These diagrams from the March 2, 1942 issue of Life detailed the Nazi invasion of America shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Check out such alternate reality battles like the bombing of Detroit and invasion of Norfolk, Virginia.

These maps were created as a follow-up to an article about an American defeat in WWII by pioneering science fiction author Philip Wylie, who wrote the proto-superhero novel Gladiator. These maps were made in the early days of US involvement in World War II, so there was a sense that this invasion was a real possibility. You can read more about these maps at Ptak Science Books.

www.io9.com

“When you meet the man you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes.” Brassai (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) – 9 September 1899–8 July 1984 – was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century.

Gyula (Jules) Halász (the Western order of his name) was born in Brassó, Transsylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (since 1920 Brașov), in Romania, to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian. When he was three, his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.

As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War.

In 1920, Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist for the Hungarian papers Keleti and Napkelet. He started studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste).

There he became friends with several older Hungarian artists and writers, including the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, and the writer György Bölöni, each of whom later moved to Paris and became part of the Hungarian circle.

In 1924, Halász moved to Paris, where he would live the rest of his life. To learn the French language, he began teaching himself by reading the works of Marcel Proust. He soon became friends with the American writer Henry Miller, and the French writers Léon-Paul Fargue and Jacques Prévert.

Halász’s job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He first used it to supplement some of his articles for more money, but rapidly explored the city through this medium, in which he was tutored by his fellow Hungarian André Kertész. He later wrote that he used photography “in order to capture the beauty of streets and gardens in the rain and fog, and to capture Paris by night.” Using the name of his birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym “Brassai,” which means “from Brassó.”

Brassai captured the essence of the city in his photographs, published as his first collection in 1933 book entitled Paris de nuit (Paris by Night). His book gained great success, resulting in his being called “the eye of Paris” in an essay by his friend Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, Brassai portrayed scenes from the life of the city’s high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He had been befriended by a French family who gave him access to the upper classes. Brassai photographed many of his artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti and several of the prominent writers of his time, such as Jean Genet and Henri Michaux.

Brassai’s photographs brought him international fame. In 1948 he had a one-man show in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which traveled to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. MOMA exhibited more of Brassai’s works in 1953, 1956, and 1968.

In 1956, Brassai directed a film Tant qu’il y aura des bêtes (As long as there will be animals), shot at the Paris Vincennes Zoo. It won the “Most Original Film” award that year at the Cannes Film Festival. In the 1970s, he received French national awards for his artistic contributions and especially his photography.

Brassai wrote 17 books and numerous articles, including the 1948 novel Histoire de Marie, published with an introduction by Henry Miller.

Brassai died on July 8, 1984 in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes in the south of France, and was interred in the Cimetiére du Montparnasse in Paris. The copyright representative for the Estate of Brassai is the French photography agency, Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

http://books.google.com/books

http://www.photo-seminars.com

http://books.google.com/books

OVERVIEW

Koenigsberg, as the city of Kaliningrad was once known, was founded by Teutonic knights in the 13th century. It became one of the cities of the Hanseatic League and was once the capital of Prussia. The philosopher Immanuel Kant spent all his life in the city and died there in 1804.

The region was part of Germany until annexation by the USSR following World War II when it saw bitter fighting and suffered rampant destruction. The German population was expelled or fled after the war ended.

During the Soviet period, Kaliningrad Region, administratively part of the Russian Federation, was separated from the rest of Russia, more than 300km to the east, by the then Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus.

Since Lithuania joined the EU it has been impossible to travel between the exclave and the rest of Russia over land without crossing the territory of at least one EU state. There has been friction, particularly with Lithuania, over transit regulations. President Putin described as a matter of Russian national security the inauguration of a new sea route linking the region with Ust-Luga, near St Petersburg, in 2006.

Kaliningrad was one of the most militarised and closed parts of the Soviet Union. Up to half a million servicemen were stationed there. The military were the region’s chief economic mainstay in the Soviet years. When the USSR ceased to be, that military presence was decimated along with the economic benefits it provided.

Kaliningrad is still of great strategic importance to Moscow. It houses the Russian Baltic Fleet at the port of Baltiysk and is the country’s only European ice-free port.

During the Soviet period, agriculture was a key industry. The market for Kaliningrad’s produce was largely dismantled with the collapse of the USSR. The economy nosedived in the early 1990s. Russia provided very little real investment. Unemployment soared and poverty became very widespread, particularly in rural areas. Organised crime and drugs became increasingly problematic. HIV infection rates rose.

In a bid to tackle the region’s problems, in 1996 the Russian authorities granted it special economic status and tax advantages intended to attract investors. Although corruption was an early deterrent, the region’s economy benefited substantially.

Kaliningrad underwent an unprecedented boom, and in 2007 a new $45m airport terminal was opened.

The European Commission provides funds for business projects under its special programme for Kaliningrad. The region began to see increasing trade with the countries of the EU as well as increasing economic growth and rising industrial output.

However, the global financial crisis of 2008-9 affected the region badly, and by the beginning of 2010 unemployment had climbed to over 10% – considerably higher than the Russian average.

Rumblings of discontent came to a head after a sharp increase in the cost of public transport, and in January an estimated 10,000 people attended a rally calling for the dismissal of Kaliningrad governor Georgiy Boos, in what was one of the biggest opposition protests in Russia in a decade.

Moscow keeps a wary eye on developments. The Kremlin is particularly sensitive over calls from within the region for a referendum on whether to seek greater autonomy within Russia with a view to strengthening ties with the European Union.

http://englishrussia.com

http://bbc.co.uk

Structured Settlement Investments Firefighters today extinguished a fire that raged for more than 15 hours after two oil pipeline exploded at a Chinese Structured Settlement Investments port.

An explosion at a pipe transporting crude oil from a ship loan rates to a storage tank blew up yesterday evening, causing a blast at a second, nearby duct.

More than 2,000 firefighters and 338 mesothelioma layers engines from 14 different cities worked loan rates through the night in the north-eastern port of Dalian to put out the blaze which illuminated the sky in a strange orange glow.

Inferno: Firefighters walk along a stretch of pipelines towards the blast site in Dalian, northeast China

Sky transformed: A strange orange glow can be seen for miles around as 2,000 firefighters battled flames

More than 300 fire engines line up to deal with the blaze which sent flames bursting into the sky.

Smoke poured into the sky as a switch error meant that one of the oil pipes could not be turned off.

By the morning the fire was under control. By 9am – 15 hours after it started – it was extinguished.

At the smaller pipeline, the problem was exacerbated because workers were unable to remotely switch off the oil pump because of mechanical failures caused by the fire.

Firefighters had to switch it off by hand before the blaze was eventually extinguished this morning. Eventually, at 9am, 15 hours after the first explosion, the inferno had been quenched. The ship, a Very Large Crude Carrier, left the port undamaged.

Here are some pictures:

Read more: http://www.dalimunthe.com

Back in 1995, George Steinmetz, an award-winning photographer, documented clans of tree-dwelling people in Indonesian New Guinea. They had no prior contact with anyone outside their language group.

These are amazing beautiful images of the Korowai and Kombai clans living in tree houses that stand in clearings they have carved out of the forest.

PHOTOS AFTER THE JUMP

http://www.thisblogrules.com

Many see this photo from 1985 as the beginning of what we nowadays call “media globalization“, because Omayra Sanchez’s agony was followed by television cameras from all over the world.

Omayra Sanchez

Despite all the footage that was recorded by those tv cameras, it was this photograph, of a shocking reality and humanity, that went down in history as the first broadcast of the pain and death of a human being.

Erik Johansson, a young computer engineering student from Sweden, has been taking the blogosphere by storm by producing heavily manipulated photographs which invert aesthetics as we understand them, inspired by MC Escher and surrealist artists.

Aged just 25, and due to complete his Masters in Interactive Design in under a month, he has already been bombarded with offers of work following a wave of interest from blogs and design magazines after he published his innovative photographic work on his website.

Instead of shying away, as some photographers do, from revealing the intense levels of Photoshop work done on the images he produces, Johansson is proud of the technique he has developed and says it is “somehow different from other kinds of art”.

Having taken photographs “all [his] life” he developed a specialist design technique that tricks the eye and the brain. His work is humorous and playful, but can also be quite hard-hitting and political.

The Independent caught up with Johansson by phone, as he was eating his lunch at the university canteen in Gothenburg, Sweden.

How have you dealt with the recent exposure you’ve had?

It’s a bit overwhelming because I’m not really used to it. I haven’t put much effort into promoting my pictures, except for my website. People seem to have discovered them somehow. It’s really fun and has generated some great work opportunities for me. Particularly re-touching work for advertising agencies. I even went to Paris recently to complete some work.

Why do people respond so positively to your work?

I think it’s because the realisation is so realistic. Some of the ideas are quite abstract but when you first look at it, it appears realistic which creates the surprise. Plus, I think the images are somehow different from other kinds of art.

Can you tell us a bit about the production process?

I have been doing the photography all my life but I’ve only been doing the manipulations for about four or five years.

What takes most time in the production process is the planning. With good planning the other steps don’t take so long.

If I have a good idea I will add it to my list of projects that I want to realise. The photography, for me, is a way to get material because my work is created on a computer afterwards. From the idea to the final image, it can take between a week and a month.

You appear in some of the photographs yourself. Why?

Some of the models in the pictures are me, yes, but I try to get other people most of the time as it’s much easier to do. I don’t really like being in them myself, so a lot of the models featured are friends and family.

Have you received much attention in your native Sweden?

Not that many people have heard of me here in Sweden. France has shown the most interest in my work.

You’re studying Computer Engineering, which is very different from being an artist. Do you want to do the photography as a career?

I want to do this as my job. It was a just a hobby for several years, but I’ve started to think about trying to make a living out of it more and more.

People don’t usually thing of Computer Engineering as a creative arts subject. What do you think?

It can be creative, but in a more abstract way. Writing code can be kind of creativity you know, in terms of solving problems. My photographs are a lot like that, except they’re creating visual problems by solving them, as it were.

Who or what inspires you?

I get my inspiration from artists rather than photographers. MC Escher, Dali and Rene Magritte and other old fashioned artists mainly.

What are you up to at the moment?

Right now I’m finishing my Masters so I’m not doing any photography. I’ve got a lot of priorities at the moment and the photographs are not really the highest.

Here’s a link to his site: http://www.alltelleringet.com

http://www.independent.co.uk