Millions tune in to see former leader face charges as confusion reigns in Cairo courtroom and violence continues outside The last time Hosni Mubarak visited New Cairo’s police academy building, his name was written above the door – one institution among hundreds around the country, from schools to metro stations, that had been named after the wartime pilot who rose to become president and transformed Egypt into his private fiefdom. On that day – 23 January this year, only 48 hours before revolution swept the streets – Mubarak thanked his police force, the group he relied upon to continue his three decades in power. “I and all Egyptians salute policemen on their day of celebration and affirm our pride in their role and sacrifice,” he said to an apparently devoted audience. Just over six months later, Mubarak returned to the police academy on Wednesday morning to find his name unceremoniously stripped from the walls. His lectern had been replaced by a metal cage, his suit swapped for standard-issue prison overalls, his security forces and judiciary now tasked with locking him up and deciding his culpability, a verdict that could lead to his execution. The struggles against dictatorship that have consumed the Arab world this year boast many historic moments, but few were as dramatic, or cathartic, as this. Lying on a stretcher under the gaze of state television cameras and accompanied by his two sons and codefendants, Alaa and Gamal, the 83-year-old spoke only once to confirm his presence and enter a plea. “I deny all these charges and accusations categorically,” he said. The case was adjourned until 15 August. At times, the trial that most Egyptians thought could never happen – at least partly because there was widespread scepticism that Egypt’s ruling generals would ever bow to public pressure and turn so decisively against their former commander-in-chief – descended into a bawdy cocktail of confusion and farce. As rocks flew outside the temporary court house, courtesy of running battles between supporters and opponents of Mubarak which left 53 people injured, mayhem often prevailed within. Lawyers squabbled and shouted to gain the beleaguered judge’s attention as he tried to deal with procedural matters; at one point, an attorney even demanded Mubarak be given a DNA test, claiming he had actually died in 2004 and had been replaced by an impostor. But moments of levity, including a camera shot of the former tyrant picking his nose, quickly melted away as the prosecutor read to Mubarak the accusations against him. This was still history in the making. The three charges – profiteering, illegal business-dealing involving Israeli gas exports, and the unlawful killing of protesters who rose up to challenge his rule – may not even begin to encompass the crimes committed by his regime, but they all spoke to key aspects of the nation Mubarak created. Twenty years after Egypt first accepted an IMF “structural adjustment package” and embarked on aggressive neo-liberal reforms that left 90% of the country worse off but enriched the elite to unimaginable levels, corruption remains one of the defining features of modern Egypt. So does political stagnation, symbolised by the country’s declining status in the region and the pursuit of a slavish pro-US and pro-Israeli foreign policy, of which subsidised gas exports to Israel were only one component. And the state-sponsored murder of demonstrators in January and February this year arose from a security apparatus in which torture and abuse had become systematically embedded. As the litany of wrongdoing continued and the names of some of those who died in the uprising were read, many onlookers wept. “It’s a glorious day,” said Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “Many of us were worried Mubarak would use the trial to turn public opinion in his favour and plea for sympathy, but in fact it revived that sense of achievement we felt when he was unseated back in February. This can only be good for the revolution.” The court could extend its current remit. Other people and institutions were implicated by lawyers and may be dragged in – including state media officials accused of spreading disinformation during the protests, mobile firms who agreed to shut down their networks at the height of the revolt, and Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief and, briefly, vice-president, who is yet to face any charges. “We’re now getting a sense of the byproducts that may come out of Mubarak’s prosecution,” said Bahgat. “These are examples of how the trial will not just provide justice for victims of the uprising and their families, but also shed real light on the truth of what happened during those 18 days. That’s particularly important given the military council’s refusal to initiate a fact-finding mission into all the past crimes of the Mubarak regime.” The army generals will also be watching proceedings nervously. They can expect a short-term popularity boost after keeping their promise to put Mubarak in the dock, but remain uneasy about what revelations may emerge when he takes the stand. Samer Shehata, an assistant professor and Egypt expert at Georgetown University, said: “Some of the lawyers have already requested that [Egypt's current de facto leader, field marshall Mohamed Hussein] Tantawi, [army chief of staff] Sami Anan and other senior generals come to the court and bear witness. I don’t think their attendance is likely, but there’s certainly a possibility that Mubarak, if cornered, might start speaking about the extent of corruption within the military council and pinpoint Tantawi in particular.” Relations between the military and revolutionaries are at an all-time low following a brutal assault by soldiers in Tahrir Square this week and the persistent use of military trials, a timely reminder of just how far Egypt still has to go in its battle for meaningful reform. As Mubarak’s case was concluded for the day, only a few miles across town, demonstrators who had been participating in the Tahrir sit-in were being interrogated at a different courthouse, accused of breaking a new law created by the generals which forbids protests. Tantawi and his fellow officers have done their best to paint these young people as baltagiyya , or thugs, but were it not for their street rallies, there is little doubt Mubarak would not be on trial. Mona Seif, a cancer researcher who campaigns against arbitrary arrests and military trials, and who has been involved in the occupation of Tahrir, said: “We’re celebrating today because it’s not just about seeing Mubarak in court, it’s also about regaining a bit of the popular support that we seem to have lost recently. “We keep on getting framed by the media as people who don’t have anything better to do than sit in the road and make trouble, so for those of us who have been detained and beaten in the process, the knowledge that it was our pressure that forced them to have this public trial – that’s very uplifting.” Millions were glued to their TVs as the trial unfolded, turning central Cairo into a ghost town and sending the stock exchange to a 10-year low as traders stopped work to follow proceedings. Many companies set up viewing areas for staff; others stayed at home, such as Gelal Faisal Ali, whose brother was killed during the uprising. “The martyrs’ families had lost faith in the judicial system, and we thought that today the court would do little other than try to calm public anger,” Ali said. “Forgive me, but I am still concerned that this is what’s happening. Mubarak deserves nothing less than the death penalty.” Some took a different view, arguing that the sight of a former leader behind bars was a national humiliation. Reda Tohami Ibrahim, the owner of a Cairo clothing store, was one: “If there has to be a court case, it shouldn’t be public – this is a man with a long history. The entire world is watching this charade, and as an Egyptian I say it’s not fitting or appropriate.” Ibrahim’s objections put him in a minority on a day that, for all the procedural wrangling, will stand as a symbolic landmark not just for Egypt, but for much of the world beyond. “We don’t know what will happen next, because none of this has been scripted,” said Shehata at Georgetown University. After three decades of having the script written for them by one of modern history’s most entrenched dictators, that messy uncertainty is just what many Egyptians have been looking forward to. Additional reporting by Mohamed El-Dahshan Hosni Mubarak Egypt Africa Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Protest Jack Shenker Mohamed El Dahshan guardian.co.uk
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Hackers infiltrated 72 world organisations including United Nations and IOC, security company McAfee discovers Dozens of countries, companies and organisations, ranging from the US government to the UN and the Olympic movement, have had their computers systematically hacked over the past five years by one country, according to a report by a leading US internet security company. The report, by McAfee, did not openly blame any country but hinted strongly that China was the most likely culprit, a view endorsed by analysts. China has previouslybeen implicated in a range of alleged incidents of cyberspying – a practice Beijing vehemently denies – including a concerted attack on Google and several attempts to prise secrets from computers at the Foreign Office. But the McAfee report is among the most thorough attempts yet to map the scale and range of such data-theft efforts. The study traced the spread of one particular spying malware, usually spread by a “phishing” email which, if opened, downloaded a hidden programme on to the computer network. Through tracing this malware and also gaining access to a “command and control” computer server used by the intruders, McAfee identified 72 compromised companies and organisations. Many more had been hacked but could not be identified from the logs. “After painstaking analysis of the logs, even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organisations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the company’s head of threat research and the author of the report. Of the hacking victims 49 were US-based, among them various arms of federal, state and local government, as well as defence contractors and other industries. There were two targets in the UK, a defence company and a computer security firm, while other governments included those of Taiwan, South Korea, and India. Also found on the logs were records from the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee and two national Olympic committees – one of which was accessed by the hackers for more than two years continuously. McAfee was at pains not to identify the suspected culprit. However, it did little to disguise its suspicions, noting that the targeting of the Olympic groups, and the sport’s anti-doping agency, immediately before and after the 2008 Beijing Games was “particularly intriguing” and pointed to a country being to blame. China has been accused in the past. After Google came under a so-called “advanced persistent attack” in 2009 which it said originated in China, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, asked Beijing for an explanation . This year William Hague said a “hostile state intelligence agency” – identified by UK sources as China – had penetrated the Foreign Office’s internal communications system. While a high proportion of media attention on cybersecurity focuses on the loss of personal data, such as the recent security breaches at Sony , and the activities of hacking collectives such as LulzSec , analysts say this is often minor when compared with the methodical, industrial-scale attempts to seize commercial and state secrets, presumed to be carried out by many countries, chief among them China. Alperovitch said state-orchestrated hacking was so endemic and ambitious it could reshape the workings of the global economy. “What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth,” he said. If only a fraction of the stolen data was used to gain commercial or technological advantage “the loss represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth in a suddenly more competitive landscape and the loss of jobs in industries that lose out to unscrupulous competitors in another part of the world”. Beyond even this, he added, were the national security implications of stolen intelligence or defence files. Such was the endemic scale of this problem, Alperovitch said, that he divided large corporations into two camps: “Those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.” He said: “This is a problem of massive scale that affects nearly every industry and sector of the economies of numerous countries, and the only organisations that are exempt from this threat are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing.” When Google accused China last year the ministry of industry and information technology told the state news agency Xinhua: “Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber-attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We are firmly opposed to that.” No one was available for comment at the foreign ministry in Beijing. Chinese officials have previously said that China has strict laws against hacking and is itself one of the biggest victims. Dave Clemente, a cybersecurity analyst from the Chatham House thinktank, said it was likely China was also targeted by hackers acting on behalf of other countries. “It’s going in both directions, but probably not to the same extent,” he said. “China has a real motivation to gain these types of industrial secrets, to make that leapfrog. There’s probably less motivation for the US to look to China for industrial secrets or high technology. But certainly there’s things China has which they’re interested in, maybe not for commercial advantage but in a geopolitical sense.” Clemente said McAfee’s characterisation of such hacking efforts as a wholesale theft of intellectual property and secrets was “fairly reasonable”: “It’s confirmed not just by this report but by so many dozens of other incidents which build up to an overall picture.” The effects, however, were harder to quantify: “The blueprints are only part of the picture. The technology for, say, how to build a sophisticated jet engine is one thing, but there’s a whole set of other processes – the logistics, how to manage the supply chain to build more than one, the long-term management of a really advanced manufacturing process.” While basic security or human errors often made hacking easier than it should be, Clemente said, even the biggest organisations struggle to stop sophisticated attacks: “There’s not much even Google can do if China’s really determined to get inside its networks. It’s not a fair fight in that sense.” Hacking Data and computer security Google China United States Peter Walker guardian.co.uk
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Record haul discovered after pleasure cruiser is searched in docks as separate drugs ring jailed in London for similar plot Two massive consignments of cocaine bound for Britain’s streets have been seized in operations by the police and UK border agency. The Home Office said the discovery of 1.2 tonnes of cocaine hidden aboard a pleasure cruiser at Southampton was a record haul in the United Kingdom. In London, members of a smuggling ring were jailed over a separate conspiracy which saw a tonne of cocaine grabbed off the Spanish coast after an operation spearheaded by the Metropolitan police. Scotland Yard believes the jailing is the final link in taking out virtually the entire international network, which involved drug dealers in London who bought a boat in Canada, then shipped the drugs from South America, through the Caribbean, on to Spain, and eventually into the UK. But experts in drugs policy warned the massive seizures, while examples of good work by UK law enforcement, would make little difference to the price of cocaine or its availability on the streets. The seizure of £300m worth of drugs from the pleasure cruiser at Southampton docks followed an international operation. Once the vessel was seized it took six days of searching of the 65ft craft for investigators to find the cocaine. Six people have been arrested. The drugs, with a 90% purity, are believed to have come from Venezuela. Brodie Clark, head of the UKBA said: “It’s a major seizure. It’s about serious crime, it’s about major criminal disruption.” At the end of the Scotland Yard case, two members of the British end of another drugs ring were sentenced for their part in a drugs network which was trying to smuggle one tonne of cocaine into the UK in December 2009 aboard a ship called the Destiny Empress. The breakthrough came when police in London, investigating two seemingly mid-level drug dealers, raided a west London home, during which a detective noticed a piece of paper in their bin. It was a receipt for about £200,000 worth of work on a boat moored in Nova Scotia, Canada. The boat was a former Canadian coastguard vessel which was being refurbished and converted to hide the drugs. It was seized by the Spanish navy 200 miles off the Iberian coast. Fourteen people have been convicted in Britain, and sentenced to a total of 79 years, and trials are still to take place in Spain. Detective Inspector Steve Ellen said: “It’s rare to take out the whole network.” He said some involved were “clean skins”, with no record of involvement in drugs or criminality. Harry Shapiro of the charity Drugscope said the massive seizures were unlikely to have had much effect on the ability of cocaine users to buy the class A drug. He said: “No one is reporting a cocaine drought. “Everyone knows you can’t stamp out drug use and stop drugs getting in, it’s always going to be an exercise in damage limitation. The role of the authorities is to do whatever they can.” The Serious and Organised Crime Agency estimates that 25-30 tonnes of cocaine is smuggled into the UK every year, meaning the record seizure off the waters of Southampton represents 4% of the annual amount.The average price of a gramme of cocaine sold on the streets is £60 to £70, and one way dealers can compensate for a drop in supply is by cutting the purity. A report from MPs on the home affairs committee in 2010 found that purity levels had dropped, meaning one gramme could contain just 5% pure cocaine. Cocaine is the second most popular drug in the UK, with its use having trebled in the last decade. Drugs trade Drugs Health Crime Police Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Forensic Science Service closure forces police to use untested private firms
August 3, 2011 No Comment
Forces employing suppliers without ‘due diligence’ after rushed closure of loss-making central service The closure of the Forensic Science Service has been so rushed that police forces have been forced to turn to untested private suppliers to fill the gap, a police authority has warned. Andrew White, the chief executive of the Hertfordshire police authority, said he had no choice but to sign off new contracts without doing the usual due diligence after being told that if they were not in place by the middle of July, there would be no access to forensic services in October. “This was not considered an option,” he said. Hertfordshire is one of 10 forces, including Hampshire, Kent and the City of London, in a joint competitive tendering exercise to replace the Forensic Science Service (FSS). The contracts range from simple DNA analysis from swabs taken when people are arrested, through to specialist support at crime scenes, including murder and
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Click here to view this media Lawrence O’Donnell had nothing but praise for actor Matt Damon who came out over the weekend to support teachers during the Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action in Washington D.C. Apparently Damon’s mother is a school teacher and when confronted by some wingnut libertarian reporter from Reason.tv, Damon hit back at her pretty hard with her assumptions that teachers only care about tenure and job security, rather than being the underpaid civil servants that the majority of them are that put up with what they do because they really do love their jobs and care about educating kids. O’Donnell: That’s how crazy the attacks on teachers has become. Damon had some harsh words for what has become of our public school system these days where test scores are held above any care that curriculum is based on being able to be flexible enough to make sure that the children in any given class are actually given a well rounded education to where they’re actually learning something besides just being able to pass some standardized test. Lawrence O’Donnell also had something to add with his personal experiences on the topic and pointed out that the real reason that conservatives are attacking teachers’ unions and our public education system has a lot more to do with politics than any real concern for whether students in America are actually getting a decent education. It’s about busting unions and taking away any political power from Democrats since anyone who is a teacher obviously has no reason to support the Republican Party when they’d prefer our educators were working for minimum wage with no bargaining rights and no benefits if they had their way, or at least letting those more “productive” teachers who are younger come in and take the place of someone who’s been teaching twenty or thirty years plus and getting rid of that burdensome teacher who might be costing the tax payers too much by actually having their pension obligations honored that they bargained for. It’s a sorry state of affairs in this country when we’ve got one political party that cares more about busting unions than educating our children but sadly, our education system is not the only one you can make that point on when it comes to what the GOP has in mind for the future of our country and whether there are any companies or workforces left that are still unionized. They’d prefer workers having no voice and a race to the bottom with third world countries — and heaven forbid anyone pushes back against that and wants to retain a middle class in America. The HuffPo has more on Damon’s appearance over the weekend — Matt Damon Defends Teachers Against ‘Sh***y’ Reason.tv Cameraman (VIDEO) : Matt Damon had some strong words at last Saturday’s Save Our Schools march in Washington, D.C. Following his keynote address, the actor took offense to a Reason.tv reporter who contended that, as opposed to the environment faced by teachers in a tenure system, the lack of job security in acting functions as an incentive for hard work. Here’s what Damon had to say : So you think job insecurity is what makes me work hard? I want to be an actor. That’s not an incentive. That’s the thing. See, you take this MBA-style thinking, right? It’s the problem with ed policy right now, this intrinsically paternalistic view of problems that are much more complex than that. It’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when they have tenure. A teacher wants to teach. I mean, why else would you take a shitty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it? Good for Matt Damon and thank you for speaking out. Damon: Maybe you’re a shitty camerman.
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A collision with a smaller moon may explain why the terrains on the far and near sides of the moon are so different The remnants of a second moon that orbited around the Earth billions of years ago may be splattered across the far side of our moon, scientists claim. The two moons are believed to have been created at the same time and followed a similar path to the moon we’re familiar with today, but after tens of millions of years of peaceful co-existence, the two moons appear to have crunched together in a gentle collision that left the smaller moon, just a third of the size, spread across the larger like a cosmic pancake. Researchers put forward the idea after computer simulations found that a collision with a second, sibling moon in Earth’s early history might solve the longstanding puzzle of why the two faces of the moon differ so dramatically. While the near side, which always faces the Earth, is low-lying and relatively flat, the far side is high and mountainous, with a crust tens of kilometres thicker. The idea builds on what planetary scientists call the “big impact” model of the moon, in which a planet the size of Mars slammed into the Earth in the early days of the solar system and knocked out a vast shower of rocky debris, which later coalesced as the moon. “The impact produced a disc of debris around the Earth and from this disc we got the moon, but there is no reason why only one moon would be formed,” Martin Jutzi at the University of Bern in Switzerland told the Guardian. Jutzi and his colleague, Erik Asphaug at the University of California in Santa Cruz , decided to simulate what might happen if a second moon was created from the rock and dust that fell into orbit around the Earth. Computer models showed that a sister moon roughly 1,200km in diameter could have accompanied the larger moon around the Earth for tens of millions of years. But as the moons’ orbit moved further away from Earth, the balance of forces became unstable and the two moons collided. A high-speed impact would have punched a giant crater into the moon and kicked a shower of rock into space, but if the two bodies met at less than three kilometres a second, the smaller moon would have splatted onto the surface of the larger and stayed there. The study appears in the journal, Nature . “A slower collision doesn’t produce such intense shockwaves and causes much less damage than a high-velocity collision,” Jutzi said. “It’s kind of a gentle collision that doesn’t form a big crater. The smaller moon gets more or less pancaked onto the larger moon.” If Jutzi is right, the impact thickened the moon’s crust on the far side, creating the highlands and forcing subsurface magma to the opposite side. “It wouldn’t matter where the impact happens, because after the collision, the moon would reorient itself so that the material left from the impact was on the far side,” Jutzi said. While speculative, scientists hope to find ways of testing the idea. The smaller moon would have formed before the moon we see today, so rock samples from the far side of our moon should be older than rocks collected from the near side. Another approach under consideration is to compare Jutzi and Asphaug’s simulations with details of the moon’s internal structure, gleaned from lunar maps drawn up by Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , and high-resolution gravity maps of the moon, which will be obtained next year by Nasa’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission . In an accompanying article, Maria Zuber, a geophysicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , said the study raised “the legitimate possibility that, after the giant impact, our Earth perhaps fleetingly possessed more than one moon. Furthermore, significant remnants of this long-departed member of the Earth-moon collisional family may be preserved today on the lunar far side.” The moon shows only one face to the Earth because its centre of mass is slightly off-centre – around 2km closer to our planet than the geometric centre. There is no dark side of the moon, though much of the surface spends 14 days in daylight and 14 days in darkness. Last year, Ian Garrick-Bethell and Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published an alternative explanation for the different thicknesses in the moon’s crust that suggested tidal forces rather than an impact were responsible. “The fact that the near side of the moon looks so different to the far side has been a puzzle since the dawn of the space age, perhaps second only to the origin of the moon itself,” said Nimmo. “One of the elegant aspects of [this] study is that it links these two puzzles together: perhaps the giant collision that formed the moon also spalled off some smaller bodies, one of which later fell back to the moon to cause the dichotomy that we see today.” The moon Space Geology Physics Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
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The UN has declared famine in three more regions in Somalia and calls on Somalis everywhere to pull together Another three regions in Somalia are in famine, the UN declared Wednesday as it warned that the international humanitrian response to the crisis has been inadequate. The UN said the prevalence of acute malnutrition and rates of crude mortality surpassed the famine thresholds in areas of Middle Shabelle, the Afgoye corridor refugee settlement and internally displaced communities in Mogadishu, the capital. The UN last month said two other regions in southern Somalia – Bakool and Lower Shabelle – were suffering from famine, defined as when acute malnutrition exceeds 30% and when the death rate exceeds two per 10,000 a day. About 450,000 people live in Somalia’s famine zones, said Grainne Moloney, chief technical adviser for the UN’s food security and nutrition analysis unit. The UN’s food arm, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said famine is likely to spread across all regions of Somalia’s south in the next four to six weeks, with famine conditions likely to last until December. A humanitarian emergency exists across all other regions of southern Somalia, and there have already been tens of thousands, according to the UN. “The current humanitarian response remains inadequate, due in part to ongoing access restrictions and difficulties in scaling‐up emergency assistance programmess, as well as funding gaps,” said the UN’s famine early warning system network. As a result, famine is expected to spread across all regions of the south in the coming four to six weeks and is likely to persist until at least December 2011. Continued efforts to implement an immediate, large scale, and comprehensive response are needed.” Aid efforts have been hampered in the south as elements of al-Shabaab, the Islamist insurgents, have refused access to western relief agencies. Throughout Somalia, 3.7 million people are in crisis, with 3.2 million people in need of immediate, lifesaving assistance, 2.8 million of whom are in the south. A senior UN official today appealed to all Somalis, both inside and outside the country, to work together to support the peace process and alleviate the plight of those suffering from famine. “This is a time of great crisis, but also of rare opportunity. It is a time for everyone to pull together to help those suffering and to work towards a better future for all,” Augustine Mahiga, the UN special representative for Somalia, said in a letter to the Somali diaspora . “I appeal to all those who are able – Somalis and the international community alike – to give as much as they can during this holy month (Ramadan) to feed the hungry, heal the sick and prevent the famine spreading further.” Mahiga noted that one of the contributing factors to the famine has been the fighting in the country and he criticised extremists for preventing the movement of people from the worst-hit areas. “We call for the humanitarian agencies to be given unhindered access to all areas to provide desperately needed help,” he said. Famine Somalia Africa Mark Tran guardian.co.uk
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Former model told BBC’s Newsnight that in 2001 journalist admitted listening to message following row with Paul McCartney Heather Mills on Wednesday claimed a journalist from the Mirror Group admitted to her that he had obtained a story about her and her former husband Sir Paul McCartney by hacking into her mobile phone messages. The former model told the BBC’s Newsnight that the unidentified journalist called her in 2001, following a row with the ex-Beatle, who was then her boyfriend, and quoted parts of a message McCartney had left on her voicemail after she had travelled to India. According to Ms Mills, the journalist rang her and “started quoting verbatim the messages from my machine”. Ms Mills said she challenged the journalist, saying: “You’ve obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story … I’ll go to the police.” She said the individual responded: “OK, OK, yeah we did hear it on your voice messages, I won’t run it.” The interview will be shown on the programme tonight. It will place the spotlight back on the Mirror’s publisher, Trinity Mirror, and the paper’s editor at the time, Piers Morgan. Mills told the BBC it was not Morgan who called her, but the corporation has chosen not to identify the journalist. Morgan, who now hosts a chat show for CNN, has consistently denied hacking into phones, having any knowledge about hacking at the title, or running stories obtained by using the method. A spokesman for Trinity Mirror said: “Trinity Mirror’s position is clear: all our journalists work within the criminal law and the PCC code of conduct”. Morgan wrote a column in the Mail on Sunday in 2006 in which he described being played a message that had been left by McCartney for Mills. “It was heartbreaking,” Morgan wrote. “The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work it Out’ into the answer phone.” Mills was the subject of intense tabloid interest before, during and after her marriage from the former Beatle. She is considering launching legal action against the News of the World after the Metropolitan police confirmed to her earlier this year that her mobile-phone number and other details had been found in notebooks belonging to Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the News of the World. Morgan wrote in his published diary, The Insider, that following a personal request from McCartney he had pulled a story about Mills and McCartney arguing in 2001 over Mills’s decision to go to India to help the victims of an earthquake. Newsnight also claims it has established that other celebrities, including Ulrika Jonsson, beleive their phones were hacked by the Daily Mirror or its Sunday sister title the Sunday Mirror. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter ] and Facebook Daily Mirror Newspapers & magazines National newspapers Newspapers Phone hacking Trinity Mirror Piers Morgan James Robinson guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Pat Buchanan refuses to apologize: ‘Calling Obama ‘your boy’ was not a slur’
August 3, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan refused to apologize Wednesday for telling Al Sharpton that President Barack Obama was his “boy.” “Lemme tell ya, your boy, Barack Obama, caved in on it in 2010 and he’ll cave in on it again,” Buchanan had told Sharpton Tuesday . “Let me clarify something that happened last night on the Al Sharpton show,” Buchanan said Wednesday morning on MSNBC. “A very spirited discussion, I was asked who was the big losers in these battles and the big winners, and I said one of the big losers, using boxing terminology, was ‘your boy,’ and I meant the president of the United States.” “Rev. Sharpton said my boy is the president of the United States and he’s doing a rope-a-dope in the Ali fashion and he’s going to finish off your crowd. Now this was taken, some folks took what I said as some kind of slur. None was meant, none was intended, none was delivered, for the record,” he added. Buchanan didn’t explain what he had meant Tuesday when he wrote that “the Tea Party ‘Hobbits’ are indeed returning to Middle Earth — to nail the coonskin to the wall.” UPDATE : John Amato: Buchanan knows how to use coded words to make racist points since he’s been around the Southern Strategy a long time. And his long history of bigotry is well documented so he’s someone that will never get the benefit of the doubt.
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US publisher hopes to create a series of comic-book stories based on songs by Morrissey and Johnny Marr • The Smiths’ songs as comics – in pictures What if the Smiths’ songs were comics? An American publisher is taking that idea to the printing-press, organising a new anthology that transforms songs such as Girlfriend in a Coma and How Soon Is Now? into comic-book stories. Each tune will unspool as a four-to-eight-page comic strip, with the whole thing published in November. Unite and Take Over: Comic Stories Inspired by the Smiths is the brainchild of Shawn Demumbrum, a Phoenix, Arizona comics geek who clearly likes his Batman with a dash of melancholy. Instead of imagining Morrissey and Johnny Marr as vinyl-wielding superheroes who seek out happiness and, er, destroy it, the Smiths’ influence on Unite and Take Over is subtle. “What’s the story that plays in your head when you listen to your favourite Smiths songs?” he explains in a promotional video . The book’s authors use these songs as “an inspiration, a jumping-off point, a theme or a mood”. In an email to the Guardian, he added: “As a teen in the 80s, one of my favourite soundtracks was the Pretty in Pink soundtrack. While training for cross country, I played the cassette over and over on my Walkman as I ran. There was always something about the Smiths’ Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. It tapped into my teenage psyche, a combination of loneliness and yet hopeful optimism, that only Morrissey’s vocals seem to capture.” Demumbrum is funding the project on the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter , hoping to raise $3,000 (£1,841) toward printing costs and ISBN codes, as well as to license song lyrics from the Smiths themselves. He has already gathered 13 writer/artist teams, each of whom will take on a different Smiths classic. Although the anthology lacks any major names, most of the contributors are indie comics veterans, including Christian Vilaire , Henry Barajas , Jeff Pina and Shelby Robertson. The finished product, which will run to at least 72 illustrated pages, is due out at the upcoming Tucson Comic-Con . The Smiths Morrissey Comics and graphic novels Sean Michaels guardian.co.uk
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