WikiLeaks

"Shares in Bank of America, the largest US bank, tumbled more than 3 per cent on Tuesday amid speculation it would be the next target of leaked documents from WikiLeaks."

Interesting... what have they been up to...?

Sarah Palin: "Assange is not a 'journalist', any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist'."

False equivalence. Palin, dumb bitch, also calls his actions treasonous, so presumably she didn't even know he was Australian.

Meghan McCain: "creepy rogue Swedish guy"

Oh the boys in Sweden will just love you for that, Meghan.

Now consider:

"In April the website (WikiLeaks) released graphic, classified video footage of an American helicopter gunship firing on and killing Iraqis in a Baghdad street in 2007, apparently in cold blood. The de-encrypted video, which WikiLeaks released on its own sites as well as on YouTube, caused an international uproar.
The Baghdad video has been WikiLeaks' biggest coup to date, although an extraordinary number of unauthorised documents - more than a million - have found their way to the website. These include a previously secret, 110-page draft report by the international investigators Kroll, revealing allegations of huge corruption in Kenya involving the family of the former president Daniel arap Moi; the US government's classified manual of standard operating procedures for Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that it was policy to hide some prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross; a classified US intelligence report on how to marginalise WikiLeaks; secret Church of Scientology manuals; an internal report by the global oil trader, Trafigura, about dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast; a classified US profile of the former Icelandic ambassador to the US in which the ambassador is praised for helping quell publicity about the CIA's activities involving rendition flights; and the emails leaked from the embattled Climate Research Unit at East Anglia in Britain, last November, which triggered the so-called ''climategate'' scandal."

Note the frothing "hunt him down and clip him" cowboys were not so passionately and murderously critical of WikiLeaks when the latter gave them Climategate... hmm?

Based on Valerie Plame's memoir...

Double Oh Dahl

Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other children's stories, was apparently a spy.
This might be the most interesting "outed as a spy" since Errol Flynn.

Donald Sturrock has written the first biography of Dahl - "Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl" (not the book in the picture... that happens to my kid's favourite Dahl).

It surprises me greatly there has never been a biography before.

According to this biography, Dahl did the Bond thing and slept around with wealthy women in America while working for an organisation called the British Security Co-ordination, established to promote British interests and counter Nazi propaganda. Officially he did public relations at the British embassy in Washington, after injuries sustained as a fighter pilot ended his RAF career.

"I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts (female) that had more than $50,000 a year" goes one claim.

...okay...

The biography also goes into Dahl's experiences during his boarding school days in the British Midlands, which he wrote about in his book "Boy - Tales of Childhood". British boarding schools are firmly associated in my mind with pathological bullying. I remember this being a touchstone of actor David Niven's autobiography. Dahl's account corroborates this.

He was married to actress Patricia Neal. His oldest daughter Olivia died of measles encephalitis at the age 7. He kept a book which no-one knew about till after his death called simply "Olivia". It was found at the back of a drawer in his writing hut at the end of his garden. It contains his thoughts about her, which he never spoke of. He was, however, a passionate proponent of immunisation thereafter.

Roald Dahl died in 1990 age 74.

He was buried with his pool cues and his typewriter, according to one account I found.

According to another it was snooker cues, a bottle of burgundy, some chocolates, pencils and (I don't know why...) a power saw.

Apart from English he spoke Norwegian and Swahili.