending.
11.Elizabeth is patron of more than 620 charities and organisations.
12.During her reign, she has made more than 256 official overseas visits to 129 different countries.
13.Many of Elizabeth's official tours were undertaken on the Royal Yacht Britannia. It was launched by the Queen on April 16, 1953 and was commissioned for service on January 7,1954. It was de- commissioned in December 1997. During this time, Britannia travelled more than a million miles on Royal and official duties.
14.Britannia was first used by Elizabeth when she embarked with the Duke of Edinburgh on May 1,1954 at Tobruk for the final stage of their Commonwealth Tour returning to the Pool of London. The last time Elizabeth was on board for an official visit was on August 9, 1997 for a visit to Arran.
15.Elizabeth has visited Australia 15 times, Canada 23 times, Jamaica six times and New Zealand 10 times . Her Majesty most recently visited Australia in March 2006 to open the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
16.Since her accession to the throne in 1952, she has visited Edinburgh nearly every year, taking up residence in the Palace of Holyroodhouse during Holyrood Week.
17.During her reign, the Queen has received many unusual gifts including a variety of live animals. The more unusual of which have been placed in the care of the London Zoo - among them jaguars and sloths from Brazil, and two black beavers from Canada. There have also been gifts of pineapples, eggs, a box of snail shells, a grove of maple trees and 7kg of prawns.
18.Elizabeth has sent around 100,000 telegrams to centenarians in the UK and the Commonwealth.
19.She has sent more than 280,000 telegrams to couples in the UK and the Commonwealth celebrating their diamond wedding (60 years) anniversary.
20.Her real birthday is on April 21, but it is celebrated officially in June.
21.She has attended 34 Royal Variety performances.
22.She has opened 15 bridges in the United Kingdom.
23.She has given over 91 State banquets during her reign.
24.Since 1952, The Queen has undertaken 78 State Visits accompanied by The Duke of Edinburgh; the most recent being to Singapore. in March 2006.
25.She has launched 23 ships in her lifetime. The first was HMS Vanguard which she launched - as Princess Elizabeth - on November 30, 1944 in Clydebank. Her first launch as Queen was Britannia, also from Clydebank .
26.The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh have sent about 37,500 Christmas cards during her reign.
27.She has given out about 78,000 Christmas puddings to staff continuing the custom of King George V and King George VI. In addition, the Queen gives all her staff a gift at Christmas time.
28.Every year she sends Christmas trees to Westminster Abbey, Wellington Barracks, St Paul's Cathedral, St Giles, Edinburgh, The Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh, Crathie Church and local schools and churches in the Sandringham area.
29.Elizabeth learnt to drive in 1945 when she joined the Army.
30.She was a Girl Guide (1937) and Sea Ranger (1943).
31.As Princess Elizabeth she travelled on the London Underground for the first time in May 1939 with her governess Marion Crawford and her sister Princess Margaret.
32.The Queen is a keen photographer and enjoys taking pictures of her family. The Duke of York is also a keen photographer and has taken a number of photographs of Elizabeth , including an official photograph for Her Majesty's Golden Jubilee in 2002.
33.The Queen was born at 17 Bruton St, London W1 on April 21, 1926, was baptised on May 29, 1926 in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace, and was confirmed on March 28, 1942 in the private chapel at Windsor Castle.
34.With the birth of Prince Andrew in 1960, Elizabeth became the first reigning Sovereign to have a child since Queen Victoria, who had her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, in 1857.
35.Elizabeth has 30 godchildren.
36.The first football match the Queen attended was the 1953 FA Cup Final.
37.She has taken the salute in every Trooping the Colour ceremony since the start of her reign, with the exception of 1955, when a national rail strike forced the cancellation of the parade.
38.The Queen has sat for 139 official portraits during her lifetime, two of which were with The Duke of Edinburgh. The most recent sitting was for Rolf Harris (2005) . She was just seven years old when she sat for her first portrait in 1933, which was commissioned by her mother and painted by the Hungarian artist Philip Alexius de Laszlo.
39.In 2003 she sat for the first and only hologram portrait.
40.There have been 11 sculptures of Elizabeth. The most recent was in 2005 by Angela Conner for St George's Chapel, Windsor.
41.The first 'Royal walkabout' took place during the visit by The Queen and Prince Philip to Australia and New Zealand in 1970. The practice was introduced to allow them to meet a greater number of people, not simply officials and dignitaries.
42.In 1969 the first television film about the family life of the Royal Family was made, and shown on the eve of the Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales.
43.An important innovation during her reign was the opening in 1962 of a new gallery at Buckingham Palace to display items from the Royal Collection. The brainchild of The Duke of Edinburgh, the new Queen's Gallery occupied the space of the Palace's bomb-damaged private chapel. It was the first time that parts of the Palace had been opened to the general public.
44.The only time the Queen has had to interrupt an overseas tour was in 1974 during a tour of Australia and Indonesia. She was called back from Australia when a general election was called suddenly. The Duke of Edinburgh continued the programme in Australia, and Elizabeth re-joined the tour in Indonesia.
45.She has opened Parliament every year except 1959 and 1963, when she was expecting Prince Andrew and Prince Edward respectively.
46.She went on her first State Visit as Princess Elizabeth, to South Africa with her mother and father, then King and Queen, from February to May 1947. The tour included (the then) Rhodesia and Bechuanaland, Swaziland and Basutoland (now Zambia and Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho). The Princess celebrated her 21st birthday in Cape Town. Her first State Visit as Queen was technically to Kenya, as King George VI died and she acceded the throne during the tour. The tour had to be abandoned.
47.Her first Commonwealth tour began on November 24, 1953, and included visits to Bermuda, Jamaica, Panama, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, the Cocos Islands, Ceylon, Aden, Uganda, Libya, Malta and Gibraltar. The total distance covered was 70,196km.
48.In 1986 the Queen became the first British Monarch to visit China.
49.She has made a Christmas Broadcast to the Commonwealth every year of her reign except 1969, when a repeat of the film 'Royal Family' was shown and a written message from the Queen issued.
50.In 1953, she made the first Christmas Broadcast from overseas, (rather than from the UK), broadcasting live from New Zealand. The first televised broadcast was in 1957, made live. The first pre-recorded broadcast took place in 1960 to allow transmission around the world.

He-he, hi-hi. What your address? My CIO will want to say "hello" to you.

Regards,
Mad Bob Mugabe

Great stuff Pietro. Brilliant job, thanks Pietro.

What about this, little history, but I am conviced it won't hurt us any more now.

Remember, the minor recession in 1876-7, again optimism prevailed in spite of disturbing political events. The Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1 together with a reaction to overextension of credit and excessive speculation in diamond-mining shares, led to a crisis in 1881, followed by a general dpression in South Africa from 1882 to 1886, described by Schumann as "the most servere South Africa had to endure during the 19th century. The situation was intensified by recession in England and America, which illustrated the growing inter-dependence between South Africa and the world's commodity and money markets.

In the diamond-mining industry itself major technical difficulties had been encountered. Large numbers of individual claim-holders, who could operate satisfactorily on alluvialdiggings, were wholly unsuited to undertake operations involving deep-level mining. This was obvious to all, but Kimberley had drawn together men of quite exceptional financial and administrative genius. his after the epic struggle of power between Celcil Rhodes and Barny Barnato, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., finally emerged to reorganize mining as a capitalized and concentrated modern industry, employing the latestscientific techniques, and establishing a world monopoly of sales through the London Ddiamond Syndicate. Kimberley was in the nature of a dress rehearsel for the Witwatersrand, and he financial strength and mining experience acquired at Kimberley, were available to tackle the much greater technical difficulties of gold-mining i the Transvaal.

After five years of recession, the Witwatersrand was proclaimed a gold-mining area in 1886, and the whole of southern Africa was drawn into the new mining boom which exceeded anything yet experienced. Soon it became clear, hat the Witwatersrand, was no mere flash in the pan, but was a huge auriferous formation, though few at that time would have believed hat every eighty years some of the mines would still be in production, and tha the Witwatersrand would have yielded a total of over £6,000 million worth of gold. Deep in the Transvaal lay the Witwatersrand, the poorest, most backward, and administratively least competent of the four white territories. Great technical dfficulties had to be overcome. The gold content of the ore was extremely low by international comparison with other gold-mining areas, and a the highest technical and administrative skills were neccessary to render it a paying proposition. The value of large-scale mining units had been learned at Kimberley, and the "group system" whereby financial "house" controlled a number of mines, soon developed. This gave financial strength and higher quality technical knowledge that a single mine could have obtained on its own. Deep-level mining encountered many difficulties, such as heat, dust, ventilation, water disposal, so that undergrounf engineering and ore recovery called for application of scientific knowledge on a vast scale. The story of how the difficulies were one by one overcome is an epic of applied science, of which perhaps the most important single event was the introduction of the Mac Arthur-Forrest cyanide process of gold recovery.

Moreover, the provisionof the infra-structure for a modern industry in a whole underdeveloped area called for organizational abilities of the first order. Labour, housing, power, transport, water and all these had to be developed from scratch. Convienty enough were coal deposits located near the gold-mines, and coal-mining was developed to suply the power, for deep-level mining as well as the railways.

Foreigners poured into the Transvaal, and Johannesburg, overninght, rose like a mushroom. These buitelaanders met hulle vreemde kapital ( with there foreign investment developed the gold-mining industry at great speed and, by 1888, fourty-four mines were in operation, with a nominal capital of £6,800,000 and a gold output worth £1,300,000 per annum.

This masive influx of foreigners and there capital, of course the most of it British, was visualized by the Tranvaalers who newly regained independence and their taditional way of life, as a grave threat. They believed and we know know, that the British and Cecil John Rhodes in particular, had set covetous eyes upon their wealth, and they welcomed friendly advances from Germany and Holland. Their financial position improved and enabled them to negotiate for a railway line to Delgoa Bay, which besides being shorter a shorter distance to the coast, would free them of their bondage to the Cape and Natal ports. After 1886, railway freight rates, customs tariffs, military and political strategy were very closely linked."


Pietro ou maat, jy weet die spreukwoord sê en ek be-am, sipres bome se wortels strek vêr. Dit het tyd geword dat ons, ons hande in eie boesem moet steek.

__________________
pangkas