Heroine Wake a 'role model for courage'

Tributes have flowed from both sides of the Tasman in honour of World War II heroine Nancy Wake, who has died in hospital aged 98.

New Zealand-born Ms Wake grew up in Sydney and after a brief stint as a nurse, worked as a journalist in

Europe, where she married a French businessman in 1939.

Trapped in France when the Nazis invaded, Ms Wake worked with the Resistance as a courier and later as an effective saboteur and spy.

She became the Gestapo's most wanted person, receiving the enduring nickname "The White Mouse".

RSL national president Rear Admiral Ken Doolan has paid tribute to the courage of Ms Wake and says she remains a great role model for all Australians fighting for freedom.

"What Nancy Wake did was quite unique and for her time she stood up in the most courageous way, and she's a tremendous role model in that respect," he said.

Ms Wake is regarded as a heroine in France, which decorated her with its highest honour, the Legion d'Honneur, as well as three Croix de Guerre and a French Resistance Medal.

Victorian RSL president David McLachlan told ABC local radio that Ms Wake thwarted the Gestapo with her every attempt.

"She was very much involved in providing information for the planning of D-Day," he said.

"She parachuted back in behind enemy lines after she'd been back to England.

"The Gestapo hated her, wanted her, more than anybody else, and she was an incredibly brave woman."

Close friend Les Partell says Ms Wake, who died just days before her 99th birthday, earned her nickname because she was so hard to capture.

"They could not catch her," he said.

"Whenever somebody dobbed her in, they would go there and she would be gone. Nancy would get away from them.

"The world offered a reward for anyone who could catch The White Mouse. They grabbed her husband, Henri, and the Gestapo tortured him to death."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard says Ms Wake was a woman of exceptional courage who had saved the lives of hundreds of allied personnel during World War II.

"Our nation honours a truly remarkable individual whose selfless valour and tenacity will never be forgotten," she said.

"Nancy Wake will remain an abiding inspiration to generations of Australians."

Across the Tasman, New Zealand veterans' affairs minister Judith Collins says Ms Wake's achievements have been acknowledged by members of the Special Forces, past and present.

"Her death will deeply affect many veterans, who will view her passing with a great sense of loss," she said.

She says while Ms Wake had lived most of her life abroad, she had visited family in her home country as a teenager.

Realist painter Lucian Freud dies

London --Lucian Freud, a towering and uncompromising figure in the art world for more than 50 years, has died, his New York art dealer said Thursday. He was 88.

Spokeswoman Bettina Prentice said that Mr. Freud died after an illness at his London home late Wednesday

night, but didn't give any further details.

Mr. Freud was known for his intense realist portraits, particularly of nudes. In recent years his paintings commanded staggering prices at auction, including one of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch that sold in 2008 for $33.6 million.

He stubbornly refused to follow the trends of that world, insisting on using his realist approach even when it was out of favor with critics and collectors. He developed his own unique style, eventually winning recognition as one of the world's greatest painters.

"He certainly is considered one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries," said Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of the postwar art department at Christie's auction house in New York.

Queen Elizabeth II

Among his most famous subjects was Queen Elizabeth II, who posed for Mr. Freud fully clothed after extensive negotiations between the palace and the painter. The colorful portrait, which the artist donated to the queen's collection, remains one of the most unusual and controversial depictions of the British monarch.

"It makes her look like one of the royal corgis who has suffered a stroke," said Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal.

Other critics said more enthusiastically that the work had broken the staid mold of royal portraiture.

Mr. Freud was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, a leading pioneer of modern psychoanalysis. He was born in Berlin in 1922 and moved to London with his parents Ernst and Lucie Freud in 1933 after Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany.

He was naturalized as a British subject six years later and spent almost his entire working life based in London, where he was often seen at fashionable restaurants, sometimes with beautiful younger women, including the fashion model Kate Moss, whom he painted nude, and other luminaries. Mr. Freud was at the height of his fame in the last decades of his life, when he still continued to paint for long hours at his studio in London's exclusive Holland Park. He was even named one of Britain's best dressed men by the fashion magazine GQ when he was well into his ninth decade.

Artworks in S.F.

His first solo exhibition was at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944 after a brief stint working on a merchant ship during World War II. After the war, Mr. Freud left London for several years to paint primarily in France and Greece. On his return in 1948, he started showing his work regularly at various exhibits and also taught art at several schools. His work can be found in major public collections around the world: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have three of his prints in their Achenbach Collection, and the Fisher Collection which will be part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's holdings has one etching.

Mr. Freud's marriage to Kathleen Garman lasted four years and was dissolved in 1952. His second marriage, to Caroline Blackwood in 1953, ended in 1957.

Echoes of Mladic's cruelty felt in wounded Bosnia

The shadow Ratko Mladic cast over Bosnia persists nearly 20 years after he led Serb military forces in Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II. Bosnia's Serbs revere him for his devotion to their failed cause, its Muslims are repulsed by his cruelty, and the soul of the capital they once shared peacefully has been scorched forever. Sarajevo and all of Bosnia are a sadder place — dysfunctional, rent by hatreds sown during the war that will last for generations.

Mladic, who was arrested Thursday after 16 years as a fugitive, has loomed large from the first artillery barrage his forces directed at Sarajevo's citizens from the hills above the city, on a sunny day in April 1992. Before the war, Sarajevo's live-and-let-live attitude had exemplified the ideal of what was then Yugoslavia. Serb, Croat and Bosniak interacted from cradle to grave. They intermarried — according to the 1991 census a year before the war began, 51 percent of Sarajevo's marriages were mixed. They celebrated each others' birthdays and jointly mourned at funerals, No place was off limits to anyone, and the city was abuzz with multiethnic art, music and literature that made it the cultural capital of Yugoslavia. The city remained tolerant even as the country began to fray along ethnic lines, but by early 1992, both Bosnia, one of Yugoslavia's former republics, and its capital were pulled into the vortex. Sarajevo's civilians huddled in basements to escape Mladic's artillery as he reveled in his power. "Burn their brains," he bellowed as his men targeted the nearly defenseless city from the hills above. At war's end three years later, Sarajevo was a burned-out shell. For most Muslim Bosniaks, Mladic shares the blame along with Slobodan Milosevic, the late Yugoslav strongman, and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader now being tried by the U.N. war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Bakir Izetbegovic, the son of wartime Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic, described Mladic as a coward who massacred thousands but had "no courage to face charges." Many Bosnian Serbs, however, were dismayed by the capture of Mladic, the man they once hoped would accomplish their dream of secession from Bosnia and union with neighboring Serbia. Now Bosnia is split into a Serb republic that still seeks independence — a goal that helped spark the war — and a Bosniak-Croat entity opposed to a split. "Most of the (Bosnian) Serbs support Mladic and perhaps half of Serbia does too," declared Tijo Mladic, Mladic's first cousin from the village of Bozanovici in eastern Bosnia where Mladic was born. "I'm furious," said a resident of Lazarevo, Serbia — the village where Mladic was arrested. He identified himself only as Zoran for fear of retaliation. "They arrested our hero," Zoran said, though he and other villagers insisted they had no idea Mladic had been living in their midst. Backed by the government in Belgrade, and supported internationally by Russia out of a sense of historical grievance, Bosnian Serbs often were more aggressively nationalist than their cousins in Serbia itself. At the same time, they played a cynical game of talking about peace, lifting and then reimposing the blockage of Muslim towns, and acting the victim. Many Bosnian Serb leaders saw the war as a harsh but necessary means to achieve their goals. But the barrel-chested Mladic, a former Yugoslav army officer, appeared to relish in using the conflict as a stage for bloody excesses — including, most infamously, the taking of Srebrenica. Just hours before ordering the massacre of thousands of men, women and children at the Bosnian town in July 1995, Mladic handed out candy to the town's children. He even patted one on the head. Television images of that scene documented his cynicism to the world. Mladic's arrest was "too long coming," said retired Adm. Leighton Smith, who as commander of Allied Forces Southern Europe led implementation of the NATO no-fly zone over Bosnia and the bombing campaign. "I never met him, and I never referred to him as 'general' because I thought he was a butcher and an animal," Smith said from his home in Pinehurst, N.C. But Mladic was idolized by his troops — and Bosnian Serbs in general who feted him as a hero born to save the Serbs from Bosniak domination. Reporters crisscrossing front lines and venturing into Serb-held Bosnian villages were challenged to down a glass of burning plum brandy to Mladic's health, regardless of the time of day. Refusing was not advisable. For outsiders, Mladic was a popinjay; arrogant, cold and dismissive. In his olive fatigues and stiff campaign cap, he delighted in insulting and keeping waiting European and international peace negotiators. To his Bosniak victims, he showed no compassion, referring to them as Turks because of their Muslim heritage. Under his command, villages were "cleansed" of Croats and Muslims. Rape became a weapon of war. Neighbors burned neighbors' houses and farms. Internment camps that recalled the concentration camps of the Nazis reappeared on the European landscape. Serbs, too suffered. Their villages were also ethnically cleansed, and their women raped by an enemy that was sometimes Bosniak, sometimes Bosnian Croat. Still, in terms of numbers in a war that left 110,000 dead and 10,000 still missing, the main victims were the Bosniaks targeted in Sarajevo, Srebrenica and elsewhere by Mladic and his loyalists with a criminal energy that sometimes defied description. Many of his soldiers pledged to follow him to the death. In a macabre pilgrimage, young men from Serbia drove for hours from Belgrade on the weekend to man guns commanded by Mladic on a mountain redoubt in Pale. They would see a cloud of smoke, hear the boom of their shell exploding below, and shout with glee. In the valley under those hills, Sarajevans suffered for days, weeks — then months and years. Food became scarce, then drinking water and gasoline. Anesthetics ran out, and the hospital began amputating limbs mangled by shrapnel without them. Old women bent by the load of water canisters on their backs were easy pickings for Mladic's snipers. Journalists, aid workers and other outsiders caught up in the war by their jobs also became targets. Daily trips became normal on "Sniper Alley" — a main thoroughfare easily reached by a Serb rifleman's bullet that was the fastest path from Sarajevo's east to the west. Reporters made white-knuckled drives in and out of Sarajevo over those hills controlled by Mladic, their cars sometimes just ahead of the machine gun bullets throwing up dust behind them. Once, Sarajevans rushed a helicopter painted in U.N. peacekeeper white thinking it was bringing food in — only to be scattered by a hail of hand grenades thrown from the chopper. It was a Serb chopper, painted white. The joy sparked by Mladic's capture Thursday was tempered by the memories of the horrors that sit deep in the psyches of those who suffered because of him. Architect Safet Basic spoke of "a boy who picked up a loaf of bread as it was distributed, then sat on the sidewalk and told me he has to share the loaf with five more people in his household — but he keeps daydreaming of opening his mouth and stuffing the whole loaf into it at once." Basic shuddered as he recalled "the rotten biscuits" distributed by local and U.N. aid organization. "The expiration date was years ago, but we ate them. They stunk. And the fish from that can. Every day the same meal. That ugly canned fish. "I ate it, but it also ate me."

Queen fetes Obamas amid pomp of Buckingham Palace

LONDON — President Barack Obama will outline in a speech today how much the world has changed since the U.S.-British partnership emerged victorious from World War II, but also argue that the relationship remains the cornerstone of global security.

The theme, outlined by administration officials here Tuesday, is part celebration of the military partnership, which has waged war in three Muslim nations over the past decade, and part reassurance that the heavy cost has been essential.

Obama will deliver the address, characterized by advisers as "the anchor speech" of his six-day European trip, to the British Parliament at Westminster Hall, becoming the first American leader to do so in that historic venue.

"He'll speak to the fact that we've obviously come through a very difficult decade, but in some respects we're turning a corner," Ben Rhodes, a U.S. deputy national security adviser, told reporters.

His address at Westminster Hall will be the most substantive event of the trip so far after a start heavy with ceremony.

On Tuesday, Queen Elizabeth II welcomed Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, for his first state visit here. The official greeting took place just before noon at Buckingham Palace.

America's first couple walked up the red carpet to the palace door, where the queen, her ubiquitous handbag in the crook of her arm, greeted them with a handshake and smile. Prince Philip stood by her side.

The Obamas' gift to the queen was a handmade, leather-bound album containing original photographs of the June 1939 visit to the United States of her parents, King George VI and his consort Elizabeth, known more recently as the queen mother.

Inside the palace, the Obamas also met with Prince William and new wife Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Many lined the streets and gathered outside the Obamas' tour sites on a warm and clear afternoon.

The Obamas visited Westminster Abbey and laid a wreath at a tomb in memory of "the unknown warrior." Obama wrote in the guest book, "It is a great privilege to commemorate our common heritage and common sacrifice," but added the wrong date, "24 May 2008."

Obama also paid a courtesy call at 10 Downing Street to see Prime Minister David Cameron, with whom he will hold more extensive meetings today.

The evening ended with a state dinner at Buckingham Palace, where Obama, in white tie and tails, toasted the alliance as "a commitment that speaks to who we are."