Friday, April 8, 2016

Wolfgang Hampel, Betty MacDonald and new projects





How to plant daffodilsBetty MacDonald in the living room at Vashon on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.



Wolfgang Hampel  - and Betty MacDonald fan club fans,


Betty MacDonald fan club research team is working on a new Betty MacDonald exhibit.

If you are interested in joining this Betty MacDonald fan club project you are welcome.
 
Several Betty MacDonald fan club fans shared very interesting details and info regarding Betty MacDonald's fascinating experiences in Hollywood.


Thanks a million!


We are going to publish some new Betty MacDonald fan club interviews  by Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel who is working on an updated Betty MacDonald biography.
 

Good luck dear Wolfgang Hampel!

Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Mr. Tigerli is a great guy even if he is a bit strange.


My British friends would say he's a bit eccentric but that's like Onions in the Stew, don't you think. 

 
Do I agree with Betty MacDonald's description of women and men? Oh yes I do! 


Betty MacDonald was such a very intelligent lady and she knew very well what she was writing about.

 
If we believe that Mr. Tigerli acts a bit strange what can we say of the behaviour of some men?

 
Betty wrote the truth! By the way I don't hate men! I love them - some of them - especially mine!


My family and friends adore Traci Tyne Hilton's books very much.

We are very happy that she is one of our great Betty MacDonald fan club honor members.

Betty MacDonald fan club fans from all over the world like Linde Lund's interview with Traci Tyne Hilton very much.  




Enjoy a new breakfast at the bookstore with Brad and Nick, please.

Great Betty MacDonald fan club ESC news will be published on Betty MacDonald fan club blog.

It's a fact that Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany have been robbed winning Eurovision Song Contest several times.

A wonderful Betty MacDonald fan club ESC surprise for Betty MacDonald fan club ESC fans from all over the world is waiting for you.


Send us your ESC 2016 votes, please.
12 points for 1st place and until 1 point for your 10th place.
You are not allowed to vote for your own country.



Deadline: April 30, 2016
We are going to publish Betty MacDonald fan club ESC TOP 10 in alphabetical order.
Don't miss the chance to win two Grand Final ESC 2016 tickets.
It'll be very exciting.
Who will be Betty MacDonald fan club ESC winner 2016? 


Have a nice Friday,
 

Mats

Don't miss this very special book, please.





Vita Magica
Betty MacDonald fan club

Betty MacDonald forum  

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) - The Egg and I 

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( German )

Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )

Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )

Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )

Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )

Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University 

Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel 

Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD

Betty MacDonald fan club items 

Betty MacDonald fan club items  - comments

Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I  

Betty MacDonald fan club groups 

Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund  











Rita Knobel Ulrich - Islam in Germany - a very interesting ZDF  ( 2nd German Television ) documentary with English subtitles 







David Cameron left dangerously exposed by Panama Papers fallout

PM gives only partial answers over father’s fund as revelations reverberate globally, forcing his Icelandic counterpart to resign








David Cameron faces questions from journalists about his family’s tax affairs during a visit to PwC in Birmingham
David Cameron was left dangerously exposed on Tuesday after repeatedly failing to provide a clear and full account about links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, as the storm over the Panama Papers gathered strength in both the UK and elsewhere around the world.
The prime minister and his office have now offered three partial answers about the fund set up by his father Ian, which avoided ever paying tax in Britain. The key unanswered question is whether the prime minister’s family stands to gain in the future from his father’s company, Blairmore, an investment fund run from the Bahamas.




After Downing Street said on Monday that the fund was a “private matter”, a journalist asked Cameron about it during a visit to Birmingham on Tuesday. Cameron replied: “I own no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description.” He dodged the key part of the question about whether he or his family stood to benefit.
Having failed to satisfy reporters, Downing Street issued a further statement that Cameron’s wife and children also do not benefit from offshore funds but again left the main question about the future unanswered.
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had called earlier in the day for an independent investigation, told the Guardian: “Three times Downing Street has been asked to provide a full and comprehensive answer. The public has a right to know the truth.
“We need to know the full extent of the links between Britain and the web of tax avoidance and evasion revealed by the Panama Papers at all levels.”





The leak of 11.5m files from the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca continued to create uproar and upheaval around the world. The documents were leaked to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Guardian, the BBC and other media organisations.
The latest developments include:

  • Barack Obama calling for tax evasion to be tackled worldwide.
  • The row claimed its first victim, Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who resigned in a row over his family’s offshore investments.
  • The German justice minister, Heiko Maas, said the country planned to introduce a new national transparency register to make offshore companies disclose their owners’ identity.
  • France’s finance minister announced that Panama would again be blacklisted as an uncooperative tax haven.
  • Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced that he would set up an independent judicial commission to investigate whether his family was involved in anything illegal through ownership several offshore companies.
  • Revelations that the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has secretly built one of the single biggest offshore property empires in Britain, owning dozens of central London properties worth more than £1.2bn through offshore companies supplied by Mossack Fonseca.
The row embroiling Cameron picked up pace on Tuesday morning when Corbyn responded to Downing Street’s assertion that the matter was private by telling reporters: “Well, it’s a private matter insofar as it’s a privately held interest. But it’s not a private matter if tax is not being paid. So an investigation must take place, an independent investigation, unprejudiced, to decide whether or not tax has been paid.”

Later in the day, Cameron told reporters: “In terms of my own financial affairs, I own no shares. I have a salary as prime minister and I have some savings, which I get some interest from and I have a house, which we used to live in, which we now let out while we are living in Downing Street and that’s all I have.”
Downing Street returned to the issue later. A No 10 spokesperson said: “To be clear, the prime minister, his wife and their children do not benefit from any offshore funds. The prime minister owns no shares.




“As has been previously reported, Mrs Cameron owns a small number of shares connected to her father’s land, which she declares on her tax return.” Downing Street also attempted to shift the argument back to Labour. A source called on people “suggesting that Mr Cameron and his family are benefiting from off shore trusts” to come forward with evidence. “The onus is on them to put up or shut up. The prime minister has put out a very clear statement.” As well as pressing Cameron, Corbyn called for a cleanup of Britain’s overseas territories and dependencies, such as the British Virgin Islands, which accounts for about half the companies named in the Panama Papers, the Cayman Islands and Anguilla.
He said the government should consider imposing direct rule on British overseas territories and crown dependencies, which lie at the heart of the allegations.

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The government had already scheduled a meeting of G7 countries in London on 12 May to discuss the overseas territories and crown dependencies. Tax campaigners, however, said that government officials had been downplaying expectations for months, telling them that tax would not be high on the agenda and that instead the main item would be corruption, such as the low-level bribery of officials.
The shadow leader of the Commons, Chris Bryant, who was responsible for overseas territories and dependencies when Labour was in power and was involved in a standoff with them over transparency, said: “There is a great deal of power the government has if it chooses to exercise it, even without the nuclear option of direct rule.”
He said he had pressed them to be more transparent and tried to put pressure on them by refusing to authorise loans, but the standoff ended when the Conservatives took power.
The City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, also responded to the Panama Papers. It said: “The FCA has written to a number of firms about this issue, including those on our systematic anti-money laundering programme, and we are working closely with a number of other agencies who are also looking at this.
“As part of our responsibility to ensure the integrity of the UK financial markets, we require all authorised firms to have systems and controls in place to mitigate the risk that they might be used to commit financial crime. We have also today published our annual business plan which identifies financial crime and anti-money laundering activity as one of our priorities for the year.”
In the US, Obama addressed reporters at the White House, making the highest profile intervention yet in favour of the global reform of tax avoidance.
“There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally is a huge problem. The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal,” he said.
The US president said the leak from Panama illustrated the scale of tax avoidance involving Fortune 500 companies, running into trillions of dollars worldwide.
“We shouldn’t make it legal to engage in transactions just to avoid taxes,” he said, praising instead “the basic principle of making sure everyone pays their fair share”.
Only about 200 US citizens have been identified so far in the leaked data, but the US justice department, which aggressively pursues cases both domestically but internationally, issued a statement saying it “takes very seriously all credible allegations of high level, foreign corruption that might have a link to the United States or the US financial system”.





Betty MacDonald fan  club interview with author Traci Tyne Hilton
           

Copyright 2014/2016 by Traci Tyne Hilton & Linde Lund
                                            

                                              All rights reserved




I can find several interviews with you. Which two ones do you prefer?





Here are two recent interviews. The second one is a "character interview" with the characters from my newest book, which is kind of fun.













 




This is a picture of me on my tenth wedding anniversary at The Betty MacDonald Farm on Vashon. My sweet husband planned our weekend away, but didn't realize that I actually wanted to STAY at the farm! But he did drive me there to see it before we went home, though. I'm pretty little in the picture, but if you look closely, you can see me by the door to the barn.





Which book by Betty MacDonald did you read first?




My mom gave me her copy of The Egg and I when I was about 11. It was my first taste of Betty Macdonald, but I was definitely hooked! I read it at least once a year until I was in my twenties and finally got around to finding the rest of her work at my library...and then collecting reprints.





What do you like most in Betty MacDonald's books?




I love her over the top humor paired with her brutally honest representation of life. 





Is there anything you dislike in Betty MacDonald's books?




One could call her portrayal of the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest in the Egg and I racist, but she was a woman of her time, and the things she writes about, such as alcoholism, are not untrue. They are just reported with that brutal honesty that she also uses for her white neighbors--no one is safe from her sharp pen. So, it makes me a little uncomfortable to read, but at the same time, I think it is real (from her perspective at least, and her perspective is valid,) and I don't dislike it, if that makes sense.





Did you ever read Betty MacDonald's books for children for example The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series and  Nancy and Plum?


Oh yes! I wish I had had them as kids, but I have been reading them to my kids which is even better! My sister in law bought me Nancy and Plum several years back, and I love it. I don't know why it's not a classic on par with the Secret Garden or the Little Princess! But...even better than Nancy and Plum are the Piggle-Wiggle books. They crack my kids up, and were the first chapter books that my girls really devoured. They crack me up, too!





What is your favourite book by Betty MacDonald?





It is still The Egg and I. It's a book that formed so much of my opinion on fiction and held such an important part of my growing up--I don't think anything could beat it. My husband and I call snobby activities "The Theatah and the Dahnce" and I've been known to say "I itch, so I scratch, so what?" 





Did Betty MacDonald influence you as author?




Absolutely. Though I write mysteries I want them to be funny, and I hold Betty MacDonald's work up as a standard for humor.





What do you think is the reason Betty MacDonald is beloved all over the world?



Betty's work gives us a glimpse into a world that we would have never known without her. Both life in the Olympic Mountains and on Vashon are so different from regular town and city life. I think readers love to escape, and the more remote the location, the more different the people we get to meet, the more we love the work! Betty's books help us all escape to a time that is getting farther and farther away, and a place that doesn't even exist anymore, but even when it did, it was unexpected, hilarious, and stunningly beautiful.





Dearest Traci I hope I don't bore with so many questions.

I wasn't a bit bored! Betty MacDonald is definitely my favorite author and I loved having a chance to talk about her work and why I love it so much!





As I already mentioned there are several Betty MacDonald fan club fans who enjoy your books very much.




That people who love Betty MacDonald also like my books is almost unbelievable to me, and really is a dream come true, as an author. When I was a young girl, curled up with her work, escaping to that remote egg farm, I never dreamed that someday people who loved her, would also enjoy what I had to say.



Dearest Traci thanks a million for this wonderful interview.
Lots of love to you and your family.

Lots of love to you, as well! Thank you.



Traci