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It's a cold, cold morning at "Riverbend", and I stayed in bed longer than usual, and I'm glad I did because I caught ABC Radio National's program "Saturday Extra" which introduced me to Patrick McGee and his book "APPLE in China". What a story!
For readers of Walter Isaacson’s "Steve Jobs" and Chris Miller’s "Chip War", this riveting look at how Apple helped build China's dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.
After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labour. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world's most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century's most iconic products — in staggering volume and for enormous profit. Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponised.
"Apple in China" is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised "rebels" and "troublemakers" — the company that encouraged us all to "Think Different" — devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate. And it's the story of why China now rules the world, and why the USA doesn't.
Whet your appetite with this segment from the audiobook - click here.
Today it's back to the good ol' days when we ignored each other with books instead of smartphones. I'm off to "Melbourne" for a solid day of reading. Books were my friends when no friends were around, and they're my friends again now that most of my friends are dead.
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.
But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.
Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
I wish I had said that but, no, it was Carl Sagan, the now long-dead but not forgotten superstar scientist who had a special way with words:
Greetings from "Melbourne", Carl Sagan! You would have liked it here.
Bali to me is the small village of Tegehe in the foothills south of Lovina. Denpasar and Kuta have become such congested, noisy hellholes that it is hard to image anybody staying there of their own free will.
Kuta comes as a culture shock - or more like a lack-of-culture shock: it's a jungle of pumping bars, nightclubs, restaurants, tattoo and piercing parlours, surfwear and novelty T-short and junky art shops. And it is full of seriously inebriated Aussies of both, or possibly several, sexes in Bintang singlets, staggering from the Aussie Koala Bar to the Aussie Kangaroo Bar.
(If you Google "lockley hijacked virgin flight", you can read all about this chap who was so skyhigh even before he got to Bali that he mistook the flight deck for the toilet and put a whole airport on hijack alert.)
On a much earlier visit I thought it would be nice to see the famous sunset, and so I headed down to the famous, or infamous depending on which way you look at it, Kuta Beach. In all my travels, I'd never seen such a jam-packed beach. Walls and walls of bodies walked, sat, laid and squished together on the sand, with smiling locals handing out small envelopes containing letters that read, "CONGRATULATIONS you have won a video camera. And one week's accommodation." Ah yes, timeshares are alive and well in Bali.
As I said, for me Bali is a small village in the foothills south of Lovina but there won't be any more jalan jalan (literally 'walk, walk') - not this year and perhaps never again!
Thank God I'm already an atheist but that didn't stop me from listening to Sam Harris, and reading his book "The End of Faith - Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" (and not only because the title contains the rare Oxford comma).
This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in the modern world. "The End of Faith" provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favour of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Sam Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he maintains that "moderation" in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. While warning against the encroachment of organised religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism in an attempt to provide a truly modern foundation for our ethics and our search for spiritual experience.
As Richard Dawkins wrote in "The God Delusion": "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." I am one of those who've gone one god further.
But I leave the last word on the Bible to Spike Milligan - click here.
The top one is of a painting done, dilettantishly but with a lot of heart, by Joan Hogan who stayed with her husband Ron at "Riverbend" for a week - or was it two? - and in appreciation of our hospitality presented us with this lovely painting.
The two photographs below are of Loloho on Bougainville Island which was my home for two years, as it was for a certain person who now lives in Fairfield in Connecticut. The three are now adorning one wall inside "Melbourne" to keep reminding me of a time that will never come again.
Joan Hogan is no longer with us, and, judging by the silence, neither may be a certain person in Fairfield in Connecticut. If so, then the last photo is even more appropriate. It reads, "ماشاء الله", which means "God has willed it". I shall ponder it next time I sit inside cosy "Melbourne".
Some people had their life flash before their eyes, often during a near-death experience. Gazing into a blazing fire on a cold winter's morning is far from a near-death experience but can induce a similar phenomenon, even more so when fortified with a steaming glass of "Glühwein".
By the second glass of "Glühwein" I felt extremely grateful that I was sitting here at "Riverbend" rather than somewhere in (c)old Germany, which would have been the case had I never had the courage to take that first step and leave the "Vaterland" almost exactly sixty years ago.
And, as unlikely as it may seem, I may have continued driving a delivery truck around Canberra, had I not seen that advertisement in the "Canberra Times" which led to my becoming a bank officer with the ANZ Bank, which was a career good enough to aspire to even for an Australian school-leaver, let alone someone whose school education was almost entirely useless by the time he stepped ashore in Melbourne.
I could have seen out my working life, as so many others did, working for the bank and living a good and stable 9-to-5 life until my retirement. I could have accepted my good fortune but I refused what was spread before me and turned by back on it. I refused, so as to better hunger for what had so far been denied me, because to enter the promised land was to despair to ever coming near it. And on I went, holding everything at arm's length, and coming closest to arriving when farthest from it.
I could've started a new life again in Germany when I returned after two years, but both my parents refused to take me back in, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I wouldn't have mustered the courage a second time after being spoilt again with three home-cooked meals a day and clean underwear and an ironed shirt every morning.
And so on I went to South-West Africa which was like Germany but with blue skies. I fitted in well but again I refused to accept my good fortune and kept looking for that promised land, which I found a year later in Papua New Guinea. It was everything I had ever wanted from life but it was also too close to arriving, and so, after several years, I left again.
And on and on I went, one country after another, always holding things at arm's length, until, finally, I am sitting here beside a blazing fire on a winter's morning, holding nothing more at arm's length than a steaming glass of "Glühwein". Somehow I've got this far! Sometimes it seemed like driving a car at night. I could see only as far as the headlights, I couldn't see where I was going and very little of what I passed along the way, but somehow I managed to make the whole trip.
Now the only trip left is to the house for another glass of "Glühwein"!
You can no longer watch this TV mini-series after billionaire Gina Rinehart sued Channel Nine over the two-part series, broadcast in February 2015, for injurious falsehood and misleading and deceptive conduct, falling broadly into three categories: sheer inaccuracy, portraying her as an unloving daughter, and implying unfair business practices.
In an earlier court hearing Mrs Rinehart had also argued about details such as her weight, whether her father Lang Hancock cheated at tennis and the colour of her mother Hope Hancock's hair. That's it then: you can no longer watch it on TV or buy the DVD, but you can still read the book by Debi Marshall which I picked up at Vinnies for a couple of dollars. It tells you all about what at the time played out in the gossip columns and front pages of all the newspapers around the country.
In case you've forgotten: Gina Rinehart’s perfect family life was ripped apart when her mother Hope died causing her father Lang to begin a dangerous downward spiral of grief and despair. In a loving attempt to help her ailing father, Gina employed a new housekeeper to help get him back on track ... a gorgeous Filipino called Rose Lacson – not realising that it would tear apart their family for generations to come. After the death of her husband Frank, Gina was determined to stabilize the family company which is spiraling into debt. As Lang became sicker Gina began to go head to head with Rose Hancock which ended in a two-decade-long public feud filled with murder accusations, drug charges and illegitimate half caste children. Sensational? Salacious? You bet!
'It's my knickers' - Lang and Rose Hancock's infamous 60 Minutes interview in 1986
I also found another book by Paul Auster, "Invisible"; Sam Harris' "The End of Faith - Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason"; and, for some light entertainment, Richard Glover's "Best Wishes - Making the World a better, less annoying Place one Wish at a Time".
I don't know when I will have time to read them all, but Padma will waste no time reading the book she's found in the cooking section: Cooking with Mushrooms".
As in Robert Frost's poem, on the internet I often take the road less travelled by, which brings me to some surprising sources of information I had never known existed. And so it was when I read about Heinrich Breloer, a German author and film director, who has mainly worked on docudramas related to modern German history, which took me to the three-part docudrama "Speer and Hitler", described as a milestone in the understanding of Nazi Germany by the German people.
If Hitler had had a friend, it would have been Albert Speer. Dashing and worldly, Speer became one of the superstars of the Third Reich. Afterwards, the Nuremberg Trials gave him a stage on which he could shine again: he now became the good Nazi. Among the accused, he was the only one to openly welcome the trials as a necessary duty. With disarming conviction, he told his prosecutors that he was neither involved in nor aware of the Holocaust. Saving himself from execution, he was sentenced to only 20 years of prison. At Spandau Prison he wrote his biography, which became a best-seller all over the world.
It took Bavaria Film and one of the most respected filmmakers in European television, Heinrich Breloer, over 12 million euros, years of research in Germany, Washington, London and Moscow, 125 hours of interviews with Speer's children and other eyewitnesses, and the processing of 20,000 pages of Speer's diaries. Not to mention the meticulously detailed reconstruction of authentic sets.
As Kenneth Grahame's Seafaring Rat said so insightfully to Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, "It is a goodly life that you lead, friend; no doubt the best in the world, if only you are strong enough to lead it!" If it weren't for old age, I'd need all my strength not to return to the old peripatetic life and can relate to the Water Rat.
"The Water Rat was restless, and he did not exactly know why. To all appearance the summer's pomp was still at fullest height, and although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though rowans were reddening, and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and warmth and colour were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions of the passing year. But the constant chorus of the orchards and hedges had shrunk to a casual evensong from a few yet unwearied performers; the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure. The cuckoo, of course, had long been silent; but many another feathered friend, for months a part of the familiar landscape and its small society, was missing too and it seemed that the ranks thinned steadily day by day. Rat, ever observant of all winged movement, saw that it was taking daily a southing tendency; and even as he lay in bed at night he thought he could make out, passing in the darkness overhead, the beat and quiver of impatient pinions, obedient to the peremptory call.
Nature's Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d'hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year's full re-opening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these flittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship. One gets unsettled, depressed, and inclined to be querulous. Why this craving for change? Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly? You don't know this hotel out of the season, and what fun we have among ourselves, we fellows who remain and see the whole interesting year out. All very true, no doubt the others always reply; we quite envy you--and some other year perhaps--but just now we have engagements--and there's the bus at the door--our time is up! So they depart, with a smile and a nod, and we miss them, and feel resentful. The Rat was a self-sufficing sort of animal, rooted to the land, and, whoever went, he stayed; still, he could not help noticing what was in the air, and feeling some of its influence in his bones."[read on]
I"t was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen ..." Actually, it was a bright cool morning in May when I felt like Winston Smith because facebook had just told me "Your post goes against our Community Standards" and took down this real photograph taken on a real Singapore Airlines flight.
I wanted to share it with others in the PNG Expatriates facebook group but Mr "Sugar Mountain" Zuckerberg's Thought Police thought otherwise, and not only took it down but also banned me from posting anything else. What a relief! I've finally got my previous facebook-free life back!
With a name like Zuckerberg, this may be a regrettable throwback to Mr Zuckerberg's humourless Teutonic past, but it still doesn't explain why members of the facebook groups NGI Historical Society and TAIM BIPO, PHOTO HISTORY, PNG, PAPUA & NEW GUINEA with a decidedly learned anthropological leaning are not allowed to publish authentic photos of barebreasted native women or, indeed, native men with penic gourds.
I've just returned from my early-morning walk and found an enormous face gazing down at me from the wall of my house. It's one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it runs.
Our creaking tax system needs fixing, and the most equitable and quickest fix would be to raise the GST from the 10% it's been since inception, to at least 15%. Have the politicians on either side of Parliament the guts to do it? Of course not! Instead, they prefer to play off one group of constituents against another.
The easiest to play are the ones who trusted the tax system and locked their money away until retirement. If they were lucky - or, more to the point, productive enough - they may now be sittting on a multi-million-dollar nest egg which they are not allowed to touch - but the tax man can and will under Labour's proposed 30% super tax on unrealised gains!
This 30% super tax will apply from 1 July 2025 on all unrealised gains over $3 million; in fact, if the Greens, who hold a lot of votes in the Senate post-election, get their way, that threshold will be screwed down to $2 million. Taxing unrealised gains is not only unreasonable and unfair but may be impossible to pay if based on "paper profits" from real estate which doesn't generate enough income to cover the 30% tax.
Not that the authors of this unreasonable and unfair tax hadn't already thought of this by giving those whose superannuation income doesn't cover the tax the option to pay it out of their personal funds. Should we be grateful? I don't think so. Instead, we should all be mounting the barricades against such an oppressive tax. But will we? Of course not.
Because of their convict past, Australians are supposed to have their own particular brand of individualism and dislike having rules imposed on them "for we are young and free". Remember when they made seat belts compulsory? We all buckled up the next day! Remember when they brought in bicycle helmets? We all looked ridiculous the very day after.
And those of us who entrusted their long-term retirement plans to a fair and long-term tax system will be a whole lot poorer after 1 July 2025. Not that I would expect much sympathy from the hoi polloi - click here.
It just proves once again - if such proof was even necessary - that if a government is strong enough to give some people everything they want, it's also strong enough to take from other people everything they have.
Having made the effort of washing up and dressing up to drive into town, I don't just rush back after whatever it was I needed to do there. Oh no, I stand back - or, more often, just sit back - and watch the passing parade of humanity.
There are the young kids who, looking still bright-eyed and hopeful, work behind the SUBWAY counter, doing what perhaps took them no more than a day or two to learn; and then there is the elderly man, looking broken and apathetic in his hi-vis vest with TROLLEY SERVICE stencilled on its back, who collects empty trolleys in the carpark.
What will happen to those young kids if they get stuck in their mundane job for too long? What did happen to that elderly man who, almost at the end of his working life, still collects empty shopping trolleys? They all had drawn the winning ticket in life's lottery by having been born in this lucky country. How and why had they wasted that opportunity?
I can relate to the small Nepalese man who, always smiling, constantly sweeps the long concourse of the shopping mall, and the other migrant, a Pakistani perhaps, who wears a SECURITY jacket and patrols from one end to the other. They're both still at the start of a new life in a new country, and cheerfully accept their first steps towards a better life as I did sixty years ago when I drove a delivery truck for three short months.
I am sure they know, as I did then, that this will not last, and that they can work their way up and look forward to better things to come, but what about those native-borns who already speak English, who already had years in which they could have got themselves set up and learned the skills and gained the experience necessary for a much better job?
I feel like apologising for them by saying "There but for the grace of God ...", but then I remember the German saying that I grew up with, which all my life has reminded me that "Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied".
After the aborted visit to the warm-water pool, I had just paid for my car registration and a few insurance premiums and was wondering what sort of lunch we could afford with the money we had left, when we saw a friendly labrador behind the steering wheel of a parked car. Walking across to ask him if he had a driver's licence, we were joined by a young couple who also loved dogs.
The young couple (well, youngish! you have to be under 35 to get an Australian holiday working visa) turned out to be from France and on a twelve-month working holiday in Australia. He had been working in a metal factory in Cowra; she had been pet-sitting in Sydney; now they were off to see the nation's capital before driving to Falls Creek in Victoria where they will be working in the snow fields for the season.
Thankfully, the NRMA had given me enough loyalty and no-claim bonuses on my insurance premiums to allow us to have lunch for four at the Catalina Country Club, and so we spent the next few hours chewing the fat and on a beautifully cooked barramundi with chips and salad, and the drinks and the conversation just flowed. Padma talked what's called 'women's talk' with her, and I talked politics, books and movies with him.
"Being French, of course, you would have seen 'The Day of the Jackal'?" I asked. Blank look! "But you've seen 'Casablanca' with Humphrey Bogart, surely?" Blank look! "What books have you read?" None of the books he had read I had ever heard of, nor had he ever heard of any of the books I had read. And on and on it went, both of us seemingly living in parallel universes when it came to books and movies. Am I really that old?
When we began to bemoan the unaffordability of housing in both our countries, we seemed to have struck a common cord. I mentioned 'le viager' which he countered with a hesitant "Le viager - qu’est-ce que c’est ?" but then he remembered "Le viager consiste à vendre un logement à une personne qui verse en échange une rente viagère au vendeur jusqu'à son décès imprévisible". Always on the look-out to recommend another movie, I suggested he watch "My Old Lady".
Of course, they followed us out to "Riverbend" where we spent a few more hours over tea and biscuits and, of course, they will visit us again before they fly back to France from Sydney in nine months' time.
It's warm outside. The verandah is flooded in sunlight. I think I lie down on the old sofa and listen to the audiobook of "The Day of the Jackal".
It's (almost) winter now and you won't get me down to the pool any earlier than eight o'clock in he morning. This morning we got there around 8.30. Kerrie-Lee and the other lifeguards were already in attendance, walking round and round the beautiful 35-degree warm-water pool in their upmarket brandnew sneakers which, as they told me, cost them several hundred dollars a pair - and they had several pairs of them!
"Why don't you buy an ordinary pair of plimsolls?" I asked. "A pair of what?" came the reply. Not one of them had ever heard of plimsolls or what some of us commonly called "sandshoes" which had a canvas upper and a flat rubber sole. Am I the only one who is old enough to remember plimsolls?
I still remember a friend from our days on Bougainville Island in the early 1970s who visited me in Canberra in 1992 (or was it 1993?), still wearing the same pair of plimsolls he had worn on the island, except that by then both of his big toes were poking through their canvas top. He'd always been known as a man who had got his money's worth!
I had no time left to ponder this before a butch-looking female gym instructor of uncertain age turned on the loudspeakers, and over the blast of upbeat zumba music ordered everyone not belonging to her 9.15 water aerobics class to get out of the water before at least half of the Bay's geriatric ladies invaded the pool. The only thing to be said in their favour was that probably all of them still remembered plimsolls!
Who derived their name, should you wish to know, from the coloured horizontal band joining the upper to the sole which resembled the Plimsoll line on a ship's hull, because, just like the line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet.
If you want to read more about the Plimsoll Line, click here
The so-called Plimsoll Line, which indicates the legal limit to which a ship may be loaded for specific water types and temperatures in order to safely maintain buoyancy, came about when the British MP Samuel Plimsoll back in the 1860s blew the whistle on the common practice of overloading ships, and he thus saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
What would have saved us from paying fifteen dollars for a mere thirty minutes in the warm-water pool was the above notice which we only saw on the inside of the door after we had paid for our two tickets.
If you were a smoker, you'll remember Salem for having been the first filter-tipped menthol cigarette. If you were (like me) in mari-time transport (on and off four times), you'll remember Salem for having been the biggest maritime fraud ever perpetrated.
The Salem was a supertanker which was scuttled off the coast of Guinea on 17 January 1980, after secretly unloading 192,000 tons of crude oil in Durban in defiance of the South African oil embargo. The ship's owners then presented Lloyd's of London with an insurance claim of US$56.3 million, the largest single claim received up to that time. Go and read Klinghoffer's book or look at the unadorned facts
here and here.
Although the tanker was supposed to have sunk so quickly that not even the ship's log could be saved, the shipwrecked crew had taken all their personal belongings as well as duty-free goods and wrapped sandwiches.
"Fraud of the century: the case of the mysterious supertanker Salem" by A.J. Klinghoffer
One apocryphal story even suggested that they had booked in advance hotel rooms in Dakar where they eventually came ashore. Methinks it was the sandwiches that gave them away, be they plain or toasted.
As for the mastermind behind this audacious fraud, he escaped:
ARCHITECT OF HUGE TANKER FRAUD CAPS HIS CAREER WITH A JAILBREAK
JAMES NOLAN | May 30, 1988
When Frederick Soudan, the mastermind of the world's largest maritime fraud, decided it was time to leave federal prison he called his wife from a phone booth.
She drove up. They drove away.They have phones there that aren't monitored, said one lawyer involved in the case. I suspect he just called and said, 'Hello dear. It's time to come get me' and she did.
Outside the minimum security prison near Fort Worth, Texas, the pickup was so unobtrusive that federal prison guards barely remember Mr. Soudan leaving. And in Washington, the Justice Department believes it has bigger fish to fry. The matter is settled so far as we're concerned, said a spokesman. He was caught, convicted, sentenced and escaped.
But on an international scale, insurance investigators and anti-fraud detectives are outraged that the perpetrator of the notorious Salem supertanker scam is free.
After years of international legal wrangling and complex criminal investigations, Mr. Soudan now is not only free but probably still wealthy - with an estimated $2 million cachedin Swiss and Bahamian banks.
We're very disappointed, said Eric Ellen, the director of the International Maritime Bureau. If you can't hold him in prison the whole deterrent effect goes immediately.
The escape, simple compared to his other crimes, was only the latest chapter in Mr. Soudan's book of world-class tricks. His crimes have given him a perverse air of Homeric greatness. The Salem caper now holds the Guiness Book of World Records' title as World's Largest Maritime Fraud.
Guiness claims the Salem fraud eventually cost Shell Oil Co. $305 million. Court testimony showed that the crime began when the audacious Mr. Soudan talked sophisticated London merchant bankers into lending him some $15 million to buy the supertanker Salem. Then he hired Greek officers and a crew of Tunisians.
The plot turned on South Africa's unquenchable thirst for oil. The racially troubled nation is not deemed a legitimate customer by the Middle East oil kingdoms.
The Soudan ring got a contract to deliver oil worth $45 million to Durban, South Africa, in 1980. The ship loaded in Kuwait and, while it was at sea, Mr. Soudan succeeded in selling the cargo again to Shell.
The oil was delivered to Durban. Then the Salem loaded its tanks with seawater and headed up the coast of Africa, faking a course for Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to make delivery to Shell.
A hundred miles off the coast of Senegal, the crew opened valves in the ship's bottom to let in the sea water and took to lifeboats. Down the giant ship sank, in mile-deep waters.
The first suspicion of a scam came when it was reported that the crew wore shore-going clothes and carried well-stocked suitcases into the lifeboats.
Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a Rutgers University professor, has written a book about Mr. Soudan called Fraud of the Century: the Case of the Mysterious Supertanker Salem. It's due out later this month.
Mr. Klinghoffer says trial testimony taken in Rotterdam; Athens, Greece; Houston; and Liberia shows that Mr. Soudan got a tidy sum of loot.
Fred Soudan got $4.25 million. But he had expenses and paid off debts so we estimate he's got $2 million now. It's in Swiss banks and the Bahamas, said the professor of political science.
In 1985, Mr. Soudan was sentenced to 35 years in a minimum security prison in Fort Worth. And last December, he escaped.
Mr. Soudan was born in Tyre, a Lebanese port in the eastern Mediterranean. But the 45-year-old Mr. Soudan made his business in the United States. He had moved to Houston in the glory days of the oil patch, won U.S. citizenship and grew rich as an oil broker.
And it was in the international oil business that Mr. Soudan learned the gift of persuasiveness that would serve him so well - and international commerce so poorly.
U.S. District Judge Carl O. Bue, a former admiralty lawyer, tried the case in Houston. Now retired, the judge recalled Mr. Soudan.
Many people in life are gifted with a glib vocabulary and charming personality. Mr. Soudan was one of these, Judge Bue said.
David Berg, a trial lawyer who defended Mr. Soudan, said the judge rejected a plea bargain. The terms of the proposal called for Mr. Soudan to plead guilty to some counts and serve three years.
The trial, Judge Bue said, was no back-alley scrap. This was a very sophisticated case. You had people come over from Lloyd's of London; detectives from Scotland Yard; South African police; people from Greece.
The Justice Department sent down two of their top prosecutors from Washington. Very able lawyers to deal with issues that were novel. Nothing like it ever before.
I am sure the maritime industry would like the case to go away and its like never be seen again, Judge Bue concluded.
Mr. Berg laughed as he reminisced about Mr. Soudan.
Down here, we think that he had his mind fixed on the three-year term in the plea bargain. That time came, and he just looked around and said: 'Well, I have done my time. That's it. Time to go.' Then he just walked out, Mr. Berg said.
Clint Peoples, a U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Texas in Dallas, has issued a warrant for Mr. Soudan. Paris-based Interpol is looking for him.
Mr. Peoples said that Mr. Soudan's Spanish-born wife, a very pretty young lady, bought airline tickets to Madrid, her home. Some feel he has returned to Lebanon, where the long arm of the law catches few these days.
Others, at Lloyd's of London, feared briefly that he would seek revenge against those who testified against him, according to some sources.
Still other investigators say he may be in Spain. In the Whitehall Club in New York City, maritime officials speculate that Mr. Soudan may have met with foul play from some colleague in crime. Whatever the case, Mr. Soudan has simply disappeared.
He was in the Federal Correctional Institute for the morning head count and at night he was just gone, Mr. Peoples said.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien gab mir eine zweite Sprache und eine zweite Chance und es war auch der Anfang und das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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