Douglas Caddy

News Corp exposed to growing legal threat following charges for tabloid duo Charges for Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson raise prospect that News Corp could be prosecuted under US anti-bribery laws By Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe in New York guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 November 2012 16.49 EST The charges complicate the rehabilitation of Rupert Murdoch's son James as a possible successor to lead News Corp. The new round of criminal charges brought in the UK against former senior News International editors has once again raised the prospect that Rupert Murdoch's New York-based parent company may be prosecuted under US anti-bribery laws, and complicates the rehabilitation of his son James as a possible successor to lead the global media empire. The charges brought against Rebekah Brooks, who ran Murdoch's newspaper holdings in Britain, Andy Coulson, former editor of the now defunct News of the World, and two other former News International employees exposes the parent News Corporation to possible action under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The FCPA exists to prosecute US-domiciled companies for acts of bribery and corruption that they might commit abroad. An official of the British ministry of defence, Bettina Jordan Barber, also faces trial for allegedly receiving £100,000 from Murdoch's tabloid newspapers for information that led to a series of published stories. The allegation that money passed hands clearly falls within the legal remit of the FCPA. Mike Koehler, professor of law at Southern Illinois school of law and author of the blog fcaprofessor.com, said the charges "would be hard for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to ignore. We have been hearing allegations for a year and a half now, now we clearly have charges against high ranking officials at a foreign subsidiary," he said. The new charges, and the allegation of bribery of a military official, come at a very sensitive time for the company. The media giant is preparing to split itself in two, separating the TV and broadcasting arm from the scandal-hit newspaper and publishing division. The developments also bring to a crashing halt the recent perception in America that News Corporation had begun to recover its confidence after months on the defensive as a result of the phone-hacking scandal. Only on Monday, the New York Times ran an article headlined The FCPA has two main components, one that relates to the bribing of foreign officials and another that relates to books and record keeping. It is often the latter that causes companies the biggest headaches. Characterising a bribe as "miscellaneous expense" is a serious offence. "This latest news is an escalation of the FCPA case," said Koehler. But he said he expected the case could still take some years to be resolved. The latest legal difficulties to hit News Corporation could also potentially have ramifications on its 27 TV licences within the Fox network – the real financial heart of the operation. Three of the licences are up for renewal, and in August the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) filed a petition with the US broadcasting regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, that called for them to be denied on the grounds that the company did not have the requisite character to run a public service. Melanie Sloan, Crew's director, said the charges of the four former News International employees played into its petition. "News Corp argues that the conduct in Britain shouldn't matter here in the US, but the Atlantic ocean doesn't have cleansing properties – if Murdoch is seen to be unfit to run a global company in the UK, then he's unfit in this country, too." In May, the UK Commons culture committee censured Murdoch in their report into the phone hacking scandal, saying that he was "not a fit person" to exercise stewardship of a major international company. So far there have been no confirmed cases of News Corporation employees engaging in illegal activities within the US. This week the Daily Beast alleged that the Murdoch tabloids the Sun and the New York Post may have made payments to a US official on American soil in order to obtain a photo of a captive Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, in his underwear. News Corporation has denied the claims. Mark Lewis, the UK-based lawyer who has represented many of the victims of News of the World hacking, has been investigating possible cases of data breaches within the US but has yet to issue legal proceedings

Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks face charges over payments to officials Former editors among five to face charges over alleged corrupt payments by News International staff to public officials By Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 November 2012 07.41 EST Prosecutors have announced new criminal charges against the former News International editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, this time over alleged illegal payments to public officials. The Crown Prosecution Service announced on Tuesday that four former News International employees, and a defence official alleged to have been paid £100,000 for information, should stand trial. The announcement came as a result of Operation Elveden, in which the Metropolitan police are investigating claims of unlawful payments by News International staff to police officers and other public officials. Coulson, former editor of the now defunct News of the World, and the former royal editor Clive Goodman, are both charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. These relate to payments allegedly made to gain confidential information about the royal family. In a statement, Alison Levitt, QC, principal legal adviser to the director of public prosecutions (DPP), said: "We have concluded, following a careful review of the evidence, that Clive Goodman and Andy Coulson should be charged with two conspiracies. The allegations relate to the request and authorisation of payments to public officials in exchange for information, including a palace phone directory known as the "green book" containing contact details for the royal family and members of the household." Also charged are Brooks, editor of the Sun between 14 January 2003 and 1 September 2009, the Sun's former chief reporter John Kay, and the Ministry of Defence official Bettina Jordan Barber, who is alleged to have been paid £100,000 over a seven-year period. The CPS said all three "conspired together, and with others, to commit misconduct in public office" between 1 January 2004 and 31 January 2012. "We have concluded, following a careful review of the evidence, that Bettina Jordan Barber, John Kay and Rebekah Brooks should be charged with a conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office between 1 January 2004 and 31 January 2012. This conspiracy relates to information allegedly provided by Bettina Jordan Barber for payment which formed the basis of a series of news stories published by the Sun. It is alleged that approximately £100,000 was paid to Bettina Jordan Barber between 2004 and 2011." The Metropolitan police have arrested 52 people as part of Operation Elveden, including 21 journalists at the Sun. Among the public officials arrested are a member of the armed forces, a prison official, and police officers. In its statement, the CPS said: "All of these matters were considered carefully in accordance with the DPP's guidelines on the public interest in cases affecting the media. This guidance asks prosecutors to consider whether the public interest served by the conduct in question outweighs the overall criminality before bringing criminal proceedings. "Following charge, these individuals will appear before Westminster magistrates court on a date to be determined." The Met has said the investigations triggered by the phone-hacking scandal may last another three years and cost £40m. The force has 185 officers and civilian staff working on all the related investigations – 96 on Operation Weeting, looking at phone hacking, 70 on Elveden and 19 on Tuleta, which covers computer hacking. In July the CPS announced phone-hacking charges against Coulson and Brooks, who both edited the News of the World. They have denied the charges. Coulson also faces trial in Scotland over claims he committed perjury in a libel trial, which he denies. He is a former top aide to the prime minister, David Cameron. Brooks and Coulson were among eight people charged with 19 counts of conspiracy over the phone-hacking scandal, with prosecutors alleging that the News of the World targeted, among others, Labour cabinet ministers and celebrities – including at least one person associated with the Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Brooks and her husband, Charlie, are also facing charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by allegedly concealing evidence from the police investigating her time as a top News International executive. Both deny those charges also. The other News of the World staff facing phone-hacking-related charges are Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor, Ian Edmondson, former assistant editor (news), Greg Miskiw, a former news editor, Neville Thurlbeck, former chief reporter, James Weatherup, former assistant news editor, and a the private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Kuttner faces three charges, while Miskiw faces 10 charges. Edmondson faces 12 charges, Thurlbeck eight, and Weatherup eight.

Emerging From Scandal, News Corporation Looks at Potential Acquisitions News Corporation is starting to look like its old self again. The New York Times November 19, 2012 The media conglomerate, which had been on its heels for more than a year because of the phone hacking scandal in Britain, is looking to make acquisitions again. First on the list could be a 49 percent stake in the Yes Network in New York, a purchase that could become the foundation for a new nationwide sports network to compete with ESPN. News Corporation’s stock has reached highs as the company prepares to transfer its underperforming publishing assets, including newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, into a separate publicly traded entity. One of the crucial factors in the decision was that the split would allow Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, to buy into the businesses he loves without upsetting investors who are more interested in cable and broadcast. Potential targets include The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and more education companies. “Rupert has his mojo back,” said Todd Juenger, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “The stock is up, investors are happy with the company’s recent decisions.” “He is definitely rubbing his hands together,” a person with knowledge of News Corporation’s deal-making discussions said of Mr. Murdoch. In the last several weeks, Mr. Murdoch has exuded a satisfaction and sure-footedness that people close to the company said they had not seen since before Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper unit became embroiled in a phone hacking scandal. That is in part because hacking has been overtaken in the press by an unfolding scandal at the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC, which Mr. Murdoch and his son James have frequently criticized, is accused of canceling a news program’s segment about serial child molesting committed by longtime host Jimmy Savile, and broadcasting false reports of pedophilia about a member of Margaret Thatcher’s administration. People close to Mr. Murdoch said he considered the BBC scandal karmic justice for months of negative coverage of News Corporation, and he has provided almost daily commentary via Twitter. “BBC getting into deeper mess,” he wrote on Nov. 10. “After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as pedophile.” And the BBC scandal touches another Murdoch rival — The New York Times, whose parent company’s new chief executive, Mark Thompson, served as director general at the BBC. Mr. Thompson’s replacement at the BBC, George Entwistle, resigned on Nov. 11 after just 54 days on the job. “Look to new CEO to shape up NYT unless recalled to BBC to explain latest scandal,” Mr. Murdoch wrote on Twitter last month. As News Corporation sank into its hacking scandal last year, it delayed new acquisitions. In September, Britain’s Office of Communications, known as Ofcom, said that British Sky Broadcasting, 39.1 percent owned by News Corporation, was “fit and proper” to hold a broadcast license. The decision removed a cloud of uncertainty at News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters and cleared the company to revisit deals, analysts said. “The internal narrative at the company is that the boss is in shopping mode,” said one person close to News Corporation who could not discuss Mr. Murdoch’s thinking publicly. Dropping its $12 billion bid for the portion of BSkyB that it did not already own gave News Corporation ample cash to complete share buybacks and consider other acquisitions. The company had $9.6 billion in cash at the end of its 2012 fiscal year and in September borrowed another $1 billion. On a recent earnings call, Chase Carey, News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, said: “We always seem to be the topic of the day when it comes to a rumor of some transaction.” Still, he added: “There are places where we think we should kick the tires on things.” Last week News Corporation neared a deal with Yankees Global Enterprises to buy a 49 percent stake in the Yes Network, a regional New York sports network, with a valuation of about $3 billion. A stake in Yes would add to News Corporation’s lineup of regional sports channels and contribute to its reported plans to introduce a national cable sports channel that could take on the Walt Disney Company’s ESPN. “It’s one of the only businesses where there’s no No. 2,” said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Nomura Securities. “In our view, sports is the safest asset in media.” This month the company paid an estimated $250 million for the portion of ESPN Star Sports that it did not already own. ESPN Star Sports, based in Singapore, operates 17 sports networks in five languages around Asia. Then there are publishing assets that the 81-year-old Mr. Murdoch has long coveted, like The Los Angeles Times. Its owner, the bankrupt Tribune Company, is looking for a buyer for its struggling newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune. Julie Henderson, a spokeswoman for News Corporation, called recent reports that News Corporation was in talks with Tribune Company and The Los Angeles Times “wholly inaccurate.” News Corporation’s last major acquisition, of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Journal and Barron’s, for $5.6 billion in 2007, was unpopular among investors. But the structure of the coming split of News Corporation could give Mr. Murdoch considerable resources to indulge his love of newspapers. While the final details of the split won’t be announced until next month, News Corporation has arranged for its sluggish publishing division to be bolstered by Australian pay television assets, which will make up the bulk of the earnings in the newly formed company. In Australia, the company recently paid $2.01 billion to increase its stake in Australia’s dominant pay TV provider, Foxtel. “All of the Australian assets go into the split-off company,” Mr. Murdoch said in June. “It is just a lot simpler.” That structure also gives the company’s hard-hit newspapers a financial safety net and Mr. Murdoch capital. Mr. Carey, News Corporation’s president, has said the company will invest in its fledgling education division. Run by a former New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, the education group, called Amplify, will be part of the new company. Last month, News Corporation explored a $1.6 billion cash offer for Pearson’s Penguin publishing house. Penguin ultimately merged with Bertelsmann’s Random House. But News Corporation’s interest raised questions about other acquisitions that would bring scale to its HarperCollins book division, also part of the publishing company. “He’ll have the currency” to do whatever he wants, said a person who discussed the split plan with Mr. Murdoch.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/2012/11/16/323-i-loved-lee-harvey-oswald/

The book's author notes that Joe, Jr.'s World War II bomber suddenly exploded in midair. Was it is planned assassination? I wonder if the author discusses the sidereal timing of the deaths of members of the Kennedy family. If Joe, Jr.'s plane exploded because of a device placed on board, then the device may have been set to go off at the determined sidereal time. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17723

Family Guy ‘The Patriarch,’ a Joseph P. Kennedy Biography, by David Nasaw The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy The Penquin Press - $40 868 pages The New York Times Sunday Book Review November 18, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/review/the-patriarch-a-joseph-p-kennedy-biography-by-david-nasaw.html?hp The next time you land at Logan Airport in Boston, pause a moment to reflect that you are standing on landfill annexed to what was once Noddle’s Island. Here, sometime in the late 1840s, a young escapee from the Irish potato famine named Patrick Kennedy first set foot in the New World. A cooper by trade, Patrick died of cholera in 1858 at age 35. His grandson and near namesake, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was born in 1888 in a neighborhood now known as unfashionable East Boston. The rest, as they say, is history. In the hands of his biographer David Nasaw, it is riveting history. “The Patriarch” is a book hard to put down, a garland not lightly bestowed on a cinder block numbering 787 pages of text. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Not quite as disinterested a credential as one might hope for in a Kennedy biographer, but Nasaw informs us that the family placed no restrictions on him, and allowed him unfettered access to the deepest recesses of the archive. This book is a formidable labor of six years. Kennedyland is terrain notably susceptible to idolatry, hatemongering, whitewash, conspiracy-thinking, sensationalism and other agendas. Nasaw credibly avers that he has taken forensic pains to excise anything that could not be confirmed by primary sources. I am no historian, but the evidence appears to support his claim. His research is Robert Caro-esque; barely a paragraph is not footnoted. And he is unsparing about his subject’s shortcomings, which are numerous. Given the extraordinary sweep of Kennedy’s life — banker, Wall Street speculator, real estate baron, liquor magnate (but not bootlegger), moviemaker, Washington administrator, ambassador, paterfamilias and dynastic founder — the miracle is that Nasaw was able to tell the whole damned story in only 787 pages. The book’s subtitle, “The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times,” is if anything an understatement. Joe Kennedy was personally involved in virtually all the history of his time. There has been no dearth of books about America’s royal family, but this one makes a solid case that the ur-Kennedy was the most fascinating of them all. Fascinating, that is, as opposed to entirely admirable. Not that he wasn’t in ways, but boy was J.P.K. one complicated boyo. To paraphrase the heavyweight Sonny Liston’s manager: Joe Kennedy had his good points and his bad points. It’s his bad points that weren’t so good. On the positive side of the ledger, he was an utterly devoted father. He adored his children and, when he was there — which wasn’t often — was a touchy-feely, hands-on daddy. When he wasn’t there, he regularly wrote them all copious letters. He superintended every aspect of their lives. And in his own highly idiosyncratic way, he was a devoted husband to his wife, Rose, a priggish, pious, humorless and deeply boring woman, while conducting conspicuous affairs with Gloria Swanson, Clare Boothe Luce and “hundreds” of other women. Also on the positive side: he was a genius at management and organization; a Midas at moneymaking. He amassed his immense fortune without even seeming to break a sweat. As a Wall Street manipulator, he was involved in some shameful episodes; but he was also the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and headed up the Maritime Commission at critical times in the nation’s history. At these enormous tasks he performed tirelessly and valiantly. As for the not-so-good part: he was a deplorable and disastrous United States ambassador to the Court of St. James’s during the crucial prewar period. One ought to refrain from smug judgments on the commonplace biases of prior generations. Kennedy was culturally anti-Semitic, but over time his anti-Semitism metastasized into a grotesque and paranoid obsession. His isolationism was formidable and adamant, but in that, too, he was hardly unique. A lot of Americans, notably Charles Lindbergh, wanted to keep America out of another European war. But Kennedy’s relentless drive to appease — indeed, reward — tyranny was monomaniacal, preposterous and dangerous. In his view, Hitler was really just another businessman with whom a deal could be struck. Here his business genius impelled him in a direction that would have led to hell. But it was his profound defeatism, a trait seemingly contrary to his talent for rising to a challenge and getting things done, that was so — to quote from the subtitle — remarkable. At one point we see him fulminating at the Royal Air Force. Why, you may ask, is Ambassador Kennedy in such a rage? (“Yet another rage” would be more accurate, for you can open “The Patriarch” to almost any page and find him spluttering in fury, indignation or resentment. Or all three.) Well, the answer is that he was livid at the R.A.F. for winning the Battle of Britain and thus halting the German invasion of England. No, Nasaw is not making this up. You see, all that those brave young men in their Spitfires had really accomplished was “prolonging” Britain’s inevitable defeat. One rubs one’s eyes in disbelief. Next to Joe Kennedy, Cassandra was Pollyanna. As the saying goes, to be Irish is to know that sooner or later the world will break your heart. Daniel Patrick Moynihan adduced this chestnut of Hibernian Weltschmerz on Nov. 22, 1963, upon the assassination of the patriarch’s son. Nevertheless, for someone on whom the gods had lavished every blessing — as well as one hell of a lot of the proverbial “luck of the Irish” — Joe Kennedy was possessed of a pessimism that ran deeper than the Mariana Trench. And yet — and yet — in the end, his suspicion that the cosmic deck was stacked against him was weirdly and tragically validated. When, in 1969, this vibrantly alive man, who over a lifetime generated more energy than a nuclear reactor, died after eight years as a drooling, stroke-afflicted paralytic able to utter only one word — “No!” — he had outlived four of his beloved nine children. His firstborn son and namesake was taken from him by the war he had so desperately tried to avert. His most cherished daughter, Kathleen, known as Kick, went down in a private plane that had no business being aloft in dangerous weather (a recurring Kennedy tragic theme). Two more sons were gruesomely murdered in public. Then there was the daughter, also much loved, whose life was permanently destroyed by a botched, if well-intentioned, lobotomy that her father had authorized. The invalid patriarch was told about the assassinations of his sons. Nasaw does not reveal whether he was told about his remaining son’s rendezvous with karma at Chappaquiddick. Probably not; and probably just as well. His devastation was already consummate. To whom the gods had given much, the gods had taken away much more. The dominant animus in Joe Kennedy’s life was his Irish Catholic identity. (Identity, as distinct from his religious faith.) He was born into comfortable circumstances, went to Boston Latin and Harvard (Robert Benchley was a classmate and friend). But as a native of East Boston, he was permanently stamped as an outsider. He could never hope to aspire to the status of “proper Bostonian.” This exclusion, harnessed to a brilliant mind and steel determination, fired the dynamo of his ambition. One of the more arresting sections of the book is the betrayal — and it was certainly that, in Joe Kennedy’s view — by the Roman Catholic Church when his son was trying to become the first Irish Catholic president. The Catholic press relentlessly criticized John, while the church higher-ups sat on their cassocks, murmuring orisons for a Quaker candidate. Nasaw cites a 1966 oral history by Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston, an intimate Kennedy friend and beneficiary: “Some of the hierarchy . . . were not in favor of John F. Kennedy being elected president. They feared the time had not arrived when a president who was a Catholic could be elected.” This reticence may remind some of the modern-day reservations expressed in quarters of the American Jewish community that a Jewish president might exacerbate and inflame anti-Semitism. Many blacks had similar reservations about Barack Obama when he first decided to run for president. Kennedy’s Irish Catholicism, his ­outsider-ness, both paralleled and reinforced his anti-Semitism. He identified with Jews, to a degree. They, like the Irish, were an oppressed people who had also been persecuted for their religion. But in Kennedy’s view the Irish had fled their holocaust in Ireland and found haven in the New World. Now, in the 1930s, the Jews were trying to draw the entire world into a war. Kennedy was not indifferent to the plight of European Jewry. Indeed, he tried hard to achieve some international consensus on establishing new Jewish homelands somewhere in the British Empire. His motives were more tactical than humanitarian: if European Jews could be removed from the equation, then perhaps Hitler would have his Lebensraum and . . . chill. Back home, Kennedy shared the extremist consensus that Franklin Roose­velt was the captive of his cabal of left-wing Jewish advisers: Felix Frankfurter, Samuel Rosenman, Bernard Baruch, Eugene Meyer, Sidney Hillman and the whole schmear. (Brainwashed, as Mitt Romney’s father might have put it.) At war’s end, even as news of the Nazi death camps was emerging, Kennedy was pounding the table and railing at the overrepresentation of Jews in the government. Nasaw writes: “The more he found himself on the outside, scorned and criticized as an appeaser, a man out of touch with reality, a traitor to the Roosevelt cause, the more he blamed the Jews.” None of this is pleasant to learn. Kennedy’s relationship with Franklin Roosevelt is on the other hand supremely pleasant; indeed, is the book’s pièce de résistance. Roosevelt’s supple handling of his volatile — make that combustible — ambassador and potential rival for the presidency in 1940 and 1944 constitutes political spectator sport of the highest order. Long before “The Godfather,” Roose­velt well grasped the idea of keeping one’s friends close, one’s enemies closer. Roosevelt and Kennedy were “frenemies” on a grand stage, full of sound and fury, strutting and fretting, alternately cooing and hissing at each other. As president, Roosevelt held superior cards, but Kennedy played his hand craftily — up to a point. The epic poker game ended on a sad and sour note. We hear the president telling his son-in-law that all Joe really cared about deep down was preserving his vast fortune: “Sometimes I think I am 200 years older than he is.” What a tart bit of patroon snobisme. It would have confirmed Kennedy’s worst suspicions about “proper” WASP establishmentarians. Of Roosevelt’s death, Nasaw writes with Zen terseness: “The nation grieved. Joseph P. Kennedy did not.” “Isolationist” seems a barely adequate description for Kennedy’s worldview. He opposed: the Truman Doctrine of containing Communism in Greece and Italy, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the creation of NATO and Congressional appropriations for military assistance overseas. Oh, and the cold war. His foreign policy essentially boiled down to: We ought to mind our own damn business. But in fairness, this debate is still going on. (See Paul, Ron.) Perhaps most stunningly, his pessimism could not even be assuaged by . . . victory! After the war, we find him accosting Winston Churchill, someone he abhorred: “After all, what did we accomplish by this war?” Churchill was not a man at a loss for words, but even he was momentarily flummoxed. In Kennedy’s view, it was Churchill who had foxed (the Jew-­controlled) Roosevelt into the war that had killed his son. Elsewhere we see him lambasting — again, Nasaw is not making this up — Dwight Eisenhower, who favored retaining American troops in Europe. Kennedy “was aggressive, relentless, without a hint of deference to the general, who was arguably the most popular and respected American on two continents.” Kennedy did not know Yiddish, but he did not lack for chutzpah. And rage. Nasaw cites an oral history — though he advises that we approach it with caution — in which Kennedy is described as browbeating Harry Truman: “Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son?” (A strange omission in the book: Roose­velt’s son Elliott was on the bombing mission in which Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was killed. Elliott’s plane was following behind Joe Jr.’s to photograph the operation when Joe Jr.’s bomber suddenly exploded, perhaps because of an electrical or radio signal malfunction. Surely this “Iliad”-level detail — Roosevelt’s son possibly witnessing the death of Kennedy’s son — was worth including?) Kennedy was a man of uncanny abilities, but among them was a talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And here we — or rather, Kennedy’s perspicacious biographer — arrive at the crux and fatal flaw: “Joseph P. Kennedy had battled all his life to become an insider, to get inside the Boston banking establishment, inside Hollywood, inside the Roosevelt circle of trusted advisers. But he had never been able to accept the reality that being an ‘insider’ meant sacrificing something to the team. His sense of his own wisdom and unique talents was so overblown that he truly believed he could stake out an independent position for himself and still remain a trusted and vital part of the Roose­velt team.” As his son indelibly put it some months before his father was struck down: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” One wonders what was going through the mind of the patriarch, sitting a few feet away listening to that soaring sentiment as a fourth-generation Kennedy became president of the United States. After coming to know him over the course of this brilliant, compelling book, the reader might suspect that he was thinking he had done more than enough for his country. But the gods would demand even more. Christopher Buckley’s latest novel is “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2012/nov/14/assassination-robert-kennedy-pictures

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/11/why-did-cia-director-petraeus-suddenly-resign-and-why-was-the-u-s-ambassador-to-libya-murdered.html

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Tragedy-and-Hope-Chapter-651.pdf The above link is to key chapter 65 of Prof. Carroll Quigley's book, Tragedy and Hope.

Profits at News Corp's publishing division down by almost half Home to titles including the Times, Sun and Wall Street Journal hit by $67m charge relating to phone-hacking scandal By Mark Sweney guardian.co.uk Wednesday 7 November 2012 06.52 EST Rupert Murdoch's News Corp said it took a $5m charge in the quarter in costs related to the proposed separation of the publishing division. Photograph: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters Profits almost halved at News Corporation's publishing division, home to titles including the Times, Sun and Wall Street Journal, in the three months to the end of September, during which the company took a further $67m (£41.9m) charge relating to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. The company's newspaper publishing operation was also hit by an advertising slow down in its US and Australian businesses in the three-month period. Overall, News Corp beat analyst expectations reporting total profits – net income – of $2.23bn in the quarter. This was triple what it made in the same quarter last year, due mostly to the sale of its 49% stake in NDS to Cisco, which resulted in a $1.4bn gain, and $75m from a share buyback programme at BSkyB, in which News Corp owns a 39.1% stake. News Corp's film business, which includes Twentieth Century Fox, also performed strongly. The company cited the success of Ice Age: Continental Drift, a boost in TV production and revenue from content deals with Netflix. Total News Corp revenue for the three months to the end of September rose 2% year on year to $8.14bn. News Corp's publishing division, which is to be spun-off into a separately listed company that will include publisher HarperCollins, reported profit of $57m in the three-month period. In the same period last year the division produced a profit of $110m. The ongoing fallout of the phone-hacking scandal continued to mount up financially, with News Corp booking a $67m charge in the quarter relating to ongoing investigations "initiated upon the closure of the News of the World". News Corp said the declines in the US and Australian publishing businesses were partially offset by an "increased contribution" from its UK operation, thanks to the launch of the Sunday edition of the Sun in February. Book publisher HarperCollins also boosted the publishing division thanks to having acquired Thomas Nelson, a Christian book publisher. News Corp said it took a $5m charge in the quarter in costs related to the proposed separation of the publishing division. The company also took a $152m pre-tax restructuring charge mainly related to its newspaper and digital games businesses. "We are committed to leading the change that the marketplace and our customers demand as the company builds on its success at leveraging multi-platform opportunities for our content," said Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp. "We believe that our ability to do so will be enhanced by the flexibility and management focus that will result from the proposed separation of our entertainment and publishing businesses." He added: "We have made considerable progress in this process and look forward to providing more details by the end of the calendar year."

Leveson Inquiry DID ask David Cameron to provide evidence of News International communications on 'a range of issues' Pressure grows on Cameron to publish communications with Rebekah Brooks By James Cusick The Independent Monday, 5 November 2012 The Leveson Inquiry asked David Cameron for communications between himself and representatives of News International that covered a "range of issues" that went further than just the BSkyB bid, The Independent has been told. However, lawyers advising the Prime Minister "interpreted" the request for information as narrowly as possible, allowing him to hand over no texts or emails to Lord Justice Leveson's press inquiry. The inquiry's decision to allow Downing Street lawyers to "interpret" their requests, and to leave Mr Cameron to define for himself what "inappropriate conversations" meant, was last night criticised by the Labour's shadow Justice Minister, Chris Bryant. The Rhonda MP has been demanding for weeks that the Prime Minister publish "dozens" of emails described as "embarrassing and salacious" between himself and the former chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks. The Independent revealed the existence of the emails last month. Legal advice on the emails that Downing St received from government lawyers said that full disclosure to Leveson was not necessary because they fell outside the remit of the inquiry. "There is a clear disconnect between what Leveson asked for, and the interpretation Downing Street put on that," Mr Bryant said. "To resolve this, the Leveson Inquiry should now publish the exact questions it put to the Prime Minister." Mr Cameron has repeatedly refused to answer calls by Mr Bryant in the Commons to publish the private emails between himself and Mrs Brooks. He is also withholding emails between himself and the former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson. Mr Coulson later ran Downing Street's communications operation. Downing Street has denied Mr Cameron is hiding anything, stating that everything they were asked for has been handed over. However, Leveson asking for communications that went beyond the BSkyB bid substantially weakens Mr Cameron's defence. "The public does not know what the Leveson Inquiry asked the Prime Minister for. Neither do they know the scale of the communications between the PM and Rebekah Brooks. The number of texts and emails is crucial here," said Mr Bryant. Robert Jay QC, the inquiry's senior counsel, repeatedly asked Mrs Brooks how often she had texted Mr Cameron. However, the emphasis on frequency was absent when the Prime Minister was questioned. Mr Bryant has estimated that up to 150 text messages between Mr Cameron and Mrs Brooks were disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry by News International. None were handed over by Downing Street. Two texts were discussed by the inquiry, with one mentioning that Mr Cameron often used the term LOL, which he thought meant "lots of love". Last weekend two further texts held by the inquiry were leaked to the Mail on Sunday. Their content proved embarrassing for Mr Cameron, with Mrs Brooks saying she cried twice during a Cameron Tory conference speech, adding: "Will love 'working together'." Yesterday the Liberal democrat peer, Lord Oakeshott, added to the political pressure on the PM, saying it was now "in the public interest" that he publishes the emails and all the texts. He said: "These exchanges show an unhealthy close relationship between Rebekah Brooks and David Cameron."

Peeking Through Years, and the Wall, at Oswald By ANDREW E. KRAMER The New York Times November 2, 2012 MINSK, Belarus — At the end of the cold war, the leadership of the K.G.B., demoralized and seeking favor with the pro-Western reformers then coming to power in post-Soviet states, briefly opened its files on the accused assassin of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. The material was so intimate as to be painful to read, showing unequivocally that the K.G.B. had Oswald under intense surveillance, even at night, for the two and a half years he lived in the Soviet Union as a defector. “They go to bed,” a transcript states at one point, according to the only Western researcher to read it, Norman Mailer. The agency had a peephole into Oswald’s bedroom here, taking advantage of a thin wall between it and a neighboring apartment, where a watcher sat. “Don’t touch me, damn you,” Oswald says after climbing into bed, in the transcript dated July 29, 1961. “No, damn you,” says Oswald’s wife, née Marina Prusakova, now Marina Oswald Porter and a resident of Dallas. “In a minute I’m going to cut off a particular place. Oy mama.” “They laugh,” the watcher notes. The tiny peephole and magnifying lens that made such observation possible are long gone. This summer, the wall that remained as a reminder, of sorts, of Oswald’s presence in Minsk was also lost; a neighbor rebuilt it to add sound insulation. Minsk, a leafy and pleasant former Soviet backwater, is a city where tiny traces of Oswald linger to this day as perhaps nowhere else but in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas. They will not last forever. Taking advantage of what clues — and in two cases memories — remain, four new books touching on Oswald’s Soviet period went to press over the past two years or are awaiting publication. These books comb through a surprising wealth of detail about a central mystery of the accused assassin’s life. A Southerner from a broken home, he lived behind the Iron Curtain after defecting at the age of 19, in 1959. Oswald returned to the United States with Marina and their first daughter, June, in 1962. An acquaintance of Oswald’s from this time, Dr. Ernst Titovets, published a memoir in 2010 describing the long-ago friendship. He still lives in Minsk, where he is a researcher specializing in the chemistry of the brain. The book makes clear that, in Minsk at least, Oswald was hardly a lone gunman: the two went on numerous double dates before Marina came along. It rattles through a list of girlfriends and flings that kept Oswald, a young former Marine, busy while his do-nothing job at a radio factory did not. A foreign-language university, still operating on a side street off Victory Square, about a five-minute walk from his apartment, was a wellspring of young English-speaking women, and a favorite hangout. “Our tastes in girls differed markedly,” Dr. Titovets writes in the memoir, “Oswald: Russian Episode,” published in English in Belarus. “Lee fancies a species of flashy, uninhibited and seductive female, full-breasted and lean, but never an athletic type.” In fact, Dr. Titovets suggests, the K.G.B. with its long experience using sex for intelligence-gathering purposes intentionally placed Oswald near this bounty of English-speaking college women, hoping pillow talk might reveal his real purpose in the Soviet Union. If these clues the city offers up, such as they are, have meaning, it has been to reinforce a conclusion reached by most serious researchers, including Mr. Mailer, who first gained access to Minsk soon after the Soviet collapse: the K.G.B. had no role in the assassination. The agency was as perplexed as anybody by Mr. Oswald. “The K.G.B. understood better than Oswald what Oswald wanted,” said Peter Savodnik, whose book, “The Interloper,” is scheduled for publication by Basic Books, timed to the 50th anniversary of the assassination on Nov. 22 next year. “They knew very well he had never had anything akin to a real family, a mother and a father who loved him. In a way, they provided him with a world.” Compared with the scorched earth the Kennedy assassination presents to researchers in the United States, Oswald’s time in Minsk remains a fertile topic, for now, Mr. Savodnik said. Mr. Mailer handled it in his 1995 book “Oswald’s Tale,” based on the exclusive access granted by the first post-Soviet president of Belarus, Stanislav S. Shushkevich, who ordered the K.G.B. to open the file. Mr. Mailer’s book incorporated techniques of fiction like imagined dialogue, muddying the historical picture and in some views squandering what turned out to be a one-time opportunity to view the file. Mr. Shushkevich’s forthcoming memoirs, discussed with a reporter in a hotel lobby where plainclothes police officers sat at an adjoining table, include a chapter on Oswald, whom he taught Russian at the radio factory. He wrote that the two were never allowed to meet alone, reinforcing the narrative that Oswald could hardly have been a Soviet agent if the K.G.B. was taking such pains to watch him. But the author of one of the new books is now suggesting that author of another — Dr. Titovets — is a K.G.B. agent, once part of the team watching Oswald. In an interview, Dr. Titovets denied this. Alexander Lukashuk, a reporter with the American-financed Radio Liberty and author of “Trace of the Butterfly,” published in 2011, cites Dr. Titovets’s role in creating audio recordings of Oswald’s voice, perhaps used by the K.G.B. to authenticate Oswald’s Southern accent. Dr. Titovets is now using these recordings to promote his book. The peephole into the bedroom was only part of the K.G.B.’s surveillance effort. A listening device was installed in Oswald’s ceiling, researchers have determined; the family living upstairs later emigrated to Israel, where members recalled being asked to leave for a few days while this work was done. The K.G.B tape recorder caught Oswald’s marital spats with Marina, among other things, according to the agency files shown to Mr. Mailer: “You idiot!” the transcript records Marina saying on May 19, 1962. “Shut up,” Oswald says. “Take the baby.” Even today, the apartment has poor sound insulation. “Whenever I watch television, my neighbor hears everything,” said Eduard K. Sagyndykov, a retiree who settled into the one-bedroom home a decade ago without knowing who had lived there before. “He yells at me through the wall. ‘Turn it down!’ ” Not all those listening in on Oswald were members of the K.G.B. Irina Ganeles, a retired journalist, 65, lived downstairs, and as a 14-year-old girl once overheard Oswald singing in the shower. She and her giggling schoolgirl friends wrote him a note, practicing their English and praising his singing, she said in an interview. The response, now a treasured family heirloom, came in the looping longhand of Oswald, who went by Alex while in Minsk. It reads: “Dear Girls, I was very glad to receive your note and I want very much to meet you. Please feel free to come and see me. In your next letter, please say when it shall be convenient for you. Sincerely, Alex Oswald.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/washington-judge-orders-some-watergate-era-court-records-unsealed-history-prof-seeking-them/2012/11/02/524e3ffe-2509-11e2-92f8-7f9c4daf276a_story.html?hpid=z3

WASHINGTON (AP) November 2, 2012 — A federal judge in Washington has ordered the release of some court documents sealed in the 1970s as part of the court case against seven men involved in the Watergate burglary. U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth said in a two-page order Friday that some materials being sought by a Texas history professor should be released. He gave the National Archives and Records Administration a month two review and release the materials. Luke Nichter of Texas A&M University-Central Texas in Killeen, Texas, wrote the judge in 2009 to ask that potentially hundreds of pages of documents be unsealed. Attorneys for the U.S. government said in court documents earlier this year that they would not oppose the release of some of the documents.

James Murdoch reappointed as BSkyB director with 95% shareholder backing No repeat of last year's rebellion over his handling of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal By Mark Sweney guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 November 2012 08.56 EDT James Murdoch has been reappointed as a director of BSkyB with the support of 95% of shareholders at the company's annual general meeting. Barring one investor labelling him as "toxic", Thursday's BSkyB AGM for 2012 experienced no repeat of the rebellion at last year's meeting in reaction to his handling of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Making his first public appearance in the UK since April, when he stood down as chairman of BSkyB and then appeared before the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, Murdoch was oppposed by just 4.96% of company shareholders who voted. A very small number of shareholders – less than 0.5% – withheld their vote at the AGM in central London. Last year a third of independent shareholders voted against Murdoch's reappointment when he was still chairman. In Thursday's vote, just 8.8% of independent shareholders voted against Murdoch and less than 1% abstained. There was some criticism of Murdoch from the floor with shareholder John Marshall saying that his presence on the board was "toxic" and damaged the public view of the business as long as he remained. "He clearly failed to ask questions he should have asked at News of the World over phone hacking," Marshall said. "The name of Murdoch is toxic with a large number of investors. As long as he is on the board, that will reflect on the company." Louise Rouse, a director of FairPensions, questioned his suitability given the recent criticisms by Ofcom of his handling of the phone-hacking scandal at News International. "Given Ofcom's very strong criticism of his competence, what would you say to reassure shareholders concerned about this issue that James Murdoch is doing better [now]," Rouse said. She queried why Murdoch had stepped down from two non-executive directorships at other companies but did not feel it was necessary to do so at BSkyB. "He is not at Sotheby's or GlaxoSmithKline and it is the same sort of role he is occupying at BSkyB," Rouse said. "Major institutional shareholders should have to explain why they have changed their position and feel he is suitable at Sky, especially following Ofcom's report." Murdoch was also the chairman of News International, before stepping down and withdrawing from all of his UK management responsibilities before amove to News Corporation's New York headquarters. He remains the deputy chief operating officer of News Corp, Sky's largest shareholder, owning 39.1% of the company. Nicholas Ferguson, BSkyB chairman, said that there had been no discernible impact on BSkyB – financial or otherwise – of Murdoch remaining on the board. "We've known James Murdoch for many, many years as chief executive and then chairman and have always seen the highest level of competence and integrity," he said. "On our judgment, he has always been a suitable member of the board and a valuable asset to the company." Ferguson said the Ofcom report never found that James had done anything wrong or been involved in a cover-up over phone hacking. "The board unanimously agreed he should stay as a director of the company [following the Ofcom report]," he said. Murdoch faced a more substantial shareholder revolt at last year's meeting AGM, when almost 26% of investors failed to back his reappointment as BSkyB chairman, with 18.76% of them voting directly against him. Despite Ofcom delivering scathing criticism in September of Murdoch's handling of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal at News International – stating that he repeatedly fell short of the conduct to be expected of a chief executive and chairman – the media regulator gave Sky a clean bill of health, saying the broadcaster remained a fit and proper holder of UK broadcast licences. BSkyB has also been refreshing its board – departures have included Random House chief Dame Gail Rebuck and the former Post Office chairman Allan Leighton – after criticism from some investors about its independence. The company said on Thursday that two more directors are to be replaced. Jacques Nasser has said he will not stand for re-election and Lord Wilson has announced his intention to retire. Ferguson said that when the two new appointments are made the majority of BSkyB's independent directors will have joined in the last 18 months. The satellite broadcaster is also understood to have waged a successful charm offensive among investor groups to convince them of the value of Murdoch's experience. He was Sky chief executive for four years from 2003

Claims emerge Alps murder victim may have had access to part of Saddam Hussein's fortune A British engineer murdered in the French Alps may have had access to part of a multi-million pound fortune once belonging to Saddam Hussein, it has been claimed. By Peter Allen, Paris The Telegraph 10:01PM BST 27 Oct 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9638566/Claims-emerge-Alps-murder-victim-may-have-had-access-to-part-of-Saddam-Husseins-fortune.html The possibility was raised by German secret agents working on the international enquiry into the quadruple killing close to Lake Annecy on September 5. Iraqi-born Saad Al-Hilli, 50, died in a blaze of gunfire alongside his wife Iqbal, 47, his mother-in-law Suhaila Al-Allaf, 74, and Sylvain Mollier, 45, a French cyclist. Since the massacre in an isolated wooden layby on September 5th, police and prosecutors have been at a loss to establish a motive for the bloodshed. But now intelligence officials based in Berlin have uncovered evidence that Mr Al-Hilli may have had access to cash which belonged to the former Iraqi dictator. This raises the possibility that sinister forces specifically targeted Mr Al-Hilli as a means of gaining access to part of the enormous wealth that Saddam hid around the world, and especially in Switzerland. Specialist police were last week questioning Geneva-based bankers about the Al-Hilli’s assets, while financial records in countries including the USA have also been requested. It has already been established that Mr Al-Hilli was in dispute with his older brother, 53-year-old Zaid Al-Hilli, over the will of their father, Kadhim, who died around a year ago in Spain. Until now it was thought that the money under dispute came from Kadhim’s property dealing and other business interests. But the German agents have now told their French anti-terrorist counterparts that cash deposited in an Al-Hilli account in Geneva originally came from Saddam. Kadhim, a former factory owner, left Baghdad in the late 1970s with his wife, Fasiha, and two boys, after allegedly falling foul of Saddam's Ba'ath Party. The family settled in Pimlico, central London, with any accounts containing money given to Kadhim by Saddam allegedly frozen after Kadhim was struck off a "list of beneficiaries", according to the new German intelligence. But the clear implication is that Kadhim may not have fallen out with Saddam at all, and was in fact being used to get money out of Iraq on behalf of the dictator, who was always making plans in case he was overthrown. Saddam was executed in December 2006, shortly after it was revealed that he withdraw around £620 million from the Iraqi central bank in 2003 and began hiding it around the world. The assets would have been added to millions already deposited in accounts in other countries – mainly through Iraqis who had moved abroad. Saddam is known to have concentrated particularly large amounts in Switzerland and France, where he had at least two homes and moored a £17million yacht. A report in this weekend’s Le Monde reads: "The German secret service has passed on to the gendarmerie’s anti-terrorist branch information about the links between the al-Hilli family and Saddam Hussein’s fortune." These assets include around £820,000 in the Al-Hilli’s Geneva account – and there could be others. The breakthrough is sourced to a senior French detective working on the killings in eastern France, who said the cosmopolitan Kadhim Al-Hilli would have been an obvious candidate to take money out of Iraq. If Saad Al-Hilli was party to this secret information – and indeed the location of the hidden millions – then he would have been an obvious target for an attack. "The conflict between the al-Hilli brothers, highlighted during the enquiry, was therefore centered on this inheritance and not solely on their father’s," read the report in Le Monde. "Swiss lawyers discovered that Saad al-Hilli had a bank account containing a million euros, without making the link between this money and Iraq, where his family originally come from," it adds. Eric Maillaud, the Annecy prosecutor who is leading the enquiry into the quadruple killer, said he had ‘not yet been informed’ about the intelligence from Germany. However he confirmed that Mr Al-Hilli’s financial affairs and his background in Iraq were at the top of subjects being investigated as he tried to uncover a motive for the murders. Emmanuel Ludot, a French lawyer who defended Sadaam Hussein following his capture, admitted that the deposed Iraqi regime still had funds in Swiss accounts, although he claimed the notion of a "hidden fortune" was fantasy. Zaid Al-Hilli has been questioned by police, but is solely being treated as a witness after denying any involvement in the slaughter of his family members to officers in Britain. The attack also saw Mr Al-Hilli’s seven-year-old daughter, Zainab, badly injured, while her four-year-old sister Zeena, was left deeply traumatised.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2223571/TV-test-innocent-people-turned-brainwashed-assassins.html

Best Selling Author Tom Woods: Was JFK Assassinated Because He opposed the Fed? http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/was-jfk-assassinated-because-he-opposed-the-fed/ Don’t miss the readers’ comments at the end.

The assassination of President John F Kennedy: the finger points to the KGB Nearly 50 years on, a new book suggests that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was guided by hardline Stalinist dissidents The Telegraph (U.K.) By Neil Tweedie 6:50AM BST 24 Oct 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9628028/The-assassination-of-President-John-F-Kennedy-the-finger-points-to-the-KGB.html The young American was agitated, increasingly emotional, and had laid a loaded gun on the table. The Soviet Union must grant him a visa as soon as possible, he pleaded. His life was being made intolerable by FBI surveillance and he, a dedicated communist, wished to return to the arms of Mother Russia. One of the three Soviet diplomats present took the gun and unloaded it before returning it to its owner. There would be no visa in the near future, he explained calmly. Dejected, the American gathered up his documents and departed the Soviet consulate, bound not for his previous home in New Orleans, but Dallas. It was Mexico City, Saturday, September 28 1963, and the man wanting the visa was Lee Harvey Oswald. Fifty-five days later, he would assassinate John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States. This is the standard version of events, as related by one of the “diplomats” present that day, Oleg Nechiporenko. The other two were Pavel Yatskov and Valery Kostikov. All were, in reality, officers in the KGB. Kostikov was, according to the CIA, attached to Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate, specialising in “executive action” – sabotage and assassination. Half a century later, two great traumas of the Cold War era stir in the memory – the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 14-28 1962 and the Kennedy assassination on November 22 the following year. The 50th anniversary of the latter is bound to reignite debate about that fateful lunchtime in Dealey Plaza. In his book, Reclaiming History, the lawyer Vincent Bugliosi expends 1.5 million words proving that Oswald was the lone gunman. Many disagree, not least the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, which in 1979 concluded that, in all probability, two gunmen were involved – and Kennedy was, therefore, the victim of a conspiracy. In its findings, the committee concluded something else, that the Soviet government had not been involved in the assassination. In 1979, the nuclear stand-off between East and West had a decade to run, and the finding was as necessary then as in 1963, when a declaration of Soviet involvement could have triggered a thermonuclear war. Robert Holmes agrees that the Russian government was not involved at an official level but believes events on Cuba, being marked this week, and those of a year later are intimately related. A former diplomat, who served in the British embassy in Moscow between 1961-2, he has made a fresh study of that fraught era. His conclusion is neither as neat as Bugliosi’s “lone nut” hypothesis nor as labyrinthine as the conspiracies proposed by authors like Jim Marrs, whose work inspired the Oliver Stone film JFK. Oswald may have acted alone, thinks Holmes, but he was almost certainly under the control of an outside force. In his new book, A Spy Like No Other, he suggests that Kennedy was most likely the victim of a rogue element within the KGB, hardline Stalinists who were, by training and temperament, incapable of taking the humiliation of Cuba lying down. They conspired behind the back of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, to take revenge on Kennedy, whose cool but resolute stance, bolstered by overwhelming US superiority in missiles and bombers, had forced the withdrawal of Russian medium-range nuclear missiles from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. “Cuba was a humiliation of the first order for these men,” says Holmes. “They believed in the Stalinist way of doing things: hit your enemy, and hit hard. “Khrushchev and Kennedy didn’t become friends in the wake of Cuba but they were able to see eye to eye, to an extent. They were moving forward, calming the world down. This group within the KGB didn’t want that; they wanted to fight. They thought Khrushchev should actually have fired off atomic weapons, and were devastated when he yielded to American pressure.” The spy of the title is Ivan Serov, a pure cold warrior schooled in the purges of the 1930s, when Stalin sent millions to their deaths. As an agent of terror, he had overseen the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the Baltic states in 1941 and the liquidation of countless supposed traitors in the war with Germany. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he seized his chance, helping to overthrow Lavrentiy Beria, the old dictator’s principal henchman. Appointed head of the KGB by Khrushchev in 1954, he played a crucial role in putting down the Hungarian uprising of 1956, supported by his allies Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov. Andropov would go on to lead the KGB, and then the USSR from 1982 until his death in 1984. Kryuchkov would attempt to roll back history in 1991 when he presided over an attempted coup against the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1959, Serov was appointed head of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. His apparent undoing coincided with the Cuban crisis when a GRU officer, Oleg Penkovsky, was unmasked as a British agent. Penkovsky was executed and Serov disappeared into the shadows. Rumours had it that, unable to cope with his disgrace, he had shot himself. In fact, he lived until 1990. Holmes believes Serov’s “disgrace” was a front, masking his involvement in an affair of infinitely greater importance than Penkovsky. These three, Serov, Andropov and Kryuchkov, were most likely the architects of a plot to kill Kennedy. “These were three stalwarts,” says Holmes. “They want action. Kennedy is the arch enemy. Something has to be done. Serov would definitely have known Kostikov and would have been able to communicate with him through the KGB system. Kostikov would have kept any orders from Moscow secret, and may have assumed he was involved in an officially sanctioned operation. “Oswald? Yes, he may have been erratic and was a focus of suspicion because he had emigrated to the Soviet Union before returning to the US. But when you need an expendable assassin, you have to work with what you’ve got.” How long Oswald had been a Soviet asset, Holmes is not sure. But his treatment in Mexico City that weekend in September 1963 was highly unusual. “You would not have had three senior supposed diplomats meeting with a person of no importance on a Saturday morning. “The three men were supposed to be playing basketball: KGB versus the GRU. They would not have missed that. If there was some kind of an emergency, one of them may possibly have stayed to talk to Oswald, but Oswald was then a John Doe, a nobody. “Yes, he had spent a couple of years in the Soviet Union but he wasn’t anybody special. He had applied on the Saturday morning for a visa that was going to take four months to come through. The answer would have been, 'Come back on Monday.’ But no, three of them stayed behind to talk to Oswald for up to two hours. For that to happen, he had to be somebody. “Immediately after the meeting with Oswald, they sent a classified telegram to Moscow. You don’t do that for someone who walks in for a visa. There was something special going on there.” Holmes, who reached the rank of First Secretary, one level below ambassador, felt the pressure exerted by the Soviet state. “You lived and worked on the basis that there were microphones in every wall. “When you went to a restaurant you felt you had been placed at a specific table with a microphone attached to it. You could never relax. There was a lot of talk that the Soviets were beaming some kind of ray at embassies.” The Kennedy conspiracy industry is cranking up for the big anniversary. Holmes is a sober type and tries not to be too sensationalist. He admits he could be wrong, but thinks a rogue element in the KGB is more plausible than Mafia-CIA-Military-Industrial-Complex, and everyone else besides, hypotheses. “There’s more than a reasonable possibility,” he says. “I would say that it is all circumstantial evidence, but if there was evidence that would stand up in court, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it. None of the Kennedy assassination theories would stand up in court. Other assassination theories require some kind of leap of faith; with mine, it is only a little step.” But Oswald? Erratic, talkative Oswald? Surely he would have told all, had Jack Ruby not pumped a slug into his stomach? “If he hadn’t shot Officer J D Tippit after the Kennedy shooting, he may have got away that day, but I’m pretty sure the KGB would have either spirited him back to the Soviet Union or killed him. There’s no way they could have allowed him to be captured.” 'Spy Like No Other’ by Robert Holmes (Biteback) is available from Telegraph Books at £18 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

Daily Mirror publisher faces being sued over alleged phone hacking Four civil claims filed at the high court in the first formal move for damages from any company outside News International By Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 October 2012 20.35 EDT Sven-Goran Eriksson is one of four individuals to have filed a civil claim against Mirror Group Newspapers over alleged phone hacking Photograph: Nicolas Asfouri/Getty The publisher of the Daily Mirror faces being sued over alleged phone hacking by four public figures, including ex-England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson. Four civil claims were filed against Mirror Group Newspapers at the high court on Monday in the first formal move for damages from any company outside Rupert Murdoch's News International. The allegation by Eriksson relates to the Daily Mirror when Piers Morgan was editor. Morgan, now a primetime TV host on CNN in the US, has repeatedly denied knowledge of phone hacking at the title. A spokesman for Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) said: "We have no comment; we are unaware action has been taken at the high court." The claims were filed by the solicitor Mark Lewis on behalf of Eriksson, former footballer Garry Flitcroft, actor Shobna Gulati, who played Sunita Alahan in Coronation Street and Anita in Dinnerladies, and Abbie Gibson, the former nanny to David and Victoria Beckham's children. The claims lodged on behalf of Gulati, Gibson and Flitcroft, allege phone hacking at either the Sunday Mirror or the People. MGN faced accusations of hacking during evidence to Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry into press standards, but has always said: "All our journalists work within the criminal law and the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] code of conduct and we have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise." Lewis confirmed to the Guardian that the civil claims had been lodged, but said they had not yet been served on MGN. He added that he did not expect to file any further claims against the Daily Mirror's publisher this week. Morgan edited the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004. He gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry in December when he repeatedly denied any knowledge of illegal newsgathering techniques at the tabloid. But in May, BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman claimed to the inquiry that Morgan had personally shown him how to illicitly intercept voicemail messages at a lunch in September 2002. Paxman claimed that at the same lunch Morgan had teased Ulrika Jonsson about the details of a private conversation she had had with Erikson, who was England manager at the time. In one testy exchange with Robert Jay, the senior counsel to the Leveson inquiry, in December 2011, Morgan said: "Not a single person has made any formal or legal complaint against the Daily Mirror for phone hacking." The four claims accuse the newspapers of a "breach of confidence and misuse of private information" relating to the "interception and/or misuse of mobile phone voicemail messages and/or the interception of telephone accounts". Former Blackburn Rovers footballer Flitcroft told the Leveson inquiry in November that he had been hounded by tabloid newspapers over an extra-marital affair in 2001. Golati is the actor best known for playing Sunita Alahan in Coronation Street and, previously, Anita in Dinnerladies. Lewis said no particulars of claim had been filed, but that relevant dates relating to the alleged activity were submitted to the high court. The individuals now have four months to serve particulars of claims on MGN. The merits of the claim remain to be tested. The formal hacking allegations come weeks before Leveson is expected to outline a critical assessment of the ethics of the press in his report to prime minister David Cameron. Trinity Mirror has robustly defended its decision not to launch an internal investigation into phone hacking at its titles. Sly Bailey, the former chief executive, told the Leveson inquiry in January that it was unhealthy for a company to investigate unsubstantiated allegations about itself. Bailey said: "I don't think it's a way to conduct a healthy organisation to go around conducting investigations when there's no evidence that our journalists have been involved in phone hacking. "There was no evidence and we saw no reason to investigate. We have only seen unsubstantiated allegations and I have seen no evidence that phone hacking has ever taken place at Trinity Mirror." Trinity Mirror opened a review of its editorial "controls and procedures" following the hacking scandal in July 2011

Here is a rare taped interview with Prof. Carroll Quigley who mentions his years of research in the U.K. and his difficulties in getting his book published. It is followed by a video of Bill Clinton praising Prof. Quigley. Both Clinton and I were students at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and studied under Prof. Quigley who taught a course titled "Civilization", although my enrollment preceded Clinton’s by six years (I was graduated in 1960.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMVVQLA_dGg

Murdoch bid for Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune mooted Report says News Corp has made approaches about buying LA Times and its Chicago stablemate from Tribune Company By Staff and agencies guardian.co.uk, Saturday 20 October 2012 01.21 EDT Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is looking to bid for the Los Angeles Times, the paper has reported, adding Murdoch is also interested in buying its stablemate the Chicago Tribune from their parent company, the Tribune Company. The Times said senior News sources confirmed executives had approached the two investment firms and a bank that hold Tribune's debt – the lenders will become its majority owners once it emerges from bankruptcy protection, possibly within months according to the LA Times. The paper said a deal might require a waiver of federal laws that block ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same market. Murdoch's Fox network has stations in Los Angeles in Chicago. Tribune also has interests in television stations, some of which carry programming from News Corp's TV channels or operate as Fox affiliates. A bid for the LA Times alone could be worth as much as US$400m, the paper said. On Friday, News Corp announced Roger Ailes will remain in charge of the Fox News Channel for the next four years. The news ended a protracted period of speculation about his contract negotiations. The deal means Ailes will remain in control of Fox for the next presidential election season in 2016 and through the 20-year anniversary of Fox News, which Ailes has run since it was set up in 1996. The terms of the new contract were not released. Ailes is already one of the highest-paid executives in television; he has received a base salary of $5m and a bonus of $1.5m a year for the past several years, as well as millions in additional compensation based on the financial performance of Fox News, according to public filings by News Corp. In the fiscal year that ended in June, Ailes received $9m, paid in cash rather than stock, as a reward for Fox's record earnings, and $4m in stock awards tied to the performance of Fox Business which he also runs. His total compensation for the fiscal year was $21m, making him the third highest paid executive at New Corp behind Murdoch, who made $30m, and Chase Carey, the chief operating officer, who made nearly $25m.

David Cameron pressed to come clean over secret Rebekah Brooks emails Furore mounts over 'embarrassing' messages revealed by The Independent By Nigel Morris The Independent Thursday, 18 October 2012 David Cameron is under pressure to release private emails exchanged with Rebekah Brooks that he has withheld from the Leveson Inquiry, after extraordinary scenes in the House of Commons in which he refused to explain the messages to MPs. A visibly agitated Mr Cameron was asked during Prime Minister's Questions to tell the Commons why he had not disclosed details of secret messages between him and Ms Brooks, the former News International chief executive, or publicly revealed their existence. In defiance of parliamentary convention, he flatly refused to tell MPs any more about the messages, which he has not supplied to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics. The Independent disclosed this week that Downing Street was sitting on a cache of emails and text messages between the Prime Minister and Ms Brooks, as well as communications with Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor. Mr Cameron held them back from the judicial inquiry after taking legal advice that they were not relevant to its remit. In acrimonious Commons clashes, the Prime Minister lost his cool as he was challenged by a shadow minister over the disclosures - and then said he would not answer any questions from the MP. Last night the deputy Labour leader, Harriet Harman, sought to increase the pressure on Mr Cameron by urging him to release the information. Sources within the inquiry have confirmed to The Independent that it has received none of the Brooks-Cameron emails. Downing Street has stonewalled on the subject, not denying the existence of the messages, and repeating that the Prime Minister has co-operated fully with the inquiry. The relationship between Mr Cameron and Ms Brooks was closely scrutinised by the inquiry, as were the Prime Minister's dealings with Mr Coulson, who became his media chief in 2007. Mr Coulson has been charged with conspiring to hack phones and perjury. Ms Brooks is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to hack phones and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. She denies the charges and Mr Coulson denies any knowledge of phone hacking. During a fractious session in the Commons, Chris Bryant, the shadow Home Affairs minister, asked Mr Cameron: "Why won't you publish all the texts, emails and other forms of correspondence between yourself and your office and Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and News International so we can judge whether they are relevant? Is it because they are too salacious and embarrassing for you... or is it because there is one rule for the Prime Minister and another for the rest of us?" Before he delivered his question, Mr Bryant told Mr Cameron to "stop smiling" and added: "When the truth comes out, the Prime Minister won't be smiling." Mr Cameron retorted: "Before answering this question, I would like everyone to recall you stood up in this House and read out a whole lot of Leveson information that was under embargo and you were not meant to read out, much of which turned out, about me, to be untrue, and you have never apologised. Until you apologise, I'm not going to answer your questions." He was referring to an occasion in April when Mr Bryant, who received Leveson evidence because as a hacking victim he was a "core participant", quoted from documents submitted to Lord Justice Leveson which had not at the time been published. Ms Harman wrote to the Prime Minister last night urging him to release details of all electronic contacts with senior News International figures. She said: "In order for the public to have total confidence it would be preferable for you to disclose all of the emails and let the Leveson Inquiry decide which are relevant." Asked whether Mr Cameron was within his rights to refuse to answer the questions, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "He can give the answer he likes. They choose the questions, he chooses the answers."

Television Review Cheerfulness Amid Calamity By ALESSANDRA STANLEY The New York Times October 17, 2012 “Ethel” is a loving, touching and sometimes mischievous tribute to Ethel Kennedy, 84, by her youngest daughter, Rory Kennedy, a filmmaker. It is presented as a “private look inside a highly public life” — and it should have been kept private. Instead, “Ethel” is a documentary being shown on HBO on Thursday night that is tone-deaf and maddeningly incomplete. Watching it is a little like reading a classified report redacted by Dick Cheney — so much material is blacked out that it’s almost impossible to follow. Rory Kennedy, who was born six months after her father’s 1968 assassination, surely meant well by putting the spotlight on the member of her family who was gutsy and fun-loving and didn’t drive paparazzi into a frenzy. If John F. Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, brought European refinement and reserve to the clan, Robert F. Kennedy’s Ethel was the less glamorous workhorse — and broodmare — who reinforced their Irish Catholic roots. The film offers lots of charming clips of home movies that show Mrs. Kennedy as a spirited, athletic child and an extroverted tomboy in love with her college friend’s brother Bobby. There are many glimpses of her as her husband’s most indefatigable helpmate: trim, smiling, tanned in sleeveless Lilly Pulitzer-style shifts, always at his side during campaigns, Congressional hearings and civil rights marches, often with several children in tow. The images of her as a young widow, pregnant and veiled in black at his funeral, are etched in history. But most of all the film is a painful reminder that Camelot ended with her husband’s death. It’s not just that the family’s mystique was washed away by too many scandals, exposés and unflattering biographies. The Kennedys were once artful curators of their myth; Rory Kennedy’s film suggests that the succeeding generations are spookily oblivious to their own public image. Many of Mrs. Kennedy’s children participated in the film, telling stories about their mother to the camera with wry, oh-that-Mummy affection: So many cabinet secretaries were pushed into the pool at her parties at Hickory Hill, the family’s house in Virginia, that Uncle Jack (President Kennedy) intervened and told his prank-loving sister-in-law to stop. Besides children and guests, Mrs. Kennedy gave packs of dogs, horses, goats and, for a while, even a seal free rein in that storied, chaotic household. Kerry Kennedy, the former wife of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, recalls with a knowing grin how her mother was a famously fast driver and scofflaw, and the film shows newspaper headlines about her speeding violations when her husband was attorney general in the early 1960s. “Mummy has a long history of dealing with cops,” she says with a smile. That interview was filmed in 2011, before Kerry Kennedy was arrested after swerving into a tractor-trailer in Westchester County, N.Y., and driving off. She later explained that she had mistakenly taken a prescription sleep aid before getting behind the wheel. That incident could not have been foreseen when the film was made, any more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is shown jovially describing his parents’ happy marriage, could have known that his estranged wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, would hang herself in the barn of her Bedford, N.Y., estate in May. But the family has a long record of ruined marriages, premature deaths and horrifying car wrecks. So much of what is told as charming family lore — tales of foolhardy escapades and physical recklessness — in hindsight seems anything but harmless. Rory and her siblings describe their mother’s childhood in the Skakel clan, a large, wealthy Irish Catholic family very much like the Kennedys — athletic, competitive, rambunctious, but without the iron discipline or intellectual rigor imposed by Joe and Rose Kennedy, Ethel’s father- and mother-in-law. There are old home movies of Skakel family dinners disrupted by firecrackers, and shots of brawny boys roughhousing. Mrs. Kennedy, interviewed in Hyannis Port, Mass., by Rory, recalls fondly how her daredevil brothers would travel from Greenwich, Conn., to New York City, not in the train but on top of it. “Mummy is a Skakel,” Chris Kennedy says cheerfully. “And as a Skakel she inherited a healthy disregard for authority in all its forms.” Unfortunately, many viewers will best know the name Skakel in connection with Michael C. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy who was convicted in 2002 of the 1975 murder of a 15-year-old neighbor, Martha Moxley, in Greenwich. Early in the film some of the children gaily introduce themselves and their birth order, and one, Max, ninth, teasingly pretends he can’t remember how many siblings he has. But that’s an unsettling joke to viewers who are aware that 2 of Mrs. Kennedy’s 11 children are dead. David died of a drug overdose in 1984; Michael was killed while playing football on skis in 1997. Their deaths are not mentioned until the end of the film, sadly but quickly. There is obviously a talent for compartmentalizing in this family, which may explain how the children of Robert Kennedy can talk blithely of periods that are imprinted in the public memory as times of calamity and also disgrace. The film makes no effort to reconcile the Kennedys’ mind-set with that of the American public, possibly because it is impossible to explain to outsiders. Mrs. Kennedy, certainly, expresses no interest in reflecting on her family’s travails. She is bravely tight-lipped when asked about her husband’s death, and scornful when Rory presses her to share her feelings about some of the social causes he introduced her to. “All this introspection,” she says gruffly, only half-kidding. “I hate it.” There is no introspection in “Ethel,” and evidently even less self-awareness on the part of the director. But this family’s triumphs, tragedies and self-inflicted disasters are too well known to skirt. It would have been a kinder gift to Mrs. Kennedy to respect her instincts and, for once, reserve this attempt at spinning history for family and close friends. Ethel HBO, Thursday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time. Produced by Moxie Firecracker Films. Directed and narrated by Rory Kennedy; written by Mark Bailey; Ms. Kennedy and Jack Youngelson, producers; Veronica Brady, associate producer; Azin Samari, editor; Buddy Squires, cinematographer; Miriam Cutler, original score. For HBO: Sheila Nevins, executive producer; Nancy Abraham, senior producer.

Rebekah Brooks's News International severance deal worth 'about £7m' Payoff package for the former News International executive is far in excess of the £1.7m speculated on after her departure By Dan Sabbagh and Patrick Wintour The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 Rebekah Brooks received a payoff worth about £7m after resigning as chief executive of News International at the height of the Milly Dowler phone-hacking crisis in July 2011. The exact figure has never been disclosed by the Murdoch company – whose parent News Corporation holds its annual meeting on Tuesday – but one source said they believed it was between £6m and £8m. An intimate of Rupert Murdoch, Brooks started out as a secretary at the News of the World in 1989, becoming editor of the News of the World and the Sun in succession. She retained Murdoch's confidence as the phone hacking crisis intensified. After the News Corp patriarch flew into London in July last year, he took Brooks out for dinner, declaring that she was his "top priority" when questioned in the street by journalists. The payoff package, far in excess of the £1.7m that was speculated about after her departure, comprised cash payments for loss of service, pension enhancement, money for legal costs, a car and an office. News International declined to comment on the sum involved, but company insiders stressed there were "clawback" arrangements, which mean Brooks would have to pay some of the money back in certain circumstances. It is understood that payback would be enforceable if Brooks was to be found guilty of a criminal offence relating to her employment. She is currently facing charges relating to interception of communications and obstruction of justice. News Corp has not had to make any disclosure in public accounts, because its British companies have not reported their results to Companies House yet. News International companies have a financial year that ends on 30 June, so any filing covering the period of the Brooks payoff would not be due until next year. The revelations about the size of Brooks's payoff are likely to be raised at the company's annual shareholder meeting at News Corp's Fox studios lot in Los Angeles. Some investors, such as the British group Hermes, are expected to vote against Rupert Murdoch remaining as chairman in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, but the media tycoon controls 40% of the votes so he is unlikely to lose. The Independent newspaper reported on Tuesday that private emails between David Cameron and Brooks were withheld from the Leveson inquiry into press standards. A government lawyer advised the prime minister that the emails involved were not "relevant". They were said to reveal the close friendship between Cameron and Brooks and were described by sources as containing "embarrassing" exchanges. A Downing Street spokesman said: "All the material the inquiry asked for was given to them." It is understood that there was an agreement between No 10 and the Leveson inquiry that Cameron would provide all emails and texts relevant to the News International bid for broadcaster BSkyB, as Cameron set out in his witness statement to the inquiry. Government sources said this was accepted by the Leveson inquiry and some texts or emails handed to the inquiry by Cameron, deemed to be on the margin of this definition, were not published by Leveson. No 10 is not challenging the newspaper's claim that Cameron had sought legal advice on the nature of the exchanges to be given to Leveson.