The Man The Master The Marvel

Salvador Dali is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. His fiercely technical yet highly unusual paintings, sculptures, and visionary explorations in film and life-size interactive art ushered in a new generation of imaginative expression. From his personal life to his professional endeavours, he always took great risks and proved how rich the world can be when you dare to embrace pure, boundless creativity.

Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory. A visionary within the art world, Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) has long been revered as an iconic Surrealist artist who possessed immense talent and fearless creativity. Although esteemed primarily for his painting ability, Dalí was a man of many talents, excelling in many artistic pursuits including filmmaking, printmaking, and fashion. Known for his breathtakingly innovative works of art, Dalí created artwork that surpassed the boundaries of traditional art and dared to be bold, unique and avant-garde.

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Glyndwr Michael:Glyndwr Michael as William Martin was buried in Huelva, Spain. In 1998, the inscription GLYNDWR MICHAEL; SERVED AS MAJOR WILLIAM MARTIN, RM was added to his grave-stone by the British government.

Operation Mincemeat

How a Corpse Fooled the Nazis

 In World War II, a secret department of British ‘corkscrew thinkers’ hatched a plan to use the cadaver of an unclaimed homeless man to turn the tide of the war in the Allies’ favour. It worked.

Ewen Montagu and his team of deceivers achieved in Operation MINCEMEAT what all deceivers endeavour to achieve upon commencing an operation: complete success. By adhering to the six principles of Military Deception (focus, objective, centralized control, security, timeliness, and integration), Montagu duped the Germans into altering their strategic plans; thereby enabling the Allies to achieve theirs.

“You can’t get bodies just for the asking, you know . . . each one has to be accounted for.”

—London coroner Bentley Purchase

Seventy three years ago, the mission of acting Major William Martin of the British Royal Marines was determined to have been a success. The top secret operational documents on the planned Allied invasion of the Balkans and Sardinia Martin had carried with him had been intercepted and transmitted all the way up to the highest levels of the German high command and even to Adolf Hitler himself.  This seemingly disastrous outcome was a positive for the Allies because the success of Martin’s mission, Operation:  Mincemeat, hinged upon the Germans discovering and believing the documents that he carried with him to be real when in fact they actually composed a part of one of WWII’s most ambitious and elaborate misinformation campaigns.  Nothing about the documents was real: not even their carrier.

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Bad luck the Kraut pedo died, but a hiding was probably well deserved.

A wealthy British businessman who killed an alleged German paedophile in an exclusive Spanish expat resort after catching him taking photographs of his young children will not go to jail despite being found guilty of manslaughter, Spanish judicial sources have told The Telegraph.

Estate agent Devinder Kainth was given a six-month jail sentence after admitting that he had killed Sandro Rottman by punching him at a restaurant in the upmarket area of Sotogrande, near Gibraltar.

He had discovered that the 43-year-old German socialite had pictures on his iPad of Mr Kainth’s young daughter, taken without permission.

The 39-year-old Kainth was eating at the resort’s Spinnaker restaurant in February of this year with his glamorous partner Gemma Hawkins and their three children – two young sons and a daughter – when an argument started over the images on Mr Rottman’s tablet, leading to the British man punching the German several times in the head.

Rottman, who was suffering from severe liver cirrhosis, died within minutes.

According to the Spanish judge who sentenced Kainth, “they were punches which would not normally have caused a person’s death”.   Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Photo: CIA People
Virginia Hall of Special Operations Branch receiving the Distinguished Service Cross from General Donovan, September 1945.

WANTED

The Limping Lady

The Nazi secret police were hunting her. They had distributed “wanted” posters throughout Vichy France, posters with a sketch of a sharp-featured woman with shoulder-length hair and wide-set eyes, details provided by French double agents.

They were determined to stop her, an unknown “woman with a limp” who had established resistance networks, located drop zones for money and weapons and helped downed airmen and escaped POWs travel to safety. The Gestapo’s orders were clear and merciless: “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.

Virginia Hall’s origins began in Baltimore where it soon became evident that she had no intention of heading down the road of life to housewifedom. After a year at Barnard and another at Radcliffe, she was off to Europe in 1926 to finish her education at the Sorborne in Paris and the Konsularakademie in Vienna.

Then came a series of frustrating attempts to join the Foreign Service. She did not do well in her first examination, so she decided to gain experience and try again while working for the State Department as a clerk overseas. It was while in Turkey, in December 1933, that she lost her lower leg in a hunting accident. After recovering at home, she was fitted with a wooden prosthesis that had rubber under the foot. She then returned to her clerk duties, this time in Venice, Italy, where her Foreign Service dreams ended: She was told that Department regulations prohibited hiring anyone without the necessary number of appendages.

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not of the actual incident

Four African migrants have drowned and up to 35 are missing after their boat sank in the Mediterranean early on Thursday about 65km north of the Moroccan coast, Spanish sea rescue services say.

Lifeguards pulled four bodies from the sea after they were spotted by a Colombian military helicopter helping in the search, a sea rescue spokesman said. Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

If citizens of Auckland ever want to take a sanity check to Len Brown, Auckland Council and their looney ideas then look no further than Spain.

Spain is in debt up to its eyeballs and mostly due to expenditure by local government on projects they said were needed but turned out to be white elephants.

We have the same risk here in Auckland. Just because the Mayor says a tunnel or a rail link to the airport are projects that must be built, doesn’t actually mean they are a good idea.

In fact, if Spain is anything to go buy – large scale transport infrastructure expenditure choices by local government are actually pretty dumb.

In September, something strange will happen at Castellon airport in eastern Spain: an aircraft will land there.

Despite being officially opened with much ceremony in March 2011, to date, no regular commercial flight has ever landed or taken off from the “ghost” airport, leaving it as a stark reminder of just how much Spain binged on cheap debt in the years before the economic crisis.   Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Credit: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Mega Tyre Dump Blights Spanish Countryside

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Photo: José Palazon/Reuters, Oct 22, 2014.
A golfer hits a tee shot as African migrants sit atop a border fence during an attempt to cross into Spanish territories between Morocco and Spain’s north African enclave of Melilla October 22, 2014. Around 400 migrants attempted to cross the border into Spain, according to local media.

Realities Clash

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Greenpeace likes to protest but when things go wrong they turn into a whiny bunch of girls.

When one of the crew members ends up in the drink all they do is scream while it is the Navy blokes who get their kit off and dive in to rescue her.

It is astonishing that they tool up with cutters, grapples, helmets and safety gear and then wonder why they get sorted out by professionals.

Furthermore when they clearly are warned off approaching the drilling vessel they continue on.    Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

All the bribes and threats and whatever else is needed inside the morally corrupt United Nations and despite the best efforts of our media and opposition to poofinger the bid has paid off, NZ has won its seat on the Security Council.

I fear however that John Key and Murray McCully have simply had an Underpants Stealing strategy.

1. Win seat on Security Council
2. ???
3. Finish up two years and move back to obscurity.

In a vote at the UN’s New York headquarters on Thursday local time (Friday morning NZT), New Zealand picked up 145 votes, claiming one of the “Western Europe and other nations” seats – ahead of Turkey and Spain – in the first round of voting.

New Zealand will take its seat on the council for two years, starting on January 1, 2015. The last time New Zealand sat on the council was 1993-94. It had earlier stints in 1953/54 and 1966.

It has been hailed a victory for small states by Prime Minister John Key, who said it came after hard work over a decade lobbying for the seat.

“We have worked very hard on the bid for close to a decade because we believe that New Zealand can make a positive difference to world affairs and provide a unique and independent voice at the world’s top table.

“It has been more than 20 years since New Zealand was last on the Council and we are ready to contribute again.   Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz