By DAVID N. GOODMAN, Associated Press Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, October 23, 2009

Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs, has died. He was 83.

Sales died Thursday night at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York, said his former manager and longtime friend, Dave Usher. Sales had many health problems and entered the hospice last week, Usher said.

Soupy Sales, born Milton Supman

At the peak of his fame in the 1950s and '60s, Sales was one of the best-known faces in the nation, Usher said.

"If President Eisenhower would have walked down the street, no one would have recognized him as much as Soupy," Usher said.

At the same time, Sales retained an openness to fans that turned every restaurant meal into an endless autograph-signing session, Usher said.

"He was just good to people," said Usher, a former jazz music producer who managed Sales in the 1950s and now owns Detroit-based Marine Pollution Control. ( >>Continued )

By Ray O'Hanlon
Irish Echo
**Via Newshound



September 23, 2009: The headline was, no doubt about it, an eye catcher: "Did Britain Wreck The World?"

The banner question was posed in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine.

And under the headline the full page "Back Story" stated in part: "Most of today's festering conflicts can be traced to (British) colonial-era meddling, either through partition - slicing and dicing the planet as they see fit - or worse, indiscriminately corralling unrelated ethnic groups into a single, quarrelsome country."

The story listed seven countries and/or regional conflicts: Sri Lanka, India/Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Israel/Palestine, Somalia and Nigeria. Under each heading was a brief account of what the British did in the past that has led to present day difficulties.

Missing from the list, and much to the astonishment of Fr. Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus, was Ireland.

That astonishment led to a letter to Newsweek's editor that opened: "Are you kidding me?"

And continued: "You enumerate seven countries that Britain destroyed by its racist/sectarian violence. Yet you incredibly fail to include Britain's first and last colony, where Britain tested, refined and perfected its repressive techniques: the island of Ireland."

The letter added: "You rightly lament how the British government created modern-day Iraq in 1920. Well, in that very same year, Britain through its Government of Ireland Act, undemocratically created the modern-day State of Northern Ireland: six tiny counties torn from the rest of Ireland, so as to create and artificial Orange/Protestant majority thereby guaranteeing British rule in that corner of Ireland - and, of course, ensuring that the Catholics would never have justice.

That, argued McManus, was how Britain "wrecked" Ireland until Tony Blair, "free from a racist mindset and anti-Catholic bigotry, did the right thing."

Even this, according to McManus, was not the end to the wrecking process.

"However," Fr. McManus asserted, "the deep sectarianism Britain planted and nurtured still survives in Northern Ireland.

"And why wouldn't it, as anti-Catholic bigotry is enshrined, justified and practiced in the British constitution. The Act of Settlement, 1701, an integral, fundamental part of that unwritten, un-codified constitution, prohibits a Catholic from succeeding to the British throne and decrees that if the monarch becomes a Catholic, or marries a Catholic, he/she forfeits the throne and 'the people are absolved from their allegiance.'"

And this, McManus concluded, was how Britain "is still wrecking Ireland today."


rohanlon@irishecho.com

This story appeared in the issue of September 23-29, 2009

BBC
14 Sept 09

A war hero pigeon who received a medal for his bravery is to be honoured in his home town of Carnlough.

Paddy the pigeon, who was bred in the townland of Moyleen, was the first bird to fly back with news of the D-Day landings in Normandy in World War II.

Now, a plaque is being put up at Carnlough harbour in honour of the only Irish pigeon to receive a Dickin medal.

Paddy the pigeon from Carnlough was a war hero

Paddy received the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross for a secret mission codenamed "U2".

Two days after D-Day, 30 pigeons were transported to France by a unit of the 1st US Army.

Paddy's task began in Normandy at around 0815 BST on 12 June, when he was released while carrying coded information on the Allied advance.

Paddy received a bravery medal

He returned to his loft in Hampshire in just four hours and 50 minutes, the fastest time recorded by a message-carrying pigeon during the Normandy landings.

After the war, the bird was returned to his owner in Carnlough, where he died in 1954, aged eleven years old.

At a special ceremony next Saturday the plaque will be unveiled by John McMullan, a well-known local pigeon breeder and friend of Captain Andrew Hughes, an army officer, who owned Paddy.

A song about the famous pigeon will have its first public airing at the event.

And by not calling his bluff on Chappaquiddick, Americans became complicit in it.

Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
OC Register
Friday, August 28, 2009

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

"Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …"

FILE - In this July 26, 1969 file photo, Senator Edward M. Kennedy talks with newsmen after leaving court house in Edgartown, Mass., where he received a two months suspended sentence for failure to report an accident in which a young woman was killed. Wife Joan, 32, expecting her fourth child, accompanied the senator, and his brother-in-law, Stephen Smith, is in the background, at right. (AP Photo/Boston Globe, file)

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel? ( >>Continued )

Hitler's former bodyguard Rochus Misch is the last survivor of Hitler's bunker

By Steven Rosenberg
BBC News, Berlin
Thursday, 3 September 2009 09:02 UK

**Watch video

At his living room table, 92-year-old Rochus Misch shows me some of his old photo albums. Private pictures he had taken more than 60 years ago. There are colour images of Mr Misch in an SS uniform at Adolf Hitler's home in the Alps, snapshots of Hitler staring at rabbits, and photos of Hitler's mistress and future wife Eva Braun.

For five years, SS Oberscharfuehrer Rochus Misch had been part of Adolf Hitler's inner circle, as a bodyguard, a courier and telephone operator to the Fuehrer.

"My first meeting with Hitler was rather strange," Mr Misch recalls. "I'd been in the job 12 days when Hitler's chief adjutant, a man called Bruckner, started asking me questions about my grandmother, about my childhood.

Rochus Misch spent years as part of Hitler's inner circle. Photo Rochus Misch

"Then he got up and walked towards the door. Being an obedient soldier, I flung myself forward to open it, and there was Hitler standing right behind the door. I felt cold. Then I felt hot. I felt every emotion standing there opposite Hitler.

"In the Fuehrer's entourage, strictly speaking, we were bodyguards," says Mr Misch. "When Hitler was travelling, between four and six of us would accompany him in a second car. But when we were at Hitler's apartment in the Chancellery we also had other duties. Two of us would always work as telephone operators. With a boss like Hitler, there were always plenty of phone calls."

Last survivor

With the Allies advancing and Germany on the brink of defeat, Hitler retreated to his Berlin bunker. Rochus Misch was the telephone operator there.

"I worked in a small room with a telephone and teletype machine with outside lines," he remembers.

"There was only enough room to shelter one extra person in my room in the event of an air raid. The bunker really wasn't that big. It contained small rooms of only 10 to 12 square metres."

Hitler's HQ in eastern Poland was known as the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair). Photo: Rochus Misch

Rochus Misch is the last survivor of the Hitler bunker. He is the final witness of the drama that took place there on 30 April 1945. It was the day Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide.

"Suddenly I heard somebody shouting to Hitler's attendant: 'Linge, Linge, I think it's happened.' They'd heard a gunshot, but I hadn't. At that moment Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, ordered everyone to be silent. Everyone began whispering. I was speaking on the telephone and I made sure I talked louder on purpose because I wanted to hear something. I didn't want it to feel like we were in a death bunker.

Deaths

"Then Bormann ordered Hitler's door to be opened. I saw Hitler slumped with his head on the table. Eva Braun was lying on the sofa, with her head towards him. Her knees were drawn tightly up to her chest. She was wearing a dark blue dress with white frills. I will never forget it.

Eva Braun at The Berghof, Hitler's Alpine HQ. Photo Rochus Misch

"I watched as they wrapped Hitler up. His legs were sticking out as they carried him past me. Someone shouted to me: 'Hurry upstairs, they're burning the boss!' I decided not to go because I had noticed that Mueller from the Gestapo was there - and he was never usually around. I said to my comrade Hentschel, the mechanic: 'Maybe we will be killed for being the last witnesses.'"

The next day the drama continued. Down in the bunker, the six children of Germany's new leader - Joseph Goebbels - were drugged and murdered. It was their own mother Magda who killed them.

"Straight after Hitler's death, Mrs Goebbels came down to the bunker with her children," Mr Misch recalls. "She started preparing to kill them. She couldn't have done that above ground - there were other people there who would have stopped her. That's why she came downstairs - because no-one else was allowed in the bunker. She came down on purpose to kill them.

"The kids were right next to me and behind me. We all knew what was going to happen. It was clear. I saw Hitler's doctor, Dr Stumpfegger give the children something to drink. Some kind of sugary drink. Then Stumpfegger went and helped to kill them. All of us knew what was going on. An hour or two later, Mrs Goebbels came out crying. She sat down at a table and began playing patience."

Crimes

Mr Misch fled Hitler's bunker just hours before it was seized by the Red Army. But he was quickly captured and spent the next nine years in Soviet labour camps. The captured "Fuehrerbunker" became a symbol of the Allies' victory in World War II.

Winston Churchill poses outside the Berlin bunker

Two months after the end of the war, Winston Churchill visited it. He posed for photos outside, sitting on a chair recovered from the shelter. In later years, the bunker was blown up to stop it becoming a Nazi shrine.

At the end of our conversation, I ask Rochus Misch whether he knew of the horrors that Adolf Hitler had unleashed across Europe. Did he know about the Holocaust?

"I knew about Dachau camp and about concentration camps in general," he tells me. "But I had no idea of the scale. It wasn't part of our conversations. The Nuremberg Trial dealt with crimes committed by the Germans. But you must remember there was never a war when crimes weren't committed, and there never will be."

Britain declared war on Nazi Germany exactly 70 years ago this week

The Boston Globe
August 29, 2009 02:58 PM



My name is Ted Kennedy Jr., a name I share with my son, a name I share with my father. Although it hasn't been easy at times to live with this name, I've never been more proud of it than I am today.

Your eminence, thank you for being here. You grace us with your presence.

To all the musicians who've come here, my father loved the arts and he would be so pleased for your performances today.

My heart is filled -- and I first want to say thank you -- my heart is filled with appreciation and gratitude. To the people of Massachusetts, my father's loyal staff -- in many ways, my dad's loss is just as great for them as it is for those of us in our family.

And to all of my father’s family and friends who have come to pay their respects, listening to people speak about how my father impacted their lives and the deep personal connection that people felt with my dad has been an overwhelming emotional experience.

My dad had the greatest friends in the world. All of you here are also my friends, and his greatest gift to me. I love you just as much as he did.

Sara Brown, the Taoiseach, President Obama, President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, President Bush, President Carter, you honor my family with your presence here today.

I remember how my dad would tell audiences years ago, "I don't mind not being President, I just mind that someone else is."

There is much to say, and much will be said, about Ted Kennedy the statesman, the master of the legislative process and bipartisan compromise, workhorse of the Senate, beacon of social justice and protector of the people.

There is also much to say and much will be said about my father the man. The storyteller, the lover of costume parties, a practical joker, the accomplished painter. He was a lover of everything French: cheese, wine, and women. He was a mountain climber, navigator, skipper, tactician, airplane pilot, rodeo rider, ski jumper, dog lover, and all around adventurer. Our family vacations left us all injured and exhausted.

He was a dinner table debater and devil's advocate. He was an Irishman and a proud member of the Democratic Party.

Here's one you may not know: Out of Harvard he was a Green Bay Packers recruit but decided to go to law school instead.

He was a devout Catholic whose faith helped him survive unbearable losses and whose teachings taught him that he had a moral obligation to help others in need.

He was not perfect, far from it. But my father believed in redemption and he never surrendered. Never stopped trying to right wrongs, be they the results of his own failings or of ours.

But today I'm simply compelled to remember Ted Kennedy as my father and my best friend. When I was 12 years old I was diagnosed with bone cancer and a few months after I lost my leg, there was a heavy snowfall over my childhood home outside of Washington D.C. My father went to the garage to get the old Flexible Flyer and asked me if I wanted to go sledding down the steep driveway. And I was trying to get used to my new artificial leg and the hill was covered with ice and snow and it wasn't easy for me to walk. And the hill was very slick and as I struggled to walk, I slipped and I fell on the ice and I started to cry and I said "I can't do this." I said, "I'll never be able to climb that hill." And he lifted me in his strong, gentle arms and said something I'll never forget. He said "I know you'll do it, there is nothing you can't do. We're going to climb that hill together, even if it takes us all day."

Sure enough, he held me around my waist and we slowly made it to the top, and, you know, at age 12 losing a leg pretty much seems like the end of the world, but as I climbed onto his back and we flew down the hill that day I knew he was right. I knew I was going to be OK. You see, my father taught me that even our most profound losses are survivable and it is what we do with that loss, our ability to transform it into a positive event, that is one of my father's greatest lessons. He taught me that nothing is impossible.

During the summer months when I was growing up, my father would arrive late in the afternoon from Washington on Fridays and as soon as he got to Cape Cod, he would want to go straight out and practice sailing maneuvers . . . in anticipation of that weekend's races.

And we'd be out late, and the sun would be setting, and family dinner would be getting cold, and we’d still be out there practicing our jibes and spinnaker sets long after everyone else had gone ashore. Well one night, not another boat in sight on the summer sea, I asked him, "Why are we always the last ones on the water?" Teddy, he said, "Well, you see, most of the other sailors we race against are smarter and more talented than we are. But the reason why we are going to win is that we are going to work harder than them and we will be better prepared."

And he just wasn't talking about boating. My father admired perseverance. My father believed that to do a job effectively required a tremendous amount of time and effort.

Dad instilled in me also the importance of history and biography. He loved Boston and the amazing writers, and philosophers, and politicians from Massachusetts. He took me and my cousins to the Old North Church, and to Walden Pond, and to the homes of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Berkshires. He thought that Massachusetts was the greatest place on earth. And he had letters from many of its former senators like Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams hanging on his walls, inspired by things heroic.

He was a civil war buff. When we were growing up he would pack us all into his car or rented camper and we would travel around to all the great battlefields. I remember he would frequently meet with his friend Shelby Foot at a particular site on the anniversary of a historic battle, just so he could appreciate better what the soldiers must have experienced on that day.

He believed that in order to know what to do in the future, you had to understand the past. My father loved other old things. He loved his classic wooden schooner, the Mya, He loved lighthouses and his 1973 Pontiac convertible.

My father taught me to treat everyone I meet, no matter what station in life, with the same dignity and respect. He could be discussing arm control with the president at 3 p.m. and meeting with a union carpenter on fair wage legislation or a New Bedford fisherman on fisheries policy at 4:30.

I once told him that he accidentally left some money, I remember this when I was a little kid, on the sink in our hotel room. And he replied "Teddy, let me tell you something. Making beds all day is back breaking work. The woman who has to clean up after us today has a family to feed."

And that's just the kind of guy he was.

He answered Uncle Joe's call to patriotism, Uncle Jack's call to public service, and Bobby's determination to seek a newer world. Unlike them, he lived to be a grandfather, and knowing what my cousins have been through I feel grateful that I have had my father as long as I did.

He even taught me some of life's harder lessons, such as how to like Republicans. He once told me, he said, "Teddy, Republicans love this country just as much as I do." I think that he felt like he had something in common with his Republican counterparts: the vagaries of public opinion, the constant scrutiny of the press, the endless campaigning for the next election, but most of all, the incredible shared sacrifice that being in public life demands. He understood the hardship that politics has on a family and the hard work and commitment that it requires.

He often brought his republican colleagues home for dinner and he believed in developing personal relationships and honoring differences. And one of the wonderful experiences that I will remember today is how many of his republican colleges are sitting here, right before him. That's a true testament to the man. And he always told me that, "Always be ready to compromise but never compromise on your principles." He was an idealist and a pragmatist. He was restless but patient.

When he learned that a survey of Republican senators named him the Democratic legislator that they most wanted to work with and that John McCain called him the single most effective member of the U.S. Senate, he was so proud because he considered the combination of accolades from your supporters and respect from your sometime political adversaries as one of the ultimate goals of a successful political life.

At the end of his life, my dad returned home. He died at the place he loved more than any other, Cape Cod. The last months of my dad’s life were not sad or terrifying, but filled with profound experiences, a series of moments more precious than I could have imagined. He taught me more about humility, vulnerability, and courage than he had taught me in my whole life.

Although he lived a full and complete life by any measure, the fact was he wasn’t done. He still had work to do. He was so proud of where we had recently come as a nation, and although I do grieve for might have been, for what he might have helped us accomplish, I pray today that we can set aside this sadness and instead celebrate all that he was, and did, and stood for. I will try to live up to the high standard that my father set for all of us when he said "The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

I love you dad and I always will. I miss you already.


(Image: C.J. Gunther/Getty)

By David Rising in Berlin
Scotsman
28 August 2009



Photo: Auschwitz-Birkenau from dpcamps.org

ARCHITECTURAL plans for the Auschwitz death camp that were found in Berlin last year were handed over to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday for display at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

The 29 sketches of the death camp built in Nazi-occupied Poland date as far back as 1941. They include detailed blueprints for gas chambers, crematoria, barracks and delousing facilities and are considered important for understanding the beginnings of the Nazi genocide.

The sketches are initialled by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.

"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Mr Netanyahu said. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death." ( >>Continue reading )

BBC
22 Aug 09

The US army officer convicted for his part in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War has offered his first public apology, a US report says.

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened," Lt William Calley was quoted as saying by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.

Calley maintains that he was following orders from his superior

He was addressing a small group at a community club in Columbus, Georgia.

Calley, 66, was convicted on 22 counts of murder for the 1968 massacre of 500 men, women and children in Vietnam.

Cold blood

"I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry," the former US platoon commander said on Wednesday.

Bodies of women and children lie in the road leading to the village of My Lai, following the massacre.

He was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killings in 1971. Then-US President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to three years' house arrest.

But Calley insisted that he was only following orders, the paper reported.

He broke his silence after accepting a friend's invitation to speak at the weekly meeting of the Kiwanis Club, a US-based global voluntary organisation.

The My Lai massacre was a turning point in the Vietnam War

At the time of the killings, the US soldiers had been on a "search and destroy" mission to root out communist fighters in what was fertile Viet Cong territory.

Although the enemy was nowhere to be seen, the US soldiers of Charlie Company rounded up unarmed civilians and gunned them down.

When the story of My Lai was exposed, more than a year later, it tarnished the name of the US army and proved to be a turning point for public opinion about the Vietnam War.

Yesterday the Libyan convicted in 2001 for the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was released from prison on compassionate grounds. If anyone knows of or remembers the Pan Am air disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland which killed 270 people, including many on the ground, and which was subsequently blamed on the Libyans, you may be interested in reading this book which has been banned and had much trouble seeing the light of day due to governmental intervention. I found it at the Ralph Nader online library, which is a quite interesting resource. The name of the book (which can be read and downloaded online) is:


TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA

"The true story of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988 has been enshrouded in government-created lies. The American government claimed that two Libyan agents, acting alone, placed the bomb aboard an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was transferred to a London-bound 727, and then transferred again to the 747 Jumbo Jet at Heathrow Airport, destined for New York, the ill-fated flight 103. I knew better. I had spent the past four years gathering strategic intelligence on narco-terrorist cells in Lebanon as an agent for two Federal agencies -- the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy unit, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Two days after the bombing, appearing on the NBC Nightly News, I told Tom Brokaw and his television audience, 'We should take a close look at Libya -- renegade CIA operative Edwin Wilson sold Leader Muhammar Gadaffi 20 tons of plastique explosives and has trained the Libyans to make bombs.' I didn’t know then, but subsequently learned, that Wilson was no renegade. He had recruited Gadaffi at the behest of his CIA bosses, who then turned on him, arresting Wilson in 1977 and prosecuting him for doing what he had been ordered to do. While Wilson fought his battle against the CIA’s campaign of character assassination from a prison cell, Wilson’s partner Frank Terpil continued training Libyans in bomb-making and terror tactics. When Pan Am 103 was destroyed in mid-air in 1988, Gadaffi had been perfectly positioned to serve as the CIA’s scapegoat. Because Wilson knew the truth, the CIA’s campaign to discredit and silence him continued until 2003, when Judge Lynn Hughes ordered him released from Federal prison, declaring that the CIA’s story was 'nothing but lies.'"

A comment on a news post >>here alerted me to this disclosure about the book and sent me on a quest to find it.

There are many other fascinating resources about a wide variety of issues at the library. It is located here: The Ralph Nader Library.

Image source

**I learned some history today I didna know. It's quite fascinating.

Belfast Telegraph
Wednesday, 19 August 2009

He should have been hailed a hero for his wartime codebreaking. Instead he was prosecuted for his homosexuality and took his own life. So why has Britain never said sorry? Jonathan Brown reports

He may have played a pivotal role in securing victory in the Second World War for his country six years earlier, but few outside the academic community would have recognised Alan Turing as he made his way down Manchester's Oxford Street shortly before Christmas in 1951. Someone who did notice the athletically-built scientist, however, was a young working class gay man called Arnold Murray.

Alan Turing helped crack German Enigma codes during the Second World War

Homosexuality was still illegal under the same repressive laws which had sent Oscar Wilde to jail half a century earlier. But regardless of the risk, the chance encounter was to develop into something more substantial and Murray spent a number of nights at the older man's modest home in suburban Wilmslow.

A month later, after Turing, a veteran of the then still secret Bletchley Park code-cracking team, had been giving a talk to the BBC on his pioneering work on artificial intelligence, he returned home to find his house burgled.

The culprit was an acquaintance of Murray's, who would prey on Murray's lovers, thinking they would be so afraid of being outed that they would not report the thefts to the police.

But Turing defied this convention and went straight to the police, where he admitted his affair – a "crime" for which he was spared the normal two-year jail term in favour of a hormonal treatment designed to beef up his masculine urges and suppress his homosexuality. The resulting publicity was to prove too much to bear and in June 1954, the 41-year-old was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. He had eaten an apple he had laced with poison. ( >>Read on )