Douglas Caddy

Phone hacking: Mulcaire must reveal who hired him in Coogan case Court orders private investigator to divulge identity of executives who commissioned him to hack Steve Coogan's phone By Owen Bowcott guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 February 2011 12.09 GMT Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking case, has been ordered by the high court to reveal the names of executives who commissioned him. The court ruled that Mulcaire, whose contract with the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid was worth £100,000 a year, could not refuse to answer questions about his work on the grounds of self-incrimination. In legal actions brought by the comedian Steve Coogan and the former Sky Sports presenter Andy Gray, Mulcaire must now respond to inquiries about the names of News of the World journalists who ordered his services and the identity of celebrities whose phones were hacked. Coogan is suing Mulcaire and the News International subsidiary News Group for breach of privacy for allegedly hacking into voicemail messages left on his mobile phone. Mulcaire has already admitted passing phone intercept information to several individuals working on the News of the World news desk. Delivering judgment, Mr Justice Vos accepted that there was now "abundant evidence that Mr Gray's voicemails were intercepted and a strong inference that some misuse will have been made of the confidential information thereby obtained." He added: "The 12 calls that have already been proved may well not be the whole story." In terms of revealing the identities of the News of the World journalists who instructed them and the extent of Mulcaire's target list, the judge ruled that the convicted private investigator must answer virtually all the questions submitted by Coogan's and Gray's lawyers. "These requests are relevant," Vos said. "It is alleged that [the News of the World and Mulcaire] were intercepting telephone voicemail on an industrial scale. "It will be important to the claimant's case to establish the pattern of the ... interception activities. The general practice that Mr Mulcaire adopted in taking instructions from and reporting to journalists in admitted cases will... be relevant to the existence of the conspiracy alleged. "The identity of the other targeted names and the people who helped identify those names and the manner in which it was done will be relevant to the conspiracy between News Group Newspapers [owners of News of the World] and Mr Mulcaire." Mulcaire, he said, could not rely on "the privilege against self-incrimination" to refuse to respond to the questions. Only one request put by the claimants was disallowed on the grounds that it constituted a "fishing expedition". Vos granted Mulcaire's lawyers leave to challenge the ruling on self-incrimination in the appeal court. The judge, however, refused permission to appeal over the issue of identifying Mulcaire's other victims. Mulcaire was jailed in 2007, along with the News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman, for hacking into phones belonging to staff at Buckingham Palace. Mulcaire received a six-month sentence, while Goodman was sentenced to four months. Lawyers for the Metropolitan police have claimed so many messages are being examined by the force's phone-hacking inquiry that it is difficult to identify every mention of a celebrity's name among "hundreds of intercepts". The proliferation of legal actions generated by complaints against the News of the World is also in danger of congesting the courts with "parallel claims", the judge hearing applications for disclosure in three other cases has suggested.

I have an ebook with Amazon, but Smashwords distributes your ebook to Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store in addition to Amazon. Then it might be worthwhile. How much do they take from Amazon, etc? The ebook distributor of Watergate Exposed regularly uses these as vendors for ebooks: Here’s a pretty complete list of vendors that carry our e-books. We’re regularly adding new ones, as are the wholesaling partners like Ingram and Overdrive, so don’t be surprised if you see the forthcoming PDF on many more sites than the ones listed below. Amazon - Kindle Apple - EPUB Baker & Taylor - PDF Barnes & Noble - EPUB BooksonBoard.com – EPUB, PDF Borders – EPUB, PDF Diesel-ebooks.com - PDF EbookExpress.com - PDF Ebooks.com – EPUB, PDF Ebrary - PDF eFollett - PDF Follett Digital Resources - PDF Ingram Digital – EPUB, PDF Kobo – EPUB, PDF Netlibrary - PDF Overdrive – EPUB, PDF Powells.com - PDF Questia - PDF Sony - EPUB TecKnoQuest - PDF Waterstone’s - PDF WHSmith.co.uk - PDF Annie Johnston Digital Content Manager Independent Publishers Group 814 N Franklin Street Chicago, IL 60610 312.337.0747 ext 208 312.337.1807 fax www.ipgbook.com Expert distribution services for innovative publishers

I am not familiar with Smashwords. You might send an email to the blogger whose article I posted and ask him about Smashwords or about an ebook publisher he would recommend. He seems to be on top of the entire topic. His email link from his webpage is below: http://www.blogger.com/profile/08778324558755151986

EU farming subsidies for the Royal family stay secret By Mail On Sunday Reporter Last updated at 10:15 PM on 19th February 2011 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358746/EU-farming-subsidies-Royals-stay-secret.html# Ministers have ordered an information blackout on the massive farming subsidies paid to the Queen, Prince Charles and dozens of other wealthy landowners. Payouts, which in past years have amounted to £500,000 to the Queen and more than £100,000 to the Prince of Wales, will remain secret because publication has been deemed an invasion of privacy by the European Court of Justice. Farming subsidy: Queen Elizabeth received more than £500,000 last year But freedom of information groups point out that the court ruling applies only to identifying private individuals, and that large farming concerns – which might include those owned by the Queen and the Prince – could still be named. The Department for the Environment said it was 'administratively not feasible' to separate company and private details, so it was banning publication of both. A total of 80,000 farmers were paid £1 billion in EU farming subsidies for the past year. Property: Price Charles owns land such as his holiday cottage, Llwynwermod

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ Friday, February 18, 2011 The Numbers Game So I just got off the phone with an acquaintance of mine. She's a writer whom I met last year at a conference, and she called me asking for advice. First some background. She's hit the extended NYT list several times in both hardcover and mass market, and has a backlist of ten books. She was just offered a contract from one of the Big 6 for $200k a book, for a two book deal. The royalties offered are industry standard 25% for ebooks on net. She's thinking about releasing the book herself, and needed some help crunching the numbers. She's had several previous contracts for $200k a book, but so far none of her books have earned out their advance, even six years later. (This is common, by the way, even though she's had multiple printings. If I'd been paid $200k for Whiskey Sour or Afraid, I wouldn't have earned out either.) Here's what I told her: The 25% the publisher is offering is actually based on net. So you're getting 17.5% of the list price. (Amazon gets 30%, they get 52.5%--which is obscene) When your agent gets her cut, you're earning 14.9% of list price on ebooks. For a $9.99 ebook, that's $1.49 in your pocket for each one sold. If ebook prices go down (and they will) it would be 75 cents for you on a $4.99 ebook If you release a $4.99 ebook on your own, at 70%, you'd earn $3.50 an ebook. Let's say you sell a modest 1000 ebooks per month at $4.99. That's $9000 a year you'd make on ebooks through your publisher vs. $42,000 a year on your own. Now your $400k advance the publisher is offering is paid out over three years. That means, after your agent's share, you're making about $114k a year, or about $57k per book per year. We'll assume that will be all you'll earn, $57k a year for 3 years, because you have yet to earn out any of your previous advances. My current best selling ebook is selling over 3000 a month, though on average, my novels sell about 1600 a month. If you sold 1600 copies a month of your next book at $3.99 each, you'd earn $53k a year. That's a bit less than the $57k the publisher is offering. But you'll earn for more than three years if you self-pub. You'll earn forever. Forever is a long time. Traditional publisher in 3 years: $171k Self pub in 3 years: $159k Traditional publisher in 4 years: $171k (because you won't earn out the advance) Self pub in 4 years: $212k Traditional publisher in 7 years: $171k Self pub in 7 years: $371k Of course, these numbers assume ebooks sales will stay flat. I have two years of data that show ebook sales are growing. It also assumes they can sell as many ebooks at $9.99 as you can at $3.99. That's wrong. You'll greatly outsell their $9.99 list price if you price it lower. Taking print out of the equation for a moment, let's take a guess at $9.99 vs. $3.99, based on my numbers. At $9.99 you've shown you can sell 800 ebooks a week during the first 8 weeks of your release. You'd earn $1200 a week through your publisher on ebooks. At $2.99, I've shown I can sell as high as 3000 a week. If your ebook was $2.99, you'd earn $6000 a week. If it was $3.99, you'd earn $8370 a week. Obviously, you need to also factor in print revenue, though whether bookstores will still be around when your novel is released in Spring of 2012 is open for debate. But you can release your book through Createspace and have a print version. You won't sell as many books as a traditional publisher would could, but those sales will go toward an advance you'll never earn out. If you priced a 6" x 9" Createspace trade paperback at $13.95, you'd earn about $3.56 a book. For my bestselling Createspace titles, I sell 50 a week, or about $9200 a year. Not nearly what you'd make through a traditional publisher, but not bad for passive income. That means, assuming your book sells like mine sell, it would make you about $62k a year, just through Amazon. This doesn't count Nook, Smashwords, Apple, Sony, etc. It also doesn't count time lost. Your book is already written. Your publisher wants to release it in 15 months. You could have been earning money from your ebook during those 15 months. That's a nice chunk of potential dough, unearned. Now, maybe you won't sell as well as I do. It's possible. You've got more fans, a larger name, a bigger brand, but maybe it just won't fly. It's also possible that you'll outsell me. But does it really matter if it takes you 2 years, 5 years, or 8 years to do better than the publisher's offer? Because ultimately, you WILL do better on your own. And you won't have to deal with any of the stuff you hate about the publishing world, won't have to tour, will have full cover and title approval, will be able to release books at your own pace, and will be in complete control. Now a publisher offers more than just creating and distributing books. They also edit, do the cover art, do the printing, shipping, and uploading. But do you want to pay them 52.5% forever for those services? Michael Stackpole just had a wonderful quote: "You do not pay a royalty to anyone who is doing day-labor. All book production should be done for a flat fee (and there are plenty of folks who will do it for very reasonable fees). Paying a royalty to someone for prepping an ebook is akin to paying the kid who cuts your grass a percentage of the purchase price when you sell your house." Read his whole article HERE. When I got off the phone with my friend, she was still worried and not quite ready to jump into self-pubbing. This is understandable. She has no personal data to fall back on. I have 2 years of self-pubbing experience, and when I started I didn't expect it to become my main source of income. It also took me over a year, even with the data, to come to the conclusion that signing with a traditional publisher is a bad idea. But now I'm convinced. Signing with a traditional publisher, even being offered $200k per book, is a VERY BAD IDEA. And I believe these numbers back me up.

Phone-hacking intercepts 'passed to more than one person' Private investigator's statement 'blows apart' paper's defence By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman The Independent Saturday, 19 February 2011 The News of the World yesterday faced damaging new allegations about how many of its senior executives knew about phone hacking, after the private investigator convicted of intercepting messages told a court that he supplied illegally obtained voicemails to its news desk, which was manned by "different people". Glenn Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2007 for hacking the voicemails of aides to Prince William while on a £100,000-a-year contract with the Sunday red-top, said in a statement that he could no longer recall to whom on the news desk he had passed the intercepts. The High Court in London heard that, if true, the private investigator's evidence suggested the involvement of several NoW journalists in hacking and was "devastating" to the paper's long-held insistence that the practice was restricted to a "lone rotten apple" reporter. Mr Mulcaire said, in the previously unpublished statement to lawyers for the football agent Sky Andrew: "Information was supplied to the news desk at The News of the World. This was manned by different people, [Mr Mulcaire] cannot now recall who in respect of this claimant [Mr Andrews] he passed the information to." Until last month, the NotW had insisted that the hacking was restricted to the former royal editor Clive Goodman, who was jailed along with Mr Mulcaire. The paper appeared to abandon that stance when it sacked its head of news, Ian Edmondson, who the private detective has now said instructed him to hack Mr Andrew's phone. Mr Edmondson, a close lieutenant of the NotW's former editor Andy Coulson, has denied any wrongdoing. Lawyers for Mr Andrew, one of five public figures whose mobile phones Mr Mulcaire admitted to hacking between 2005 and 2006, said that, if proved correct, the private investigator's new testimony "hit for six" the defence of the NoW, whose parent company News Group Newspapers (NGN) is being sued by the football agent for breaches of confidence and privacy over the unlawfully-intercepted messages. Jeremy Reed, the barrister representing Mr Andrew, whose clients include the the former Arsenal and England player Sol Campbell, said: "I would argue this is devastating for NGN's defence. It strongly suggests the involvement of several other News of the World journalists. Put bluntly, it hits the NGN defence for six." Mr Reed, who was applying for further evidence seized from Mr Mulcaire's Surrey home to be disclosed by the Metropolitan Police, said Mr Mulcaire's confirmation that he passed hacked voicemail messages to the NoW news desk – the part of the paper responsible for sifting and managing stories prior to publication – was a "mantra" which he repeats twice in his statement. Following his arrest in August 2006, Mr Mulcaire, a former amateur footballer, formally admitted to hacking the phones of eight public figures: three senior members of the royal household; the publicist Max Clifford; the model Elle Macpherson; Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes; the former chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor; and Mr Andrew. During the private detective's sentencing hearing at the Old Bailey in 2007, the court heard that the hacking victims who were not linked to the royal family would have been of little or no interest to Mr Goodman, raising the question of just who Mr Mulcaire was eavesdropping his other victims for. Lawyers at the hearing for Mr Mulcaire, who was on a £2,000-a-month contract to the NotW to provide legally obtained information but received separate payments for his hacking activities, said he was intercepting Mr Andrew's voicemails for "persons" at NGN other than Mr Goodman. In a separate case being brought by Nicola Philips, a former employee of Mr Clifford, Mr Mulcaire has refused to say who at The News of the World instructed him to allegedly hack into her phone on the grounds that to do so would compel him to risk incriminating himself. The case is due to go before the Court of Appeal later this year. In a statement responding to the Sky Andrew proceedings, News International said: "News International is aware of the information provided to the court and continues to be pro-active and cooperate fully with the relevant authorities regarding any ongoing investigations." Earlier this week, it emerged that Kelly Hoppen, the interior designer who is a former partner of Mr Campbell, had been told by the Metropolitan Police that it held six pages of information on her from Mr Mulcaire's files, despite previously telling her on two separate occasions that she did not feature on the private detective's databank.

Phone hacking: police hand over evidence they claimed did not exist Lawyers for interior designer Kelly Hoppen claim material 'drives coach and horses' through News International's defence by Nick Davies guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 February 2011 18.51 GMT The Metropolitan police have been accused of misleading behaviour in the phone-hacking scandal after handing over evidence they had twice claimed did not exist. The latest embarrassment for Scotland Yard was disclosed in the high court in the case of Sienna Miller's stepmother, Kelly Hoppen, who claims that a News of the World journalist, Dan Evans, attempted to hack into her voicemail. The court heard she was a tabloid target because of her friendships with the former England footballer Sol Campbell and with Madonna's former husband, film director Guy Ritchie. The case also threatens to embarrass the NoW because the alleged hacking occurred in June 2009 – three years after the arrest of its then royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, who was jailed with the paper's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, on the basis that he was the only journalist involved in intercepting mobile phone messages. News International, which owns the paper, has repeatedly said that it does not allow illegal news gathering. Hoppen's barrister, David Sherbourne, told the court: "This case is enormously important because it drives a coach and horses through the claim that has been persisted in by News International and its executives, that the criminal activities of Goodman and Mulcaire were purely historic, the isolated actions of one rogue journalist and his private investigator associate." The court heard that Hoppen suspected her voicemail was being intercepted in 2009 because private information was being published while some phone messages were recorded as "old" even though she had not listened to them. After the Guardian disclosed the scale of hacking at the NoW in July 2009, her lawyer, Mark Thomson of Atkins Thomson, wrote to Scotland Yard to ask if the evidence which they had gathered from Goodman and Mulcaire included any sign that Hoppen had been the object of unlawful interception. After three months, the Yard replied that they held no such evidence. In April 2010, after receiving several alerts from Vodafone about unsuccessful attempts to access her messages, Hoppen's lawyer wrote again to Scotland Yard asking if Mulcaire had held her phone number or other personal details. After a delay of more than eight months, they finally replied in January of this year, once again claiming that they held no such evidence. But last week, Sherbourne told the court, deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who is leading a new investigation into the hacking, had contacted Hoppen to disclose that, in reality, the Metropolitan police had found hand-written notes which were kept by Muclaire detailing her phone numbers and two addresses, her mobile phone account number and the four-digit PIN code which was needed to access her voicemail. "This is the work of a professional hacker," said Sherbourne. Police had now handed over six different pages of Mulcaire's notes about Hoppen which they had been holding since they raided Mulcaire in August 2006. Sherbourne said it was "regrettable, to put it mildly" that the police had twice denied that this material existed. "It could and should have been provided earlier," he said. "The simple and unavoidable fact is that they misled Ms Hoppen." Edwin Buckett, representing the Metropolitan police, told the court that police had acted in good faith. He said the material taken from Mulcaire was in a chaotic state and some of it was indecipherable. In March 2010, her lawyers also had obtained a court order requiring Vodafone to hand over material relating to unsuccessful attempts to access her voicemail. This disclosed that on 22 June 2009 – the day after the Mail on Sunday claimed she was having a relationship with Guy Ritchie – her mobile had been called twice by a caller who witheld their own number; hung up the first call when Hoppen answered; then called back, got no answer and dialled into her voicemail for 25 seconds. Vodafone disclosed that the calls were made from a mobile phone registered to News International in the name of Dan Evans, a feature writer. Mr Sherbourne told the court that in the summer of 2009, past and present News International executives had told a House of Commons select committee that they knew nothing of illegal activity by their reporters. He added: "It was at the very time that News International executives were giving this evidence to the select committee that Mr Evans made his attempts to access Ms Hoppen's voicemail using a News International telephone." Michael Silverleaf QC, representing Dan Evans, said the evidence clearly showed that Dan Evans had dialled Hoppen accidentally. Evans remembered nothing of the calls. The keys on his phone were inclined to stick and to dial numbers accidentally. The use of his own phone to do something which he knew to be illegal would have been "quite unbelievably stupid". A search of his office and home computers had yielded no sign that he was interested in Hoppen until he was told of the allegation against him. The one occasion on which he appeared to have dialled into her voicemail was "one rogue call which nobody has yet explained", Silverdale told the court. Mr Justice Eady made an order for Scotland Yard to disclose to Hoppen all relevant material, redacting only the detail of PIN codes. Hoppen has also applied for disclosure orders against Dan Evans and the NoW

High court judge criticises police failure to fully investigate phone hacking Comments come at pre-trial hearing for legal actions by Andy Gray and Steve Coogan against News of the World By James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 February 2011 18.44 GMT A high court judge has criticised the Metropolitan police for failing to adequately investigate allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World. Mr Justice Vos made the comments at a pre-trial hearing for the legal actions by former Sky Sports commentator Andy Gray and actor Steve Coogan. They allege that the tabloid ordered private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to hack into their mobile phone voice messages. "The Metropolitan police had not done an appropriate job in analysing phone-hacking... information in their possession," Vos said. "They didn't disclose highly relevant information." He added that Scotland Yard had failed to fully comply with court orders requiring it to produce copies of Mulcaire's notes relating to the two men. The Met reopened its investigation last month after fresh evidence emerged about the extent of phone hacking at the paper. Vos also criticised the News of the World for doing "absolutely nothing" to shed light on which journalists at the title might have worked with Mulcaire. "They may have been hacking into Mr Gray's phone for months and months," he said. "I don't know. We just don't know the full extent of it." He said the paper's publisher News Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, had failed to hand over any material, including reporters' notebooks, in the course of the police investigation. News Group argued in court that the case bought by Gray and Coogan is "speculative" because it cannot be proved Mulcaire listened to voicemail messages belonging to either of them. The company concedes he made notes of their numbers and account details. "To say the whole case is speculative is frankly nonsense... to say there is not a shred of evidence is going too far," Vos said. He cited evidence handed by the Met to Gray which showed Mulcaire kept detailed notes of his mobile phone account number, pin number and password. Vos said: "Give me one possible reason why Mr Mulcaire would have held those pieces of information for any other reason [than to hack into Gray's phone]." Mulcaire was jailed for six months in January 2007 for illegally intercepting voicemail messages belonging to members of the royal household and several other well-known figures. The paper's former royal editor Clive Goodman also received a shorter jail term after pleading guilty to the same charge.

Egypt's Faux Revolution: Bait and Switch on the Nile by Eric Margolis February 15,2011 www.lewrockwell.com "Plus ça change," say the cynical French, "plus c’est la même chose." Many thoughtful Egyptians will be recalling this "bon mot" as the watch one ruler, the ousted Husni Mubarak, replaced by a military junta led by Field Marshall Mohammed Tantawi. Egyptians are getting more Mubarakism, sans Mubarak, at least for now. This is not what most Egyptians want or deserve. The new military junta just proclaimed it would support the hated Israeli-Egyptian peace deal signed by Anwar Sadat, thus assuaging fears in the US and Israel. In an example of typical post-coup talk, the junta says elections will be held sometime in the future. Many Egyptians are still euphoric over the ouster of Gen. Mubarak, known to one and all as "pharaoh." Most of them do not yet seem to have realized that the people who have taken over the regime are the very same generals, policemen and tycoons who ran it under Mubarak. The dreaded secret police, or "Mukhabarat," is commanded by Gen. Omar Suleiman, who is widely viewed as America’s and Israel’s man in Cairo. Alongside him are Marshall Tantawi, chief of staff Lieutenant General Enan and Ahmed Shafik, also seen as America’s men on the Nile. The US usually had a backup for its favorite dictators; this writer noted last April that Gen. Omer Suleiman was Mubarak’s US-anointed successor. After Anwar Sadat’s assassination, Gen. Mubarak was quickly engineered into power. The latter two generals attended the Pentagon’s updated version of the US military’s School of the America’s in Panama that recruited Latin American officers for the CIA. Senior ranks of Egypt’s 465,000-man armed forces and the secret police are believed to receive sizable secret stipends from CIA and the Pentagon. Egypt’s senior generals are part of the ruling establishment. Many spend more time managing their business affairs than military matters. Such is also the case in many other Arab one-party states. As in Pakistan, Egypt’s army is up to its helmets in big business: shopping centers, tourism, property, hotels, steel, telecom. Few among Egypt’s top brass want to end their gravy train by changing the status quo. They are ready to fight to the last mall or stock split. The US has paid Egypt’s military $1.4 billion annually since 1979 not to confront Israel, one of the biggest bribes in history. On top of this, Egypt receives some $600 million more annually in economic aid, subsidized US wheat, and a host of other goodies – all to make nice to Israel and keep Egypt from supporting the Palestinians. Egypt’s large armed forces were reconfigured after the Camp David accords, turning it under US supervision from a force designed to defend Egypt’s borders and regional interests to one whose primary function was to control the population and protect the US-backed regime. The military’s stocks of munitions and spare parts for its US arms were kept to a bare minimum to ensure Egypt could not go to war with Israel. As I watch Egypt’s slow-motion revolution, I wonder if somewhere among the armed forces is another young colonel who loves his people even more than he loves real estate. The Muslim Brotherhood, an object of ill-informed hysteria in the US, wants to reallocate arms spending to social needs. Egypt’s younger officers must be thinking about the example of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who seized power in 1952 after Egypt’s disastrous war with Israel in 1947–8. Perhaps there is a young colonel or even major who may try to seize power and emulate Nasser, who is still adored by many Egyptians in spite of his disastrous mistakes. People have forgotten many of them. What they do remember was that when Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, his family had little money, and they recall that Nasser spoke for Egypt, not foreign powers. So far, the so-called Egyptian Revolution has only been a game of musical chairs. The United States still dominates Egypt’s military, policy, and economy. Washington provides wheat without which Egypt cannot feed itself. Israel still exercises powerful influence over Egypt thanks to its supporters in the US Congress. An angry word from Jerusalem, and Egypt’s wheat could be cut off. Egyptian and Israeli intelligence are as entwined as was Israel’s Mossad with the Iranian Savak secret police. The massive pyramid of Egypt’s police state – to use a fine metaphor from the brilliant Albanian writer Ismail Kadere – will not be easily lifted, perhaps without a full scale, violent revolution. To date, the revolt on the Nile has not even produced a Kerensky, never mind a Lenin. If Egyptians feel cheated by the change of power in Cairo, as many will, and violent demonstrations begin, what will happen if the junta orders a battalion commanded by a colonel to open fire on protesters? The first young officer who refuses and orders his men to join the demonstrators could become Egypt’s new hero. Nasser’s ghost haunts Cairo. February 15, 2011

New head of hacking investigation 'critical of previous inquiry' By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman The Independent Friday, 11 February 2011 The officer in charge of the new investigation into phone hacking told one of its highest-profile possible victims that she was "not satisfied" with the original police inquiry. John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, said that Assistant Deputy Commissioner Sue Akers had expressed her dissatisfaction of the initial inquiry during discussion of the failings that led to officers not warning him that his messages may have been illegally intercepted while he was helping to run the country. Lord Prescott, who has been told by police there is evidence that he may have been a target of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire who was working for the News of the World in 2005 and 2006, heavily criticised the initial Metropolitan Police inquiry. He also claimed that "hundreds" of journalists from across the newspaper industry had been engaging in phone hacking. "The papers have been at it for years," he told BBC Breakfast. "There have been hundreds of journalists hacking phones in all the newspapers." After they went through the findings of the first investigation, officers from Scotland Yard working on the new investigation disclosed on Wednesday that they had identified individuals who had wrongly been told that there was little or no evidence about them in paperwork seized from Mulcaire's house in 2006. They are in the process of notifying up to 20 people that they may have fallen victim to the scandal. The Metropolitan Police launched the new investigation last month after receiving new evidence from Rupert Murdoch's News International relating to the News of the World's former head of news, Ian Edmondson, who has been sacked by the newspaper. He denies any wrongdoing. Mulcaire and the NOTW's royal editor Clive Goodman were jailed in 2007 for illegally accessing the voicemails of members of the royal household. Ms Akers visited Lord Prescott to outline the evidence found about him, which indicates he may have been targeted in 2006, about the time he admitted having an affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple. Lord Prescott – who has been seeking a judicial review of the initial police investigation – told Sky News that Ms Akers had told him she was "not satisfied" with the original police investigation. "She showed me substantial evidence to show the judgement that she wasn't satisfied with the previous inquiry," he said. "She showed me evidence that my phones were involved in a hacking process, with messages from different people. It convinced her and me, as I've always suspected, that not all the evidence had been properly investigated." He added: "If [the police] had my name on a list, why didn't they warn me? I was the deputy prime minister talking to the PM and the Chancellor and many other important people

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/2011/02/08/186-strangling-egypt-eric-margolis-on-the-us-israel-and-the-empire/

Now Met Police probes 'The Sun' after union chief raises concerns By Cahal Milmo, Martin Hickman and Louise Sheridan The Independent Wednesday, 9 February 2011 Detectives are looking into allegations that a second newspaper at Rupert Murdoch's News International may have used hacked voicemails to publish stories about the private life of a prominent public figure. Andy Gilchrist, a former union leader, has asked Scotland Yard to investigate his belief that interception of his mobile phone messages led to negative stories about him appearing in The Sun at the height of an acrimonious national strike by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU). He is the first public figure to suggest that the illegal technique was carried out for stories that ran in News International's best-selling daily title, rather than its Sunday red-top, the News of the World (NOTW). One of the stories, headlined "Fire strike leader is a love cheat", appeared in The Sun during the first week of its editorship by Rebekah Brooks following her transfer from the NOTW. As News International's chief executive, Ms Brooks, née Wade, is leading the company's defence against claims that phone hacking was rife at its headquarters in Wapping, east London. Publicly vowing to root out wrongdoing, News International last month passed new evidence about the practice at the NOTW to the Met, prompting Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin to open a new inquiry which he said would leave "no stone unturned". So far The Sun has been untainted by the scandal. News International said yesterday there was no evidence to support Mr Gilchrist's suspicions. Mr Gilchrist, former general secretary of the FBU, contacted the Yard last year to ask whether his details had been logged by Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective employed by the NOTW who was jailed in 2007 for hacking the voicemails of aides to the Royal Family. The Met told Mr Gilchrist in October 2010 that searching Mulcaire's hacking notes for his name would be problematic. But the force took a more urgent approach in a second letter to him dated 24 December, apologising for the delay and saying it would contact him with its findings as soon as possible. Mr Gilchrist is waiting to hear its response. He told The Independent he had strong suspicions that The Sun's coverage of his extramarital affair was written after his voicemails were accessed during a long pay dispute in 2002 and 2003 which led to a strike. In a strident campaign, The Sun criticised him for leading the strike, which resulted in soldiers being drafted in to cover in the run-up to the Iraq War. "I have no doubt that during the 2002 and 2003 dispute I was the subject of a considerable amount of newspaper skulduggery," Mr Gilchrist said. "It was a highly politically-charged situation at the time, very personal, and I have well-founded suspicions that information was obtained from my voicemails that led to stories in The Sun about my private and professional life. I have asked the police to investigate whether my name appears on the information they hold from Mr Mulcaire and they have said they are now consulting those records." A front page on 20 January 2003 revealed his relationship with Tracey Holland, a former firefighter in North Wales. Published six days after Ms Brooks became editor of The Sun, the article included an account of the year-long affair by Ms Holland. Ms Holland told The Independent this week that when she was approached by The Sun, the paper already had considerable detail about her relationship with Mr Gilchrist. "When they first came to me it was made clear that they knew all about it," she said. "They had lots of information about how long we'd been together. Messages would have been left but I don't know if that is how knowledge of us got out." A News International spokesman said there was no substance to Mr Gilchrist's claims: "There is absolutely nothing to suggest the appearance of these articles was linked to the interception of voicemail. News International has made it clear that, if there is any evidence of wrongdoing, swift and decisive action will be taken." Fireman who felt heat of the media For Andy Gilchrist's pursuers in the right-wing press it was manna from heaven. The leader of striking firefighters decried in headlines as a "Flaming Idiot" had spent £817 on a sumptuous Indian meal with companions and used his union debit card to pay for it. Critics were quick to point out that the £200-a-head meal in February 2003 at the Cinnamon Club restaurant in Westminster took place when some firefighters were accepting food hand-outs during a rancorous five-month pay dispute by the Fire Brigades Union. It turned out, however, that although Mr Gilchrist had used his FBU Visa card to pay for the dinner, he contacted the finance department the next day and repaid the full sum within a matter of days – all before any media coverage. Rather than being a blow-out for Mr Gilchrist and union cronies, the meal was a private gathering of family and friends. Each participant refunded their share. The story was one of a succession of "revelations" about Mr Gilchrist, the son of a merchant seaman and a dinner lady, during a bitter strike which saw him elevated to the status of socialist bogeyman. The Sun, a strident detractor, set the tone, saying he "talks and acts like a left-wing militant dinosaur from the Seventies". Although claims that Mr Gilchrist attended a private school (he was a grammar school boy) and stayed in five-star hotels (he preferred Travelodge-style accommodation) did not stick, he was frank in his admission that he was a member of the union movement "awkward squad" that had little time for New Labour. This made him enemies not only in the right-wing media but also the Labour government, where some senior figures took satisfaction from his discomfiture at the disclosures about his private life. In 2005, Mr Gilchrist was ousted from the leadership of the FBU but he can look back on 17 years as a firefighter with some pride. He was hailed as a hero in 1991 when he rescued a family of three from a burning flat, entering the building four times to ensure no one was trapped.

Phone hacking: more public figures may have been victims, say police Scotland Yard announces 'important and immediate new line of inquiry' in investigation into News of the World case By James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 February 2011 18.08 The Metropolitan police has announced that more public figures may have been the victims of phone hacking than previously thought. After reviewing existing and new evidence, Scotland Yard admitted it may have misinformed potential hacking victims by telling them they had not been targeted by the News of the World. Scotland Yard said in a statement it had begun reviewing new evidence handed over by the paper's owner News International. It is also looking again at the contents of notebooks seized in 2005 from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the title. "As a result, the team have... identified some individuals who were previously advised that there was little or no information held by the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] relating to them within the case papers", the force said. It added it was unclear at this stage if mobile phones belonging to those individuals had been hacked by Mulcaire, but it would be notifying them all as a matter of urgency as it begins what it described as an "important and immediate new line of enquiry". The evidence handed over by News International includes emails sent by Ian Edmondson, the news editor it sacked last month, and retrieved from his work computer during an internal inquiry. The Met also said it would contact everyone who it believed may have had their phones hacked. That marks a dramatic change of policy for the Met. Previously, only a handful of people had been informed they were targeted by Mulcaire, who was jailed for illegally intercepting voicemail messages on phones belonging to members of the royal family. Scotland Yard is now taking a more proactive approach by undertaking to contact all those who it believes may have been hacked, which could include hundreds of well know people. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, who is leading the new police investigation, said: "We will be as open as we can be and will show them all the information we hold about them, while giving them the opportunity to tell us anything that may be of concern to them". She added: "In time, we will go beyond this group of individuals and make contact with everyone who had some of their personal contact details found in the documents seized in 2005. This will ensure all of those who have been affected in some way are made aware of the information we have found relating to them." A freedom of information request submitted by the Guardian revealed Mulcaire's notebooks contain the mobile phone numbers belonging to thousands of individuals.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis226.html

Eric Margolis in his column last April foresaw what would happen in Egypt. He was a lone voice as the rest of the mass media kept up its pro-Murbarak slant of the news. http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/eruption-on-the-nile.aspx

Phone hacking: Coulson taped backing sacked News of the World executive Former No 10 PR chief Andy Coulson caught on tape saying Ian Edmondson was 'a great operator' who was 'doing a brilliant job' By James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 February 2011 10.44 GMT Andy Coulson told a reporter at the News of the World he had "total and complete faith in" Ian Edmondson, the news executive sacked by the paper last month for ordering a private investigator to hack into mobile phones. Coulson describes Edmondson as "a great operator" who is "doing a brilliant job" in a conversation with an unnamed reporter at the title, a recording of which has been obtained by Channel 4's Dispatches, to be shown tonight. Coulson edited the News of the World for four years until January 2007. He resigned after the paper's royal editor, Clive Goodman, was jailed for illegally intercepting voicemails left on mobile phones belonging to members of the royal household. Glenn Mulcaire, an investigator on the paper's books, was also sent to prison. The tape, made by a former journalist without Coulson's knowledge at some point during his editorship, also records Coulson telling the reporter: "I need more stories. I need more exclusives and I need it to be self-generated stuff." The two men do not discuss phone hacking, but Dispatches says other recordings exist which "might provide damning evidence". Coulson stepped down as David Cameron's communications director last month, saying coverage of the phone-hacking affair had made it impossible to do his job. He maintains he knew nothing about phone hacking at the paper. The News of the World last month gave emails retrieved from Edmondson's computer to the Metropolitan police, which reopened an investigation into alleged phone hacking at the title the same day. Separately, the News of the World's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, has been named in evidence submitted to parliament as an executive who organised "endemic" phone hacking at the paper. Max Mosley, former president of the FIA, the motor racing governing body, told the home affairs select committee that Thurlbeck was one of several senior journalists at the title who issued "instructions to hack phones". He told MPs that Thurlbeck, who is still employed by the paper, "commissioned potentially illegal investigations" by Mulcaire. In written evidence published on the committee's website, Mosley said the Metropolitan police had recovered documents from Mulcaire's home in the course of the 2006 investigation leading to his arrest and that they proved Thurlbeck had instructed the private investigator to hack into phones belonging to public figures. "Even a cursory examination of these papers will have identified a number of NoW journalists who had commissioned potentially illegal investigations by Mulcaire," Mosley said. "There appears to be endemic criminality on a significant scale within the News Group organisation." He added: "It must have been clear to [the police] on the face of the papers seized from Mulcaire, that instructions to hack phones came from journalists other than Goodman, including the NoW news editor, Ian Edmondson, and the NoW chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck." A growing number of well-known figures are suing the paper's owner News Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. They include actor Sienna Miller, comedian Steve Coogan, former Sky Sports pundit Andy Gray and sports agent Sky Andrew. Evidence of Thurlbeck's involvement in the practice has emerged previously. The Guardian published an email 18 months ago that was sent to Mulcaire by a reporter on the News of the World which contained a transcript of hacked voicemails and the message: "Hello, this is the transcript for Neville." A spokesman for News International said: "If presented with any evidence of further wrongdoing, we will act quickly and decisively on it."

Justice Thomas’s Wife Sets Up a Conservative Lobbying Shop By ERIC LICHTBLAU The New York Times February 5, 2011 WASHINGTON — The wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has raised her political profile in the last year through her outspoken conservative activism, is rebranding herself as a lobbyist and self-appointed “ambassador to the Tea Party movement.” Virginia Thomas, the justice’s wife, said on libertyinc.co, a Web site for her new political consulting business, that she saw herself as an advocate for “liberty-loving citizens” who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues. She promised to use her “experience and connections” to help clients raise money and increase their political impact. Ms. Thomas’s effort to take a more operational role on conservative issues could intensify questions about her husband’s ability to remain independent on issues like campaign finance and health care, legal ethicists said. Justice Thomas “should not be sitting on a case or reviewing a statute that his wife has lobbied for,” said Monroe H. Freedman, a Hofstra Law School professor specializing in legal ethics. “If the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that creates a perception problem.” Ms. Thomas’s founding of her own political consulting shop, Liberty Consulting, was first reported Thursday by Politico, which said she had begun reaching out to freshmen Republicans in Congress. The move comes a few months after she gave up the top spot at Liberty Central, a conservative Web site that she founded in 2009 and that has strong links to the Tea Party movement. An anonymous $500,000 donation to start up Liberty Central came from Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate investor and Republican financier, Politico reported. Mr. Crow, reached by phone Friday, would not say whether he was the source of the money. “I disclose what I’m required by law to disclose,” he said, “and I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.” Ms. Thomas did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for an interview on Friday. The Daily Caller reported in December that she had said in an interview that she was looking forward to a new role involving “lobbying on Capitol Hill” and a variety of other hands-on operational duties. Arn Pearson, a vice president at Common Cause, a liberal group that has been critical of potential conflicts at the Supreme Court caused by Ms. Thomas’s work, said her new position, combined with Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent address before a closed-door seminar of the Tea Party Caucus, provided further evidence of “the politicization of the court.” “The level of bias we’re seeing is really troubling,” Mr. Pearson said.

http://students.washington.edu/trevorg/pdfs/Domestic%20Intelligence/PikeReport-Domestic.pdf The role of Robert Merritt in COINTELPRO is discussed on pages 164-165.

Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking, ex-colleague told MPs Former News of the World executive said ex-editor probably told others to use illegal technique By James Robinson and Nicholas Watt guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 February 2011 20.30 GMT Andy Coulson was aware that phone hacking was taking place at Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire and "told others to do it", a former executive at the News of the World told MPs. In written evidence given to the home affairs select committee and published for the first time today, Paul McMullan, a former features executive and investigative journalist at the title, said former editor Coulson "knew a lot of people" used the technique when Coulson worked at sister paper the Sun. He joined the News of the World in 2003, where he worked alongside McMullan for 18 months. McMullan said: "As he sat a few feet from me in the [News of the World] newsroom he probably heard me doing it, laughing about it … and told others to do it". Coulson, who last month quit as David Cameron's director of communications, worked at the Sun for more than a decade before joining the News of the World. "Andy Coulson knew a lot of people did it at the Sun on his Bizarre [showbiz] column and after that at the NOTW," McMullan claimed. McMullan, who is now a pub landlord, also described a flourishing trade in private information at the News of the World, which he said was regularly supplied with details of celebrities' medical records and mobile phone pin numbers. "People who worked for Vodaphone [sic] etc would sometimes ring up the newsdesk offering to sell numbers and codes of stars' phones," he said, "as indeed people at the tax office, people in doctors' receptions." In separate evidence also published today, Vodafone told the committee: "A small minority of customers were targeted by unscrupulous individuals." The company said it had passed all evidence to the police during their 2006 investigation into phone hacking carried out by former News of the World journalist Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. McMullan told the Guardian last year that Coulson must have been well aware the practice was "pretty widespread". Coulson has continued to deny this. The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, also confirmed in written evidence to MPs he has instructed the Crown Prosecution Service to adopt a far broader definition of what constitutes illegal phone hacking. This decision makes fresh prosecutions more likely. The CPS announced a new investigation into phone hacking last month. News International says McMullan's evidence is unreliable and will demand evidence is withdrawn or corrected. The home affairs committee will publish its report into unauthorised phone hacking in the spring. David Cameron was, meanwhile, accused tonight of "breathtaking arrogance" for refusing to answer questions about his links

About a week ago I watched a video interview of a stakeholder in the wiretapping scandal who said that he was resigned to the fact that the wrongdoers had been given four years to get their stories right and destroy the evidence. For these reasons he thought that the chances of successful prosecutions had been greatly reduced. However, one never really knows in a situation like this what may suddenly emerge and change the outcome. [Two examples: Whittaker Chambers hid his evidence in the Alger Hiss case in a hollowed out pumpkin in a field on his Maryland farm. Robert Merritt placed his evidence of government agents' wrongdoing in COINTELPRO in his mother's casket just before it was lowered into the ground in April 1972.]

Landlady 1, Sky Sports 0 – the legal victory that has Murdoch worried By Ian Burrell, Media Editor The Independent Friday, 4 February 2011 A determined landlady has won a significant breakthrough in a legal battle that could transform the British pub trade by allowing premises to show Premier League games that are being broadcast by foreign networks. Karen Murphy, who runs the Red, White and Blue pub in Portsmouth, is fighting a criminal and civil action brought against her after she began screening matches from the Greek broadcaster Nova, using a much cheaper decoder. Yesterday, in a landmark case called "Murphy's Law", Julie Kokott, Advocate General at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, found that she had the right to show the matches, advising the EU's highest court to rule in favour of renegade landlords. The advice could cause a revolution in the way media sports rights are sold across the continent, and is sure to be the target of furious lobbying by the Premier League and by Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB ahead of a final decision this year. Ms Murphy is in a bitter legal dispute with the Premier League which has lucrative exclusive deals, primarily with BSkyB but also with ESPN. For four years she has been fighting to overturn a criminal conviction for breach of the Premier League's copyright. She was fined £8,000 but has taken the case to the High Court on appeal. Legal experts said the finding could create serious problems for BSkyB, which Mr Murdoch's News Corp is seeking to buy outright, and the funding of Premier League clubs. Robert Vidal, head of EU, competition and trade at lawyers Taylor Wessing LLP, said: "[Mr] Murdoch has always been a cheerleader for the free market; however, on this occasion I doubt he will welcome the introduction of cross-border competition and the resulting drop in turnover and margins as Sky customers migrate to cheaper providers." The investment bank Jefferies believes that BSkyB makes about £200m a year from selling subscriptions to British pubs and other commercial premises. Paul Charity, editor of the Morning Advertiser, the magazine for the pub trade, said: "Anything that would mean licencees pay less would be welcome. The opinion has come as a bit of a shock to the pub trade because they thought that the copyright case was clearly in favour of Sky." Ms Murphy's lawyer, Paul Dixon, said: "For the independent [pub] trade this gives them freedom to go out and buy television systems from broadcasters from any EU member state." The publican must now wait three months for a formal judgment from the court made by a panel of 13 judges. Mr Dixon said he was confident of success after the Advocate General's finding. "It's an opinion that matters because more often than not the court will follow the Advocate General's opinion." The Advocate-General's "opinion" is not legally binding, but the full panel of EU judges follows such advice in about 80 per cent of cases. That ruling will then be passed to the High Court in London. The case was referred to Luxembourg by the High Court because of a perceived lack of clarity in the European law. It was heard at the European Court of Justice on 5 October and the Spanish and Italian governments were among those who made representations in support of the Premier League's position. The UK government argues that the Premier League's right to license its broadcast rights for a fee in each member state is "part of the essential function of its copyright". Ms Murphy's stance is being backed by the EFTA Surveillance Authority, which monitors compliance within the European Economic Area. The authority argues that a licensing agreement that prevents decoder cards being used outside a licensed territory "has as its object the prevention, restriction or distortion of competition". The Tory MEP Emma McClarkin said that if the Premier League lost the case it would have "significant and detrimental" effects on the funding of grassroots sport in the UK. "This opinion is far more complicated than a simple David versus Goliath battle: money generated from television rights to sports are funnelled back into grass roots development, particularly in cricket and rugby. These are national football leagues that are being broadcast, and they should be subjected to national territorial rights agreements." In the red, white and blue corner... Karen Murphy This owner of a street-corner Victorian pub a short walk from Portsmouth's Fratton Park ground has been compared to Jean-Marc Bosman, the Belgian player whose legal challenge changed the way the football transfer market operates across Europe. The publican at the Red, White & Blue doesn't see herself as a revolutionary, so much as a traditionalist. "Supporters don't want a match on a Tuesday night – which suits the broadcaster – they want a match on a Saturday afternoon," she has said. "The whole thing has got way out of control. It's pure greed." Outraged that pubs were being charged £1,000 a month to show matches, Ms Murphy followed advice from her brewery and cut a deal to take matches with the Greek broadcaster Nova. Found guilty of breaching copyright in January 2007, she has refused to accept she has done anything wrong and is convinced she will win her case. Ms Murphy, 46, compares the right to take games from different broadcasters to the right to buy a car from a selection of dealers. She has been a publican for nearly seven years and is known for visiting her regulars in hospital and staging fund-raising events to help people in the surrounding area of Southsea. Sky in numbers £1.6bn The amount the Premier League will make from its current three-year Sky deal. £1bn Value of the Premier League's TV rights deals outside the UK over the same period. £70m Sky revenues at risk should commercial subscribers switch to cheaper foreign deals. £200m Amount BSkyB makes each year from selling subscriptions to pubs and other commercial organisations. 44,000 Number of commercial subscribers who have signed up to BSkyB packages.

'Al-Qaida on brink of using nuclear bomb' BY HEIDI BLAKE AND CHRISTOPHER HOPE THE DAILY TELEGRAPH FEBRUARY 1, 2011 5:58 PM http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Qaida+brink+using+nuclear+bomb/4205104/story.html Al-Qaida is on the verge of producing radioactive weapons after sourcing nuclear material and recruiting rogue scientists to build "dirty" bombs, according to leaked diplomatic documents. A leading atomic regulator has privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a "nuclear 9/11". Security briefings suggest that jihadi groups are also close to producing "workable and efficient" biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands if unleashed in attacks on the West. Thousands of classified American cables obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph detail the international struggle to stop the spread of weapons-grade nuclear, chemical and biological material around the globe. At a Nato meeting in January 2009, security chiefs briefed member states that al-Qaida was plotting a program of "dirty radioactive IEDs", makeshift nuclear roadside bombs that could be used against British troops in Afghanistan. As well as causing a large explosion, a "dirty bomb" attack would contaminate the area for many years. The briefings also state that al-Qaida documents found in Afghanistan in 2007 revealed that "greater advances" had been made in bioterrorism than was previously realized. An Indian national security adviser told American security personnel in June 2008 that terrorists had made a "manifest attempt to get fissile material" and "have the technical competence to manufacture an explosive device beyond a mere dirty bomb". Alerts about the smuggling of nuclear material, sent to Washington from foreign U.S. embassies, document how criminal and terrorist gangs were trafficking large amounts of highly radioactive material across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The alerts explain how customs guards at remote border crossings used radiation alarms to identify and seize cargoes of uranium and plutonium. Freight trains were found to be carrying weapons-grade nuclear material across the Kazakhstan-Russia border, highly enriched uranium was transported across Uganda by bus, and a "small time hustler" in Lisbon offered to sell radioactive plates stolen from Chernobyl. In one incident in September 2009, two employees at the Rossing Uranium Mine in Namibia smuggled almost half a ton of uranium concentrate powder - yellowcake - out of the compound in plastic bags. "Acute safety and security concerns" were even raised in 2008 about the uranium and plutonium laboratory of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear safety watchdog. Tomihiro Taniguchi, the deputy director general of the IAEA, has privately warned America that the world faces the threat of a "nuclear 9/11" if stores of uranium and plutonium were not secured against terrorists. But diplomats visiting the IAEA's Austrian headquarters in April 2008 said that there was "no way to provide perimeter security" to its own laboratory because it has windows that leave it vulnerable to break-ins. Senior British defence officials have raised "deep concerns" that a rogue scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program "could gradually smuggle enough material out to make a weapon", according to a document detailing official talks in London in February 2009. Agricultural stores of deadly biological pathogens in Pakistan are also vulnerable to "extremists" who could use supplies of anthrax, foot and mouth disease and avian flu to develop lethal biological weapons. Anthrax and other biological agents including smallpox, and avian flu could be sprayed from a shop-bought aerosol can in a crowded area, leaked security briefings warn. The security of the world's only two declared smallpox stores in Atlanta, America, and Novosibirsk, Russia, has repeatedly been called into doubt by "a growing chorus of voices" at meetings of the World Health Assembly documented in the leaked cables. The alarming disclosures come after Barack Obama, the U.S. president, last year declared nuclear terrorism "the single biggest threat" to international security with the potential to cause "extraordinary loss of life".

FT editor: press risks political retribution over phone-hacking scandal Lionel Barber says most publishers failed to 'take the issue seriously' because their titles may also have been implicated Read the full text of Lionel Barber's Hugh Cudlipp lecture By Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk, Monday 31 January 2011 20.04 GMT Lionel Barber said the press's stance on phone hacking amounted to a 'conspiracy of silence'. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, tonight warned that the Britain's newspapers were now at risk of facing political "retribution" in the form of statutory regulation in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, as he gave the Hugh Cudlipp memorial lecture. He accused Rupert Murdoch's News International – publisher of the tabloid – of failing to pursue a policy of "own up rather than cover up" to hacking, while criticising the bulk of the industry of failing to "take the issue seriously" because their titles may also have been implicated in the illegal practice. In a trenchant speech, Barber went on to warn that worries about the scale of phone hacking meant that News Corporation's £8bn bid for BSkyB was "troublesome" because "promises about editorial independence for Sky should be judged in the light of repeated assurances that the phone hacking was the work of a lone actor at the News of the World". He described the phone-hacking scandal as a "watershed – not just for News International but also for tabloid journalism", arguing that a 2006 report by the Information Commissioner suggested that 305 journalists from a range of titles used the services of a private investigator. Other newspapers, Barber said, "aside from the lead taken by the Guardian, which was followed by the FT, BBC and Independent", had taken "a pass on the News of the World phone-hacking story – almost certainly because they too were involved in similar practices". It amounted to, he said, a "conspiracy of silence [that] ruled Fleet Street". The result – he warned – of a "failure to clean house at all news organisations" would be that the "mainstream media in Britain" would be "at risk of retribution in the form of statutory regulation", not least because many MPs are "itching to retaliate" in the wake of the expenses scandal. Turning to Murdoch's News International in particular, Barber said that its management failed to follow the sort of advice their newspapers would have given in similar circumstances, namely to "own up rather than cover up, come clean rather than surreptitiously paying off aggrieved celebrities such as the publicist Max Clifford". He added: "The suspicion must remain that News Corporation [the parent company of News International] assumed that it enjoyed enough power and influence in Britain to make the phone hacking controversy go away." Barber also accused the Press Complaints Commission of being "supine at best" in its reaction to the hacking controversy, and said that the Metropolitan police faced "many questions" as to why it did not prosecute its original investigation into the News of the World with "sufficient rigour". He also warned that politicians had become "a tad too respectful" towards broadcast and print media, highlighting the number of senior politicians who had previously worked in the industry, including David Cameron, a former director of communications with now defunct ITV company Carlton, through to former FT leader writer turned shadow chancellor, Ed Balls. He added: "We have in recent years witnessed if not exactly a merger of the media and political class, certainly an increasingly intertwined relationship which, I suspect, does not necessarily serve the interest of either." Criticism in the 5,000-word lecture was also briefly reserved for the Daily Telegraph for its decision to send two journalists posing as constituents to covertly record comments made by business secretary Vince Cable. Barber said that the story did not meet "the public interest test", adding that it amounted to "nothing more than entrapment journalism". There were also passages discussing the FT's online charging strategy, which has seen the newspaper win over 200,000 paid subscribers, although he conceded that the paper's approach "does not necessarily lend itself to being adopted by others" because the financial title was a "high-end niche product". At one point Barber also conceded that the FT does not "always hit the ball out of the park", saying that the title, like many other news organisations, was slow to highlight the risk of the bursting of the credit bubble. He said that his own career had progressed well, all be it in a "circumspect" fashion, after a bumpy start when "a young man called Mark Thompson turned down an article I proposed for Isis magazine" when the two were at Oxford. Thompson is now the BBC director general

It has been claimed that one of the reasons that Andy Gray was sacked by Murdoch was that he was taking legal action against the News of the World because his phone was hacked. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/sep/10/phone-hacking-victims-list

Leading article: Sky should be limited for Murdoch The Independent Sunday, 30 January 2011 These have been a fraught few days in the office for Rupert Murdoch, who visited the London branch of his media empire last week. His television company, Sky, was humiliated by the sexist goonishness of Andy Gray and Richard Keys, the presenters of its Premiership football, its biggest generator of cash. Mr Gray was sacked on Tuesday and Mr Keys followed voluntarily on Wednesday after their off-air derogatory remarks about a female match official were leaked – although it was evidence of sexual harassment in the Sky office that emerged subsequently which prompted Mr Gray's dismissal. This coincided awkwardly with a crisis in the long-running embarrassment at Mr Murdoch's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper, the News of the World. After the departure of Andy Coulson, the newspaper's former editor, from 10 Downing Street as the Prime Minister's head of communications, it must have been hoped, by Mr Murdoch and David Cameron, that the story would start to go away. Indeed, one of the purposes of Mr Murdoch's visit seems to have been to deliver in person the message that he wants the stables cleaned out properly this time – as opposed to the cosmetic exercises carried out earlier. Mr Murdoch's intentions may be sincere, but they are not unrelated to the third story concerning his interests to have occupied the rest of the British media last week. He wants to buy out the outside shareholders in Sky. That means that he has to persuade the regulators that he and his son James take seriously the concerns about media pluralism, or free and fair competition. Mr Murdoch senior has been here before. He made promises of editorial independence when he took over The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981, which were not honoured. Hence the scepticism about the undertakings that he is prepared to offer in order to secure total ownership of Sky. That is why the refusal of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World to die down is damaging to him. While not directly relevant to competition issues, his failure to enforce standards of journalistic integrity weakens promises about how his executives will behave in future. The departure of Mr Coulson may have been part of an attempt agreed between Mr Cameron and the Government to try to close down the story, but the reopening of the police investigation puts more pressure on Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture. Mr Hunt has to decide whether to refer the Sky takeover to the Competition Commission, a decision removed from Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, after he revealed his prejudice against Mr Murdoch to undercover Daily Telegraph reporters. One response to Mr Murdoch's bid for Sky has been to wonder what the fuss is about. After all, Mr Murdoch already controls Sky by virtue of his 39 per cent shareholding. What practical difference would it make for him to own Sky outright? The technical answer is that he would not have to worry about the legally protected interests of other shareholders, which would allow him to cross-subsidise between his wholly owned companies. But all that anyone really needs to know is that Mr Murdoch and his son are desperate for the takeover to go ahead. They think that it is in their commercial interest, and there is no guarantee – indeed, if anything the opposite – that such an interest is in the national interest. Last week Mr Hunt said he "intends to refer" the bid to the Competition Commission, but gave Mr Murdoch unspecified further time to satisfy Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, and the Office of Fair Trading. Possibly because it was unexpected, Mr Hunt's decision has been commended as "astute", although it is hard to see why. None of the assurances that Mr Murdoch might give – that Sky News would be independent, for instance – could be relied on. The big question, therefore, is whether four newspapers plus such a large presence in non-public-service broadcasting is so dominant that it inhibits the vigour and pluralism of our free media. The Independent on Sunday has little faith in the safeguards offered by Mr Murdoch, and believes that giving him more power over Sky's editorial direction – and Sky News in particular – crosses a line that must be held in the public interest. But it is the Competition Commission that should decide, and there is no purpose served by further delay.