This might be getting boring for you.....

... but it's not for me!

Another day, and another Supercar, this time by my favourite manufacturer & possibly one of my top 5 cars - an Aston Martin DB9 Volante.

Absolutely stunning, parked outside my local village pub in the sunshine (albeit between showers!).

Not sure if it's local or just on a visit to the area, I'm sure I will notice it around if it's here to stay. I want one!

Another day another Supercar....

This time seen at a standstill rather than going for it on a motorway or the A303.

A Pagani Zonda, owned by a family member of a local businessman who I have a distant link with!?

Actual photo to follow shortly, I'm pretty sure they have a good car collection including Aston Martin Vanquish, Lamborghini Gallardo & Range Rover Sport. Nice to see such an exotic bunch of cars in my local area.

Bentley make another estate car....

... yes, they did have a couple of attempts before, but in my humble opinion, they weren't very good - this is the Arnage attempt.

This time around someone has taken a Bentley GT or Flying Spur & chopped it around a bit.

I saw today on the A303 travelling West to East one of these in black, followed about 4 or 5 cars behind by a standard GT also in black. Later I saw the same standard GT go back to the West Country. Given the time between sightings, it was probably going to & from London.

It follows a long line of coachbuilt cars based on premium Grand Tourers or sports cars, converted into Estate cars or SportWagon to put the marketing name to them. They range from Jaguars (an XJS Shooting Brake made by Lynx) to Aston Martin (DB5, DB6, DBS [I nearly don't mention the DBS as it's truely awful], Virage, Lagonda & Vantage with a concept based on Vanquish as well!) and even a couple of Ferrari 456 that were made into estate cars for the Brunei Royal family - they have a history of buying thousands of specialist cars & storing them in massive underground garages, it has been said that Rolls-Royce & Bentley have both had divisions solely dedicated to supply of bespoke cars to royal families of Brunei & Middle Eastern countries. Maserati have also shown a Quattroporte Concept.

Personally I like them, I've seen a Jaguar XJS Shooting Brake and a Ferrari 456 Estate in the flesh & I have to say they looked very good, given the cost of conversion I should hope that they do look good, but they also followed the lines of the original cars & looked like they were meant to be.

This is going to run & run....

..... and sadly for the family of the pilot Max Radford, I don't think we will ever know the real truth behind this tragic story.

In the Sunday Times last week there is a further installment of a long and complicated story...

I post this here as I had brief interaction with Max, he was a genuinely nice chap who took time out of his madly busy day to talk to me. I have heard various conspiracy theories in the helicopter industry in the UK, some incredible & some more unbelievable than others, but I believe the fact remains that Max was an innocent in all of this.


British lawyer hatched Putin smears

A BRITISH lawyer killed in a helicopter crash on the south coast of England was at the heart of a secret smear campaign against President Vladimir Putin and his leading associates, according to a confidential dossier.

Stephen Curtis, who died in 2004, was chairman of the security firm ISC Global (UK) which worked for a group of Russian tycoons plotting against Putin.

The dossier says the company was to “discredit [Putin] and those around him”. The targets were 11 senior Russians — from the defence minister to Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club.

ISC was also tasked with creating a luxury yacht with a crew capable of repelling an armed assault. The ship was to be a floating refuge for oligarchs wanted by Moscow on charges of fraud.

Curtis, 45, died in March 2004 alongside Max Radford, 34, the pilot, when their helicopter crashed near Bournemouth airport on the way to Dublin.

The wreckage yielded few clues and an inquest jury last November returned a verdict of accidental death. But a number of facts remained unexplained. It emerged that Curtis had received threats, felt he was under surveillance and had warned a relative shortly before: “If anything happens in the next two weeks then it won’t be an accident.”

Even the coroner conceded that the death had “all the ingredients of an espionage thriller”. The ISC connection was never investigated or put to the jury and the pilot’s parents do not accept the verdict. Their lawyer called for a public inquiry.

The dossier, seen by The Sunday Times, shows that ISC was funded by some of Russia’s wealthiest but most wanted men. They included Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin, the owners of Group Menatep, the company behind Yukos, Russia’s second largest oil company.

Curtis, who already acted for the Gibraltar-based Menatep, was made chairman of ISC, which received £6m from the Russians in the first three years, financial documents show. His expertise was in setting up complex offshore structures to disperse Yukos’s vast profits. Two former Scotland Yard officers ran the security side.

ISC “targeted” leading figures in Russia after Putin sanctioned the arrest of Khodorkovsky on fraud and tax evasion charges in October 2003 as his jet refuelled in Siberia. Putin wanted to dismantle Yukos and take it back into the Kremlin’s hands.

Nevzlin, who is wanted for fraud offences and organising a contract killing, moved to Israel as a wave of Yukos executives fled to London. City lawyers were hired to fend off extradition requests from Moscow which the oligarchs say are politically inspired.

ISC carried out “monitoring” services to collate information on developments in the extradition battle. Ex-SAS soldiers acted as bodyguards to clients considered at risk of being kidnapped by Moscow.

The company also drew up plans to customise a £30m luxury yacht, the Constellation, to provide a safe haven for wanted executives, said ISC sources. It was to be defended against armed assault by a “Swat” team which would undergo “combat and kidnapping avoidance training”, according to the boat’s specification. Living quarters would be protected by bullet-proof glass and meeting rooms pumped with “white noise” to prevent bugging.

The specification reveals how some guests were to be entertained. It says: “Procedure for vetting, screening and searching Lady’s [sic] of the night onboard. Also a need to establish a trusted agency connection for such personnel.”

The campaign was authorised by Nevzlin who told ISC to do “the biggest investigation ever”, according to a company insider. ISC drafted a 12-page document marked “Secret”, which one of its partners presented to Nevzlin in Israel. The oligarch authorised £37m for the first phase of the operation, the source said.

The plan was to mount a “sensitive and delicate” worldwide operation, feeding false or compromising information to journalists and governments about Putin — referred to as “X” — and his associates.

The plotters wanted “[Putin] to be removed from power” but the more realistic objective was to force him to release Khodorkovsky from detention by March 2004 and cut Yukos’s £5 billion tax bill.

The document shows that besides Putin, Sergei Ivanov, the defence minister, was to be smeared with allegedly compromising photographs. Other targets included key figures in state-owned energy companies.

Abramovich had angered the Yukos oligarchs because Putin allowed him to keep his billions and travel freely within Russia. The document recommended an attempt to discredit him with allegations of “money laundering and bribery”. Abramovich’s spokesman said last week he was unaware of the plot.

Curtis’s crash happened within months of the smear campaign being hatched. Former ISC operatives say he had become “paranoid” in the last year of his life. He had become Menatep’s managing director responsible for assets worth £16 billion.

An ISC source said Curtis’s “paranoia” may have had some justification: “After Curtis’s death we swept the family home and located a small magnet used to secure a listening device,” he recalled. It would emerge at the inquest that Curtis had reported his clients’ transactions to the police “on many occasions”.

Putin was re-elected 11 days after the crash. ISC stopped trading last year and was renamed RISC under new ownership. Its former partners have declined to comment on operational matters. Menatep has been renamed GML and its current board has no involvement with ISC. A spokesman for GML, still controlled by Nevzlin and Khodorkovsky, declined to comment.

Gloria Radford, the pilot’s mother, still believes her son was killed as part of an assassination plot against Curtis. “I know there was more to the situation than was ever disclosed. There is something terribly wrong,” she said.

At last.. some justice in Government

Why so glum Mr Clarke - it's not as if you have lost your job!? You're still an MP being paid well above the national average - even though you have done such a bad job.

Tony Blair has at last taken 50% of the move is both justified & absolutely necessary - getting rid of Charles Clarke is a start, now he must not just take the token move of relieving Prescott of his powers - he must put him out to pasture on the back benches as well.

I suggested earlier in this Blog that the only reason Prescott might survive is that Clarke had fucked up in a bigger way than he had at the same time. Looks like I've been proved right - this time.

Let's just hope that Prescott finds it a little too uncomfortable in the House of Commons without the political power that he was afforded by Blair in the past. I don't see a token position without that power sitting easily with Prescott - I predict he will either be given back those powers by Blair slowly & quietly after the dust has settled, or we will have the scenario I also wrote about a few months ago here of having a Lord Prescott of Hull in the House of Lords - may God (or anyone for that matter) forbid!

I wonder when Blunkett is coming back into the Cabinet?

Amateur snappers to get their reward....

A report from the BBC website has given the opportunity to justify (but only to myself) why I carry around a pocket digital camera.

I have carried a Canon Ixus with me wherever I go for the last couple of years, in the car mainly just incase I see anything interesting or newsworthy, interesting things (like buildings, cars, aircraft or vistas - views to you & me) have happened with
regularity, newsworthy stuff only happened
occasionally & only got used by the media twice.

Various pocket sized digital cameras are available from a wide number of manufacturers. I have a couple of Canon Ixus stashed away in various places. Image quality varies through the model range, but the latest incarnations, the Ixus 750 & Ixus 800 have 7.1 Megapixel with a 3x Optical zoom or 6.0 Megapixel with 4x optical zoom respectively. These are easily capable of giving better results than my earliest Digital EOS D30 SLR at close quarters. Don't fall for the sales patter of "2x optical zoom with 6x digital zoom" giving anything like decent image quality at full stretch, stick to higher megapixel options with good optical zoom of 3x or 4x. Or, if you can find something secondhand like I did recently - an Ixus 400, with 4.0 megapixels with 3x optical zoom my advice is to snap it up - it was a bargain for £65 from my local camera shop.






Members of the public who have shot newsworthy images could get their reportage recognised by a new award.

Backed by Nokia and the UK's Press Gazette the Citizen Journalism Award will spotlight people who found themselves witnesses to events that made the news.

The competition is open to anyone that has shot stills or video that has been printed, broadcast or appeared online in the last 12 months. Working journalists are excluded from entering.

To be eligible the footage or stills must have been shot between 1 May 2005 and 30 April 2006.

Although citizens have always been caught up in newsworthy events, the advent of camera phones that can instantly send images to websites or on to news organisations has prompted talk of "citizen journalism".

Many news organisations, including the BBC, now solicit images and video from those at the scene of big events. In the UK, the London bombings in July 2005 and the Buncefield oil terminal fire are just two events coverage of which was expanded by contributions from citizens.

Amateur snappers have until 30 June to submit entries.

Link to story on BBC website

http://www.citizenjournalismawards.co.uk/