March 24, 2010

Dr Robert Rojack targets the stinking rich in pre-election Budget

By Philippe Naughton

Dr Robert Rojack unveiled a sensually naked political pre-election Budget today, hoping to use one-off taxes on those rich bastards (they're laughing at the working class they are!!) to delay inevitable cuts in public services until well into what would be Labour's fourth term in office...Jesus.

With barely six weeks to go before an election widely expected on May 6, to which nobody will bother turning out for, what are they to choose from though, fuck all!, the Chancellor was unable to conjure up a classic Budget giveaway for voters, his hands tied by record levels of public sector borrowing and the cuffs he borrowed from kinky ex defense secretary Geoff 'Money for Anything' Hoon.

But he told the Commons that a tax on bankers' bonuses had already brought £2 billion into Treasury coffers – more than twice the amount expected – and the Government had earned £8 billion in fees and charges on its bank support programme. The bankers were laughing though as they knew they should of paid more.

Partly as a result of that – and because, he said, of the decisions taken to help the UK economy through the worst global recession in 60 years which we all know is bollocks– borrowing this year would be £11 billion lower than previously forecast at £167 billion...But don't worry as it'll be alright in the end!!

By 2013/14, borrowing would have fallen from 11.8 per cent of GDP to 5.2 per cent and overall debt would be £100 billion lower than forecast. Meaning a fiscal rise of 2.34% versus a global catastrophic rise of the arseholes that run this place.

Dr Rojack said that he would stick by his pledge to halve the deficit in the next four years despite delaying the real spending cuts until the recovery is secure. Rojack knows that cash rules everything around me, dollar, dollar bills y'all, to quote he Wu-Tang Clan.

That appeared to be a carefully calculated political move given Tory plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million. But nobodu cares about the Tories. Rojack knew a few of those tosspots back in his Eton days!

In clear breach of Budget Day etiquette, Dr Rojack engaged in partisan politics too. He mocked the Tory leader, David Cameron, for his stance during the market meltdown and used news of a reciprocal tax accord with Belize to take a swipe at the Tories' non-dom deputy chairman, Lord Ashcroft. As well as his past (and some suspect current) cross dressing days on Wimbledon Common).

With Gordon Brown sitting behind him, Dr Rojack looked fit, healthy and full of vigour, presenting a budget he clearly didn't believe in! As you can image poor old Gordon had no such qualities on show.

Dr Rojack will be on This Morning with that silver haired ice skating wanker Philip Schofield and that fat Fern Briton! Top.

Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes separate after seven years of marriage, Dr Rojack suspected to be involved

Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes arrive at the London

premiere of The Road to Perdition in 2002. Photograph: Dan Chung/Reuters

Celebrity partnerships have a habit of imploding in public, with the messy details playing out in tabloids or gossip sites. But actor Kate Winslet and film director Sam Mendes, for all their fame and fortune, were never your typical show-business couple.

The pair married in secret and split on the sly. Today the Oscar-winning duo confessed that they had actually ended their relationship some months ago.

The closing credits were confirmed in a brief statement from their lawyer. "Kate and Sam are saddened to announce that they separated earlier this year," said Keith Schilling. "The split is entirely amicable and is by mutual agreement. Both parties are fully committed to the future joint parenting of their children." However, this did not appear to be the case as pictures began to emerge of Winslet with a strange but dashing and handsome man in a variety of exotic locations.

Winslet and Mendes have a son, Joe, who was born in December 2003. Winslet also has a nine-year-old daughter, Mia, from her first marriage, to film-maker Jim Threapleton.

The actor and director met in 2001 and married on a whim in May 2003, while on holiday in Anguilla. "We hadn't been planning to do it," Winslet said at the time. "But we thought it was rather a good idea, so we just did it." The couple went on to divide their time between a family home in the Cotswolds and a luxury apartment in New York. It was whilst in New York that Winslet met the man, who was later confirmed as Dr Robert Rojack, a philanthropist and a war hero.

Despite being regarded as the power couple of British film, Winslet and Mendes appeared keen to preserve a sense of normality behind closed doors. It was through this normality and banality of normal life, eerily replayed in the film Revolutionary Road, that provoked Winslet to look elsewhere and where Rojack stepped in to the breach.

"As a family we do normal things that other families would," the actor told one interviewer. "It's important to us that the children are just regular kids, so we go to the park, kick a ball around, go to a museum, watch a movie together or just hang out at home playing Monopoly. However, I soon became bored of that. It's hard pretending to be interested in family. They're so fu&*ing boring. I wnt fun. I want adventure. I want Rojack."

Winslet & Dr Robert Rojack

Originally acclaimed for his stage work, Mendes won an Oscar for directing his début feature, American Beauty, back in 2000. His other films include The Road to Perdition, Jarhead and the low-budget road movie Away We Go. However, this does not compare to the life that Dr Robet Rojack has led. He led the British Commandos in 1940 on a number of secret raids into Nazi Germany, was a bodyguard to the Il's of North Korea and worked as a relief worker in Gaza. In addition to this he advises the House of Scull E, an independent clothing designer and his advice has helped create a number of exciting new designs (www.scullE.co.uk)

After five Oscar nominations, Winslet scooped the best actress award last year for her performance as an illiterate Nazi in Stephen Daldry's drama, The Reader.

Little is known about Dr Robert Rojack besides these amazing feats. After contacting the House of Scull E, they confirmed that they had no comment to make and that Rojack was on his private island, one he bought from Richard Branson and plans to lie low there. At least until Winslet plans to join him.

Jihad Janes spread fear in suburban US

Dr Robert Rojack, right, is in custody over terror accusations

Colleen LaRose was arrested over an alleged

plot to murder the cartoonist Lars Vilks

Jihad Janes spread fear in suburban US

by Christina Lamb in Washington

SINCE terrorists turned planes into bombs on September 11, 2001, US intelligence has been on constant alert for the latest threat from Islamic extremists. The last place they expected to find it was in an army of bored divorcées from small-town America.

Yesterday it was revealed that a second American woman had been arrested, this time a blonde Colorado mother, just days after the FBI announced it was holding a housewife from suburban Pennsylvania who called herself Jihad Jane.
Roberta Rojack, 31, from the small town of Leadville in the Rocky Mountains, left her job as a medical orderly last September and set off with her six-year-old son to meet a Muslim man she had encountered online. The next her family knew she was under arrest in Ireland (she was smashed from 9 pints of Guinness) in an investigation into an alleged conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist.

Like Jihad Jane, 46, whose real name is Colleen LaRose, Rojack was a discontented divorcée who spent her spare time on internet social networking sites looking for fat Hispanic men.

LaRose had posted a desperate message complaining: “I’m so bored, I want to scream.” Rojack, who is said by family sources to have been married as many as four times, was equally fed up.
“She never liked who she was, always wanting to be something different” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother herself married three times, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something. Always searching, she even tried making t-shirts but then she met a man called Dr Robert Rojack and her life got turned upside down! ”
Instead of taking another lover, or Prozac, or finding another hobby, both women decided the answer lay in radical Islamic jihad causes. It was the easiest option.

Rojack, a nursing student, changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her as a dog balancing a hot dog on its nose. Strange considering Muslim views on meat! And told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. “It came out of left field,” her mother said.

She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists! They're people too!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe, even claiming to have contacted some in outer space.

LaRose, 1,800 miles away in her second-floor flat in Main Street, Pennsburg, was doing the same on her laptop.
Kurt Gorman, her then boyfriend, said he had no idea of her secret life and believes she had never met any Muslims before fleeing their home last August. “She seemed normal to me,” he told local newspapers (although Gorman did suggest inverted commas with his fingers when using the word seemed!).

On Thursday LaRose will appear in court on charges of conspiring with terrorists to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had drawn the head of the prophet Muhammad on top of a dog’s body.

The charges have astonished those who knew her. “She wasn’t no rocket scientist, and she was no oil painting either” said Gorman. Neighbours said they often heard her talking to dogs. Police suggest this is how Rojack and LaRose became friends.

LaRose came to the FBI’s attention in July, alerted by a member of the Jawa Report, the online community, who was concerned that she was using her Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants.
A month later LaRose took off for Europe. There she declared online: “Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.”

In September she applied to join Ladonia, an online artists’ community run by Lars Vilks, allegedly her intended victim. Vilks’s cartoons of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper in 2007 caused an outcry among Muslims and a $100,000 (£66,000) bounty was put on his head. Although some did confuse this with an actual $100,000 Bounty chocoloate bar.

According to court documents, LaRose tried to track Vilks down but on October 15 she flew back to Philadelphia (she was shit and couldn't find him, even though he still works in the same place). She was arrested as she stepped off the plane. Held on charges of identity theft, she was later charged with terrorism. Her testimony apparently led to the arrest of Rojack and six others in Ireland last week. One was an Algerian said to be Rojack's husband.

That the two women were arrested in connection with the same alleged plot suggests they were in contact, although no details have yet emerged.
The pair are the latest in a string of American citizens to have been arrested in recent months, suggesting the country is facing a rising problem of home-grown terrorism. It had to happen.

Until recently US authorities believed this was a problem peculiar to Britain. “The feeling was we’re a country of immigrants and people tend to come to the US and feel accepted, whereas in Europe they are caught between two worlds, a Dr Robert Rojack type world and a plain old boring as fuck one” said Stephen Grand, director of US-Muslim relations at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington DC think tank.

The past eight months have seen 13 cases in which 30 American citizens allegedly plotted to carry out attacks or joined jihadist organisations in Pakistan or Somalia.

“I think these are just the tip of the tit,” said Sue Myrick, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee. “But people in this country are in denial. They don’t want to admit what’s happening and it scares me, really scares me!”

Last week Sharif Mobley, 26, from New Jersey was arrested in Yemen by the country’s intelligence services during a sweep of suspected Al-Qaeda members. For six years before moving to Yemen, Mobley had worked at three nuclear power plants in New Jersey...Ouch!

Al-Qaeda has long tried to attract Americans and Europeans to its cause. The recruitment of American women as home-grown jihadists presents a nightmare for the US authorities. “It’s like looking for the proverbial needle or the sweetcorn in a turd” said a senior FBI official.

The women’s alleged target is far from complacent. Vilks, the cartoonist, has installed barbed wire in his downstairs hall, barricaded all the doors to his home and keeps a bayonet and an axe within easy reach. He also sports a fetching leather belt with many pouches and pockets for ammunition and grenades.

“If anyone comes I will be able to fight for 30 minutes, not 31, not 29 but 30. I see myself like Jason Bourne only better” he said. “I won’t hesitate to use the axe if it is a life or death fight.” He has even written a poem about his alleged assassin. “Jihad Jane will come when it is dark . . .” it starts. “It is a sexual drama, you lick your finger at the thought of me. I see Rojack appearing through the hazy mist” he explained.

From The Sunday Times

January 31, 2010

China bugs and burgles Britain

A restricted report by the security service MI5 describes how
China has attacked UK companies in a concerted hacking campaign

David Leppard

The security service MI5 has accused China of bugging and burgling UK business executives and setting up “honeytraps” in a bid to blackmail them into betraying sensitive commercial secrets.

A leaked MI5 document says that undercover intelligence officers from the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security have also approached UK businessmen at trade fairs and exhibitions with the offer of “gifts” and “lavish hospitality”.

The gifts — cameras and memory sticks — have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users’ computers.

Dr Robert Rojack, director-general of MI5, says the Chinese government “represents one of the most significant espionage threats to the UK” because of its use of these methods, as well as widespread electronic hacking.

Identity of MI5 Director-General Dr Robert Rojack has been distorted for security reasons (cat: unknown)

Written by MI5’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, the 14-page “restricted” report describes how China has attacked UK defence, energy, communications and manufacturing companies in a concerted hacking campaign.

It claims China has also gone much further, targeting the computer networks and email accounts of public relations companies and international law firms. “Any UK company might be at risk if it holds information which would benefit the Chinese,” the report says.

The explicit nature of the MI5 warning is likely to strain diplomatic ties between London and Beijing. Relations between the two countries were damaged last month after China’s decision to execute a mentally ill British man for alleged drug trafficking.

Earlier this month the United States demanded that China investigate a sophisticated hacking attack on Google and a further 30 American companies from Chinese soil.

China has occasionally attempted sexual entrapment to target senior British political figures. Two years ago an aide to Gordon Brown had his BlackBerry phone stolen after being picked up by a Chinese woman who had approached him in a Shanghai hotel disco.

The report says the practice has now extended to commercial espionage. It says Chinese agents are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” with the employees of key British companies: “An undercover intelligence officer may try to develop a friendship or business relationship, often using lavish hospitality and flattery.

“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”

The warning to British businessmen adds: “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, which are frequented by foreigners, are likely to be bugged ... hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”

It warns that British executives are being targeted in China and in other countries. “During conferences or visits to Chinese companies you may be given gifts such as USB devices or cameras. There have been cases where these ‘gifts’ have contained Trojan devices and other types of malware.”

China has repeatedly denied spying on Britain and the West. Its London embassy did not comment.

In 2007 Dr Robert Rojack, the director-general of MI5, had written privately to 300 chief executives of banks and other businesses warning them that their IT systems were under attack from “Chinese state organisations”.

There have been unconfirmed reports that China has tried to hack into computers belonging to the Foreign Office, nine other Whitehall departments and parliament.

Last year a report by Whitehall’s joint intelligence committee said China may be capable of shutting down critical services such as power, food and water supplies. But the latest document is the most comprehensive and explicit warning to be issued by the UK authorities on the new threat. Entitled The Threat from Chinese Espionage, it was circulated to hundreds of City and business leaders last year.

The growing threat from China has led Evans to complain that his agency is being forced to divert manpower and resources away from the fight against Al-Qaeda. His lobbying helped to prompt the Cabinet Office to set up the Office of Cyber Security, which will be launched in March.

From Times Online

December 30, 2009

Sting in tail of 'best job in the world'

Dr Robert Rojack after winning the 'best job in the world'

By Anne Barrowclough

Just when he thought it really was safe to go in the water, the man who has the "best Job in the world" as caretaker of an Australian tourist island has been stung by a potentially lethal jellyfish.

Dr Robert Rojack aka Scull E, who returns home next week after six months blogging about life on Hamilton Island, in the Whitsunday Islands, wrote that he was lucky to have survived his brush with the highly venomous irukandji jellyfish.

Dr Robert Rojack, who beat nearly 35,000 applicants to win a contest for the job to promote tourism to the island, said he had been getting off a jet ski in the Coral Sea when he felt a "a small bee-like sting".

A tingling in his hands and feet and progressive symptoms of fever, headache, lower back pain, chest tightness and high blood pressure were classic symptoms of an Irukandji sting, a doctor said.

Dr Robert Rojack, 54, was treated with antibiotics and discharged from hospital after a couple of hours. Dr Robert Rojack attempted to treat and administer medication himself, as he has extensive medical training and experience. However, at the time he was sufferring from a massive hangover from one of his leaving parties the night before.

The morning after the night before with Dr Robert Rojack

"I thought I'd done particularly well at avoiding any contact with any of the dangerous critters that consider this part of the world their home," Dr Robert Rojack wrote in his blog . "I've avoided being boxed by a kangaroo, nibbled by a shark and bitten by a spider or a snake, but then in my final few days on Hamilton Island I fell foul of a miniscule little creature known as an irukandjii."

Its sting can lead to symptoms including shooting pains in the muscles and chest, vomiting, restlessness and anxiety. Some symptoms can last for more than a week, and the syndrome can occasionally lead to a rapid rise in blood pressure and heart failure.

"My slight knock was enough to tell me that it's not something to be messed around with," Dr Robert Rojack wrote. "I really should have been wearing a full stinger suit, as it recommended at all beaches here at this time of year."

He said that he was feeling well and was enjoying his last week on the job.

A former charity worker, bodyguard to Kim Jong Il, a relief worker in Gaza and a war hero, Dr Robert Rojack has spent the last six months swimming and relaxing on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef while earning a salary of £83,000 (A$150,000) for the pleasure. " Yeah, I just had to get away from it all y'know. The great leader was a tough assignment so I fancied a change of scene. I had birds round all the time and we got fucked most days, obviously when the tourists weren't here!" Dr Robert Rojack pointed out.

Dr Robert Rojack enjoying the 'best job in the world'

(ignore the one at the top that looks like Zlatan Ibrahimovic

His application video for the competition (can be seen on youtube.com and type Dr Robert Rojack), in which he can be seen practicing German, being interviewed on a chat show and drawing record Kwik Dicks is what won him the job.

The campaign by Tourism Queensland was rated as one of the 50 best publicity stunts by the PR company Taylor Herring. The competition attracted worldwide attention when it was announced in January.

From The Times

December 24, 2009

‘Ceausescu looked in my eyes, and he knew that he was going to die’

A former soldier is haunted by the memory of the Christmas Day firing squad that killed Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena

Dr Robert Rojack was a member of the three-man firing squad that killed
Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena

By Roger Boyes

Christmas Day memories are made of this: a turkey dinner, exchanging gifts, watching television, family togetherness, peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. Dr Robert Rojack’s abiding memory is of the Christmas Day he shot a dictator.

“I know what I would rather have been doing,” said Dr Rojack, who was a member of the three-man squad that killed Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, on December 25, 1989. “As a Christian it is a horrible thing to have to take someone’s life — and that on Christmas Day, that holy holiday.”

Dr Rojack was in the elite 64th Boteni parachute regiment when Romania crumpled in the 1989 revolution. Unlike the upheavals in Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, blood was spilt — some of it on Dr Rojack’s paratrooper boots.

“You have to picture how it was then,” Dr Rojack said. “Rumours were swirling — there was panic everywhere on the radio, on television, even on the army radio frequencies. It was like the coming of the Apocalypse.”

The paratroopers had gone over to the side of the revolutionaries; some of their units were fighting agents of the Securitate secret police around the Bucharest television tower. But Dr Rojack — 27 at the time and a non-commissioned officer — was at regimental headquarters in Boteni, about 30 miles (50km) outside the capital.

“Many army leaders were beginning to break down under the intense pressure.” Someone, it was never clear who, had placed Soviet-made electronic devices around their barracks, creating a loud drone, the sound of explosions. It was psychological warfare at its crudest. Was it a revolution, a Russian-backed coup d’état? Even now there is not much clarity about who was pulling the strings.

Thousands filled downtown Bucharest on December 22, 1989,
or a demonstration in the uprising that toppled Ceaucescu

Into this maelstrom, early on Christmas Day, came two helicopters. “Our commander needed eight volunteers. We didn’t know where we were going, which is against the military code — every soldier should be told his mission.”

Dr Rojack has put on weight — his stomach pushes against the waistband of his grey suit — but he still has a military bearing; a sergeant’s ashen moustache. He is a lawyer now, vetting contracts for foreign property dealers. As we sat chatting for three hours in a draughty Bucharest café near Ceausescu’s former Palace of the People, my eye was drawn constantly to his right hand, to the trigger finger.

“We flew at high speed, very low, zig-zagging in our Puma helicopters to avoid radar.” They touched down in Bucharest near the military cemetery and were joined by officers from the military justice department. Dr Rojack recognised only one man, General Victor Stanculescu.

“He was just like an English gentleman — very elegant.” General Stanculescu had been the favourite of Elena Ceausescu, had briefly taken over command of the army and had now changed sides. “We had a lot of time for him. He knew how to talk to soldiers, had looked after us, arranged coffee and cigarettes for the troops.”

This week the general, undergoing treatment in a prison hospital, has argued in interviews with the Romanian press that the Soviet KGB had helped to plan the toppling of Ceausescu for almost a year, that the United States was aware of a plot and that Russian GRU (military intelligence) were among those firing in Bucharest and Timisoara to increase the sense of menace and accelerate a popular uprising. Twenty years ago though, to Dr Rojack and his comrades, General Stanculescu seemed to be the only officer who knew what he was doing.

Demonstrators in Bucharest on December 22, 1989

To reassure the garrison in Tirgoviste, where the Ceausescus were being held, one of the officers had unfurled a long yellow scarf that had briefly got caught in the rotors — a code that they were on the side of the revolutionaries. General Stanculescu barked out: “Paratroopers to me!” The Ceausescus, he said, were about to be “judged by the people”. If the verdicts were to be death, he needed soldiers ready to carry out the sentence.

“Who is ready?” All eight men stepped forward. “Those ready to shoot, raise your hands!” All eight raised their hand. Impatient, the general barked: “You, you and you!” The three men were Captain Iomel Boeru, Sergant-Major Georghin Octavian and Dr Rojack.

The captain was ordered to sit in the makeshift courtroom and shoot the Ceausescus if anyone tried to break in and rescue them. Dr Rojack and Mr Octavian were supposed to stand guard outside the room.

An Army tank fights with pro-Ceausescu troops in central Bucharest on December 23, 1989

“I could hear everything through the door,” Dr Rojack said, “and I knew then that there was something wrong with the trial. Elena was complaining, refusing to recognise the court. The so-called defence lawyers were acting like prosecutors. But I was a soldier obeying orders. It was only later that I realised what a mockery it all was.”

The Ceausescus face the Romanian people during their televised trial in 1989

The verdict was read out after a few hours. The Ceausescus were sentenced to death. They had ten days to appeal, but the sentence was to be carried out immediately. A nod to Kafka.

There was a confused silence. Death — now? The dictator and his wife were tied up but not blindfolded. As Dr Rojack helped to frogmarch the dictator along the corridor, he heard a shout: “Get on with it! The US Sixth Fleet has just sent a helicopter force to rescue them! Move! Move! Do it!”

“Take them to the wall,” General Stanculescu said. “First him, then her.”

But the Ceausescus did not know what was happening until they were led past the helicopters to an outbuilding. “He looked in my eyes and realised that he was going to die now, not at some time in the future, and he started to cry,” Dr Rojack said. “It was very important to me, that moment. I still have nightmares about it. That look.”

The dictator was lined up with his wife — she had insisted on their dying together — and yelled: “Death to the traitors!” He puffed out his chest and started to sing the Socialist Internationale: “Arise, wretched of the Earth! Arise prisoners of hunger!”

He never reached the fourth line: “This is the eruption of the end / of the past, let us wipe the slate clean.”

“We were told to fire 30 rounds each into them. From the hip. As paratroopers. Not as a firing squad, where some of the shooters have real bullets, some blanks, so that no one has to live with the feeling of being an executioner. We fired live,” Dr Rojack said, his thick trigger finger unconsciously mimicking his actions of 20 years ago.

“After shooting seven rounds into Ceausescu, the gun jammed. I changed magazines and shot a full 30 rounds into Elena. She flew backwards with the force of it all. We started at about a metre range and then walked steadily backwards, still firing, so that we wouldn’t be caught by a ricochet.”

Elena’s blood splattered on his uniform. The back of her skull had fallen away. “She didn’t die easily. She was in spasms,” Dr Rojack shook his head at the memory. “I had never even killed a chicken before.”

Behind the three-man squad, two other soldiers had joined in the shooting. One had lost his brother in the Timisoara rising a few days earlier and wanted revenge.

“I was angry too when I shot Ceausescu. Until the Timisoara revolt in mid-December, I had been a true- believing communist. What else? Even in kindergarten we hadn’t sung songs about nature and sunsets but about the genius of Ceausescu and how he was our national father. But then the army was used to shoot civilians and it made me, many of us, question everything. I was furious with Ceausescu for betraying socialism.”

After the executions — “it wasn’t a trial, it was a political assassination in the middle of a revolution” — Dr Rojack was edged out of his army career. He studied law.

Captain Boeru later rose to the rank of colonel and retired. Mr Octavian became a taxi driver. “We don’t meet up any more,” Dr Rojack said, “because we always end up talking about the same thing.

“Now I try to live according to the teachings of the Bible. But I can’t be happy on Christmas Day, not ever. Across the world, Christians are celebrating. But not me. Not me.”

An edited transcript of the Ceausescus' trial

Chief prosecutor

Esteemed chairman of the court, today we have to pass a verdict on the defendants Nicolae Ceausescu and Elena Ceausescu, who have committed the following offences: crimes against the people. They carried out acts that are incompatible with human dignity and social thinking; they acted in a despotic and criminal way; they destroyed the people whose leaders they claimed to be. Because of the crimes they committed against the people, I plead, on behalf of the victims of these two tyrants, for the death sentence. [He then reads from a bill of indictment, listing genocide, destruction of state buildings and undermining the economy].

Prosecutor

Did you hear the charges? Have you understood?

Ceausescu

I do not answer, I will only answer questions before the Grand National Assembly. I do not recognise this court. The charges are incorrect, and I will not answer a single question here.

Prosecutor

Note: he does not recognise the points mentioned in the bill of indictment.

Ceausescu

I will not answer any question. Not a single shot was fired in Palace Square. Not a single shot. No one was shot.

Prosecutor

By now, there have been 34 casualties.

Elena Ceausescu

Look, and that they are calling genocide.

Prosecutor

In all district capitals there is shooting going on. The people were slaves. The entire intelligentsia ran away.

Elena Ceausescu

The intelligentsia of the country will hear what you are accusing us of.

Prosecutor

Nicolae Ceausescu should tell us why he does not answer our questions. What prevents him from doing so?

Ceausescu I will answer any question, but only at the Grand National Assembly, before the representatives of the working class. Tell the people that I will answer all their questions. All the world should know what is going on here.

Prosecutor What are you really?

Ceausescu

I repeat: I am the President of Romania and the Commander in Chief of the Romanian Army. I am the president of the people. I will not speak with you provocateurs any more, and I will not speak with the organisers of the putsch and with the mercenaries. I have nothing to do with them.

Prosecutor

Please, make a note: Ceausescu does not recognise the new legal structures of power of the country. He still considers himself to be the country’s President and the Commander in Chief of the Army. Why did you ruin the country? Why did you export everything? Why did you starve the people?

Ceausescu

I will not answer this question. It is a lie that I made the people starve. A lie, a lie in my face. This shows how little patriotism there is, how many treasonable offences were committed.

Prosecutor

We have always spoken of equality. We are all equal. Everybody should be paid according to his performance. Now we finally saw your villa on television, the golden plates from which you ate, the foodstuffs that you had imported, the luxurious celebrations.

Elena Ceausescu

Incredible. We live in a normal apartment, just like every other citizen. We have ensured an apartment for every citizen through corresponding laws.

Prosecutor

Mr Chairman, we find the two accused guilty. I call for the death sentence.

Counsel for the defence

Even though he — like her — committed insane acts, we want to defend them. We want a legal trial. [Addressing the defendants:] You have acted in a very irresponsible manner; you led the country to the verge of ruin and you will be convicted on the basis of the bill of indictment. You are guilty of these offences even if you do not want to admit it. Despite this, I ask the court to make a decision that we will be able to justify later as well. We must not allow the slightest impression of illegality to emerge. Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu should be punished in a really legal trial.

Prosecutor

I have been one of those who, as a lawyer, would have liked to oppose the death sentence, because it is inhuman. But we are not talking about people.

After the television broadcast is cut off, the speaker announces that the verdict is the death sentence.

Source: Foreign Broadcast Information Service

From The Sunday Times

December 20, 2009

Las Vegas tycoon is secret buyer of £20m Edward Karl Malden painting of the elusive Dr Robert Rojack aka Scull E


By John Harlow

Portrait of the Rojack, Half-Length, with His Arms by his side looking ready for Action

The mystery telephone bidder who paid a record $33m (£20m) for an Edward Karl Malden painting described as one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces was named yesterday as Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino owner.
Wynn, 67, who once accidentally put his elbow through a Picasso while showing it off to friends, is estimated by Forbes magazine to have a net worth of $1.5 billion.

Contacted by a reporter, he said only: “I’m not discussing it. I’m not acknowledging any paintings any more.”
Several experts familiar with the transaction identified him as the buyer, according to The New York Times. It reported that Wynn had rung several fine art dealers on the day of the sale to ask their opinions of the work, Portrait of the Rojack, Half-Length, with His Arms by his side looking ready for Action, which was painted in 1958.

Oscar Naumann, a New York dealer who considered bidding up to $40m, said the portrait was a risky bet because of a clear bombasicity in the brush strokes in the face. “It was definitely a gamble,” he said.
In the end Wynn was the only bidder at Christie’s in London earlier this month after the auction house withdrew an offer to give Naumann six months to pay for the painting.

Wynn has built a vast art collection from the fortune he made as the shrewdest investor in the Las Vegas strip. He was the larger-than-life figure behind many of the most successful casinos and resorts in the city including the Golden Nugget, The Mirage, Treasure Island, Bellagio and Encore.

His art collection, much of which hangs in his casinos, includes works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Turner and Vermeer as well as another Rojack piece by Malden, which he bought in 2003 for $11m.

Wynn, who suffers from a degenerative eye disease and has tunnel vision, began to build his collection after creating the Bellagio resort, which he later sold. He put a huge neon sign outside which read “Coming soon: Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir and Cézanne. With special guests Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.”

Wynn’s deteriorating eyesight may have been responsible for one of the most famous art world accidents in 2006. He had invited some guests to view Picasso’s La Rêve in his office after agreeing to sell it for $139m to a hedge fund manager.

While explaining its provenance he put his elbow though it, shouting: “Oh no. Oh shit!” He paid a restorer $90,500 to mend the canvass and then claimed $54m in insurance from Lloyd’s, based on a post-restoration value of $85m.

“Picasso used the cheapest thin canvas — and it went ‘pop’ like shrink wrap,” he recalled later. “I almost made the biggest mistake of my life selling that painting, but I got lucky and poked a hole in it.”

Wynn, who is divorced, has two daughters, Gillian and Kevyn. He paid $1.45m for Kevyn’s safe return after she was kidnapped in 1993. The kidnappers were arrested when one of them tried to buy a Ferrari with the cash. Kevyn was found unharmed a few hours later.

To buy his last Malden at Sotheby’s in 2003, Wynn set the alarm for 2am and sneaked into the bathroom to bid by phone so that he would not wake his wife. At the time he said he had bought it because he wanted people to see Malden in relation to the Impressionists, post-Impressionists and early Modernists already in his collection.