Is it really true that there’s no difference between cheap and expensive wines, or do some people just want to believe it? The “news” yesterday, that people don’t know slosh from sancerre when it comes to judging wine quality created widespread ferment. I contacted Richard Wiseman, the professor at the University of Hertfordshire who made the claims, to discuss them and ask how the tests were conducted. Apparently some 578 lucky visitors to this year’s Edinburgh International Science Festival were given two glasses of wine, told that one of them was cheap and the other expensive, and asked which was which. The findings showed that, with uncanny consistency, around half were right and half wrong for nearly all the wines. Wiseman originally said of these “remarkable” results: “People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship, the message is clear – the inexpensive wines we tested taste the same as their expensive counterparts”. In fact, inasmuch as everybody was choosing between the two wines, precisely nobody was saying they tasted the same, and Wiseman concedes on reflection that that point doesn’t really stand up. One could further argue that what the findings show is that around half the respondents could tell the difference, but Wiseman’s extrapolation is that because 50% is the statistical probability, the same results could have been obtained by tossing a coin. I wondered whether there’s any point in comparing an immature vintage of an expensive claret, as the survey did, with a cheap generic bordeaux. The wine that isn’t ready yet will be rigid with tannin, and tasting hard and raw. Wiseman agreed, but said that most people don’t keep wines to let them mature anyway, which is of course true, but doesn’t in any way license the conclusion that the cheaper wine is the smarter option. It’s only the smarter option if you don’t drink the dearer wine at its best. But these conclusions speak of a more far-reaching cultural proclivity. It is deeply appealing to the British to believe that anything that smells like connoisseurship in matters of food and drink is probably horse poo. And so-called wine experts are the worst offenders of the lot. It can’t be denied that there is still a sediment of rank elitism about the wine business. When single bottles of the wines of Burgundy’s and Bordeaux’s most celebrated estates can sell for more than most people earn in a month, this is not a milieu noted for its inclusiveness. (But then neither is the luxury car market, or designer-label fashion.) A healthy suspicion of pretentiousness is what immunises the British from the rhapsodic flannel with which the French PR industry talks about its own wines. That cynicism, though, on the British side has its fatal weakness, in that it habitually encourages people to settle for mediocrity. There is a kind of dogged joylessness in wanting to believe that anything that claims to be better must be trying to put one over on you. Why pay £10 for a bottle of wine, Wiseman asks, when you won’t enjoy it any more than one that cost half that? Far from being a message of hope, this is a counsel of despair. Its roots reach back to the idol-smashing puritanism of the Cromwellian era, when a righteous hatred of the luxury and entitlement in which the aristocracy lived bred in us a morally tinged distrust of anything seen as a cut above. Class privilege is of course no less grotesque than it was when they lopped off the king’s head, but it has led to a confusion of quality-consciousness with arrogance. It led to the refusal of foreign food as ‘fancy’ in the post-war austerity years, when it was thought that moussaka was just a food snob’s term for shepherd’s pie. And, despite the enormous boom in wine consumption in the past 30 years, it has resulted in a firm belief that people who pay over the odds for a bottle are helpless suckers who can’t see beyond the label. “Alcohol is alcohol,” says one of the commenters on the Guardian’s news story about the Edinburgh survey, the implication being that you may as well settle for any old gut-rot as long as you get the result. There is a heartbreaking defeatism about this that Wiseman’s interpretation of his own findings does nothing to dispel. Wine Food & drink guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Karmic Update: Recall campaign against AZ Senate President Russell Pearce gaining steam
April 15, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media You may remember how Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican state Senate leader and architect of SB1070, went on Bill O’Reilly’s show a couple of months ago and pushed hard for a recall campaign against Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for daring to opine that extremist right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (An effort which, last we checked, was going nowhere fast.) Well, karmic payback can be a rhymes-with-witch : What may seem to some as an uphill battle is becoming close to a reality for a non-partisan political group as they gather signatures to recall Senate President Russell Pearce. “I have no doubt we’ll get enough signatures to force the recall campaign,” said Chad Snow, chairman of Citizens for a Better Arizona. The group has two thirds of the signatures needed to force a recall election on the senator they accuse of having an extreme agenda. Now, there are lots of reasons to recall Russell Pearce along these lines (or better yet, never elect him in the first damned place). There’s the recent spate of Tentherism in which he seemingly urged people to declare themselves sovereign citizens. Or the long-established record of playing footsie with the local neo-Nazis . Or, if you like, he might be recalled for the corruption that’s surfaced in Pearce’s dealings and his intimate involvement in that monumentally embarrassing Fiesta Bowl scandal. No, but what really has people torqued at Pearce is what you might expect from ultimately pragmatic voters: He has fiddled incessantly with his pet immigration fetish while Arizona has burned to a crisp economically. No wonder he’s in trouble. “We feel that Russell Pearce has completely thrown Arizona’s economy under the bus so he could pursue one issue,” said Snow. That issue is immigration. Pearce sponsored the controversial SB1070 and even though the law has gained negative national attention, polls show an overwhelming amount of Arizonans support it. But Snow told us Pearce has neglected what Arizonans really care about. “He’s done nothing for education, jobs or the economy. Instead he focuses on only immigration and gun control.” Then there have been stunts he’s been involved in that have exposed the seamy underbelly of Pearce’s fetish, like the racist letter read on the floor of the Senate (at Pearce’s behest): Citizens for a Better Arizona needs to collect over 7,700 signatures by May 31st to force a recall election, but Snow is confident they will get more, claiming the Senate President’s actions are helping their efforts. “He’s had racist letters read on the Senate floor, he’s been reported to have accepted thousands of dollars of gifts from the Fiesta Bowl that he didn’t report as required by law. He feels he’s above the law and doesn’t represent the best interest of Arizona and he’s unfit for public office,” said Snow. Oh, and let’s not forget the Arizona Senate’s latest achievement: A Birther bill that accepts the features of a presidential candidate’s penis as evidence of his citizenship . The citizens of Mesa must be so proud.
Continue reading …Karmic Update: Recall campaign against AZ Senate President Russell Pearce gaining steam
April 15, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media You may remember how Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican state Senate leader and architect of SB1070, went on Bill O’Reilly’s show a couple of months ago and pushed hard for a recall campaign against Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for daring to opine that extremist right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (An effort which, last we checked, was going nowhere fast.) Well, karmic payback can be a rhymes-with-witch : What may seem to some as an uphill battle is becoming close to a reality for a non-partisan political group as they gather signatures to recall Senate President Russell Pearce. “I have no doubt we’ll get enough signatures to force the recall campaign,” said Chad Snow, chairman of Citizens for a Better Arizona. The group has two thirds of the signatures needed to force a recall election on the senator they accuse of having an extreme agenda. Now, there are lots of reasons to recall Russell Pearce along these lines (or better yet, never elect him in the first damned place). There’s the recent spate of Tentherism in which he seemingly urged people to declare themselves sovereign citizens. Or the long-established record of playing footsie with the local neo-Nazis . Or, if you like, he might be recalled for the corruption that’s surfaced in Pearce’s dealings and his intimate involvement in that monumentally embarrassing Fiesta Bowl scandal. No, but what really has people torqued at Pearce is what you might expect from ultimately pragmatic voters: He has fiddled incessantly with his pet immigration fetish while Arizona has burned to a crisp economically. No wonder he’s in trouble. “We feel that Russell Pearce has completely thrown Arizona’s economy under the bus so he could pursue one issue,” said Snow. That issue is immigration. Pearce sponsored the controversial SB1070 and even though the law has gained negative national attention, polls show an overwhelming amount of Arizonans support it. But Snow told us Pearce has neglected what Arizonans really care about. “He’s done nothing for education, jobs or the economy. Instead he focuses on only immigration and gun control.” Then there have been stunts he’s been involved in that have exposed the seamy underbelly of Pearce’s fetish, like the racist letter read on the floor of the Senate (at Pearce’s behest): Citizens for a Better Arizona needs to collect over 7,700 signatures by May 31st to force a recall election, but Snow is confident they will get more, claiming the Senate President’s actions are helping their efforts. “He’s had racist letters read on the Senate floor, he’s been reported to have accepted thousands of dollars of gifts from the Fiesta Bowl that he didn’t report as required by law. He feels he’s above the law and doesn’t represent the best interest of Arizona and he’s unfit for public office,” said Snow. Oh, and let’s not forget the Arizona Senate’s latest achievement: A Birther bill that accepts the features of a presidential candidate’s penis as evidence of his citizenship . The citizens of Mesa must be so proud.
Continue reading …Karmic Update: Recall campaign against AZ Senate President Russell Pearce gaining steam
April 15, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media You may remember how Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican state Senate leader and architect of SB1070, went on Bill O’Reilly’s show a couple of months ago and pushed hard for a recall campaign against Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for daring to opine that extremist right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (An effort which, last we checked, was going nowhere fast.) Well, karmic payback can be a rhymes-with-witch : What may seem to some as an uphill battle is becoming close to a reality for a non-partisan political group as they gather signatures to recall Senate President Russell Pearce. “I have no doubt we’ll get enough signatures to force the recall campaign,” said Chad Snow, chairman of Citizens for a Better Arizona. The group has two thirds of the signatures needed to force a recall election on the senator they accuse of having an extreme agenda. Now, there are lots of reasons to recall Russell Pearce along these lines (or better yet, never elect him in the first damned place). There’s the recent spate of Tentherism in which he seemingly urged people to declare themselves sovereign citizens. Or the long-established record of playing footsie with the local neo-Nazis . Or, if you like, he might be recalled for the corruption that’s surfaced in Pearce’s dealings and his intimate involvement in that monumentally embarrassing Fiesta Bowl scandal. No, but what really has people torqued at Pearce is what you might expect from ultimately pragmatic voters: He has fiddled incessantly with his pet immigration fetish while Arizona has burned to a crisp economically. No wonder he’s in trouble. “We feel that Russell Pearce has completely thrown Arizona’s economy under the bus so he could pursue one issue,” said Snow. That issue is immigration. Pearce sponsored the controversial SB1070 and even though the law has gained negative national attention, polls show an overwhelming amount of Arizonans support it. But Snow told us Pearce has neglected what Arizonans really care about. “He’s done nothing for education, jobs or the economy. Instead he focuses on only immigration and gun control.” Then there have been stunts he’s been involved in that have exposed the seamy underbelly of Pearce’s fetish, like the racist letter read on the floor of the Senate (at Pearce’s behest): Citizens for a Better Arizona needs to collect over 7,700 signatures by May 31st to force a recall election, but Snow is confident they will get more, claiming the Senate President’s actions are helping their efforts. “He’s had racist letters read on the Senate floor, he’s been reported to have accepted thousands of dollars of gifts from the Fiesta Bowl that he didn’t report as required by law. He feels he’s above the law and doesn’t represent the best interest of Arizona and he’s unfit for public office,” said Snow. Oh, and let’s not forget the Arizona Senate’s latest achievement: A Birther bill that accepts the features of a presidential candidate’s penis as evidence of his citizenship . The citizens of Mesa must be so proud.
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Based in São Paulo, Brazil since May 2010, we see how he documents a boxing academy in the city
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Military guards shoot weapons into air, loot shops and steal cars in Ouagadougou in protest over unpaid allowances Soldiers have shot into the air, stolen cars and looted shops in the western part of Burkina Faso’s capital as protests by military guards against unpaid housing allowances spread, witnesses said. The presidential compound in Ouagadougou was calm on Friday after gunfire erupted there overnight. President Blaise Compaoré was apparently not in the presidential compound at the time, a source there said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press. Unrest that started from two presidential guard barracks spread to camp Lamizana in western Ouagadougou. Scattered looting had begun overnight in the capital of one of the world’s poorest countries and soldiers looted and burned the homes of Compaoré aides. A presidential security source, who spoke on condition on anonymity for security reasons, told the Associated Press that the soldiers were expressing their discontent after promises to pay their housing allowances were not kept. Colonel Moussa Cissé, spokesman for the army, said that so far there were no casualties and negotiations were under way with the soldiers. About two hours after the shooting began at 10pm on Thursday, gunfire was heard near the state radio station in Ouagadougou. Employees at the station said no one was hurt but some were hiding in the building. No official statement has been made. Compaoré, who seized power in a bloody coup 23 years ago, was re-elected by a landslide in a November vote rejected by the opposition as being rigged. The former army captain took power in 1987 after the former leader was shot dead in his office. Burkina Faso has been hit by unrest recently. On 8 April people took to the streets of Ouagadougou to protest against the soaring prices of basic foods. In March, students torched government buildings in several cities to protest against a young man’s death in custody. The government said he had meningitis, but accusations of mistreatment have fuelled protests, resulting in the deaths of at least six others. Burkina Faso is near the bottom of the United Nations’ human development index, which measures general wellbeing, ranked 161 out of 169 nations. It has high rates of unemployment and illiteracy, and most people get by on subsistence agriculture. Burkina Faso Protest guardian.co.uk
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Aisha Gaddafi tells a roaring crowd her father will not step down – 25 years after US forces bombed his Tripoli compound They gather nightly, ready to die for the Brother Leader. Wrapped in loyalist green, waving flags, chanting slogans, holding aloft portraits of their “Guide”, singing, dancing and praying, they are Muammar Gaddafi’s human shields against Nato air strikes. In the early hours of Friday morning, exactly 25 years after US forces bombed Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in central Tripoli, thousands gathered in defiance of the new international coalition against the Libyan regime’s brutal efforts to suppress the uprising from the east. Whipped up by loyalist chants led from loudspeakers and patriotic songs, they were already in a state of fervour when Aisha Gaddafi, the Libyan leader’s daughter, appeared high in the skeleton of a bombed-out building. Against a backdrop of the shattered facade and draped in a flowing headscarf of green and gold, Aisha pumped her fists at the crowd as they roared and ululated their approval. Just a few hours earlier, Nato warplanes had flown sorties over Tripoli. Explosions and responding gunfire and anti-aircraft fire echoed around the capital, destroying at least one military site and causing blast damage to a nearby university cafeteria. Aisha’s message was one of uncompromising defiance. Referring to the strike in 1986, she said: “They rained down on us their missiles and bombs, they tried to kill me and they killed dozens of children in Libya. Now a quarter of a century later the same missiles and bombs are raining down on the heads of my and your children.” Below her was a statue of a giant golden fist crushing a western war plane in its grip. The throbbing crowd – mainly men, but including hundreds of women separated to one side – appeared intoxicated on love and loyalty. “Talk about Gaddafi stepping down is an insult to all Libyans because Gaddafi is not in Libya, but in the hearts of all Libyans,” Aisha told them. “Gaddafi said if the Libyan people don’t want me I don’t deserve to live. The Libyan people responded, ‘He who doesn’t want you does not deserve life’.” Half a dozen of Gaddafi’s fabled female protection guards stood to the side as Aisha spoke, some with their faces covered, amid an atmosphere akin to a hyped-up football crowd crossed with a rock concert. The cult of Gaddafi is evident across the capital. Huge portraits of him – saluting with a stern expression, beaming with his hands clasped, silhouetted against the rays of a rising sun – hang from buildings. Many in the crowd on Friday night wore miniature laminated versions on green ribbons around their necks. “I love him more than my husband,” said Randa Mohamed, 28, her voice hoarse from shouting and chanting. “We will never leave him. I will do anything to protect him.” This overt display of loyalty fractures when rare opportunities for rushed conversations out of earshot of the ubiquitous regime minders and informants arise. “He must go for the sake of Libya,” is a view expressed in whispers. These few glimpses beneath the surface are always accompanied by visible fear at the possibility of being overheard and punished. But in the Bab al-Aziziya compound, there was only one message: devotion to Gaddafi and hatred of Nato and Libya’s rebel opposition. “We will never give up. Victorious or we die,” ran one chant. As the foreign media were escorted from the compound at the end of Aisha’s speech, the “Zenga Zenga” song blared from speakers. The words are taken from a speech by Saif al-Islam, Aisha’s brother and Gaddafi’s son, early in the conflict, in which he pledged to hunt down the rebels. “House to house, room to room, alley to alley, person to person we will disinfect the whole country from filth,” it goes. “Zenga Zenga” – alley to alley – has now become part of loyalist Libya’s lexicon, a chilling term of approval among people in Gaddafi’s grip. Muammar Gaddafi Libya Middle East Harriet Sherwood guardian.co.uk
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Aisha Gaddafi tells a roaring crowd her father will not step down – 25 years after US forces bombed his Tripoli compound They gather nightly, ready to die for the Brother Leader. Wrapped in loyalist green, waving flags, chanting slogans, holding aloft portraits of their “Guide”, singing, dancing and praying, they are Muammar Gaddafi’s human shields against Nato air strikes. In the early hours of Friday morning, exactly 25 years after US forces bombed Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in central Tripoli, thousands gathered in defiance of the new international coalition against the Libyan regime’s brutal efforts to suppress the uprising from the east. Whipped up by loyalist chants led from loudspeakers and patriotic songs, they were already in a state of fervour when Aisha Gaddafi, the Libyan leader’s daughter, appeared high in the skeleton of a bombed-out building. Against a backdrop of the shattered facade and draped in a flowing headscarf of green and gold, Aisha pumped her fists at the crowd as they roared and ululated their approval. Just a few hours earlier, Nato warplanes had flown sorties over Tripoli. Explosions and responding gunfire and anti-aircraft fire echoed around the capital, destroying at least one military site and causing blast damage to a nearby university cafeteria. Aisha’s message was one of uncompromising defiance. Referring to the strike in 1986, she said: “They rained down on us their missiles and bombs, they tried to kill me and they killed dozens of children in Libya. Now a quarter of a century later the same missiles and bombs are raining down on the heads of my and your children.” Below her was a statue of a giant golden fist crushing a western war plane in its grip. The throbbing crowd – mainly men, but including hundreds of women separated to one side – appeared intoxicated on love and loyalty. “Talk about Gaddafi stepping down is an insult to all Libyans because Gaddafi is not in Libya, but in the hearts of all Libyans,” Aisha told them. “Gaddafi said if the Libyan people don’t want me I don’t deserve to live. The Libyan people responded, ‘He who doesn’t want you does not deserve life’.” Half a dozen of Gaddafi’s fabled female protection guards stood to the side as Aisha spoke, some with their faces covered, amid an atmosphere akin to a hyped-up football crowd crossed with a rock concert. The cult of Gaddafi is evident across the capital. Huge portraits of him – saluting with a stern expression, beaming with his hands clasped, silhouetted against the rays of a rising sun – hang from buildings. Many in the crowd on Friday night wore miniature laminated versions on green ribbons around their necks. “I love him more than my husband,” said Randa Mohamed, 28, her voice hoarse from shouting and chanting. “We will never leave him. I will do anything to protect him.” This overt display of loyalty fractures when rare opportunities for rushed conversations out of earshot of the ubiquitous regime minders and informants arise. “He must go for the sake of Libya,” is a view expressed in whispers. These few glimpses beneath the surface are always accompanied by visible fear at the possibility of being overheard and punished. But in the Bab al-Aziziya compound, there was only one message: devotion to Gaddafi and hatred of Nato and Libya’s rebel opposition. “We will never give up. Victorious or we die,” ran one chant. As the foreign media were escorted from the compound at the end of Aisha’s speech, the “Zenga Zenga” song blared from speakers. The words are taken from a speech by Saif al-Islam, Aisha’s brother and Gaddafi’s son, early in the conflict, in which he pledged to hunt down the rebels. “House to house, room to room, alley to alley, person to person we will disinfect the whole country from filth,” it goes. “Zenga Zenga” – alley to alley – has now become part of loyalist Libya’s lexicon, a chilling term of approval among people in Gaddafi’s grip. Muammar Gaddafi Libya Middle East Harriet Sherwood guardian.co.uk
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Scotland Yard detectives tell high court hearing that number of victims may be bigger than previously thought Scotland Yard’s renewed investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World has identified that the number of victims is in excess of 91 people – far higher than previously estimated by detectives, the high court heard today. The publisher of the newspaper has also offered Sienna Miller £100,000 in compensation and offered to pay the actor her costs – an offer she has neither accepted nor rejected. Detectives are trawling through 9,200 pages of material seized from a private investigator used by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid to hack into voicemails, a case management hearing to decide how best to handle the flood of lawsuits against the paper heard. At the hearing in the high court, Jason Beer QC, representing the Metropolitan police, gave an idea of the scale of the scandal. Beer said that the number of potential victims is “substantially” higher than 91 people. The figure of 91 is significant. Previously police had said they had recorded a total of 91 pin numbers – necessary to access a mobile phone’s voicemail – in the possession of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the News of the World. The police counsel told the hearing: “It is wrong to say that 91 is the answer, that that is the maximum [number of victims], it may be on a bigger scale.” The court hearing also heard of the offer to Miller, which was designed to reflect the number of times her phone had been targeted. Her case is one of the most advanced of the phone-hacking lawsuits, and arguably the highest profile because of her celebrity. Mulcaire was convicted of intercepting voicemail messages in January 2007, along with the News of the World journalist Colin Goodman. During the course of the original investigation, police seized paperwork and records from Mulcaire, who was employed by the tabloid. Subsequently, John Yates, the Met’s acting deputy assistant commissioner, who handled a previous phone-hacking investigation, said that the police had only identified 10 to 12 victims. That figure is far lower than the level identified by the fresh investigation team, which is under the leadership of deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers. Yates said earlier this month that he had quoted the figure on at least four occasions because prosecutors had told police they needed to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but also that this had been done before the messages had been heard by the intended recipient. So far, 24 public figures who believe their voicemail messages were intercepted by journalists at the tabloid are suing News International, the UK newspaper arm of News Corp. Many more are expected to come forward after News International apologised to eight victims last week and said it would set up a compensation scheme. Law firm Mishcon de Reya, which is acting for several of the claimants, says it has received an unprecedented number of inquiries since News International published its statement, and estimates there could be more than 6,000 potential claimants. Judge Justice Vos said that four test cases – those of Sky Andrew, Kelly Hoppen, Sienna Miller and Andy Gray – could be heard as early as December, but no later than February 2012. •
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Scotland Yard detectives tell high court hearing that number of victims may be bigger than previously thought Scotland Yard’s renewed investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World has identified that the number of victims is in excess of 91 people – far higher than previously estimated by detectives, the high court heard today. The publisher of the newspaper has also offered Sienna Miller £100,000 in compensation and offered to pay the actor her costs – an offer she has neither accepted nor rejected. Detectives are trawling through 9,200 pages of material seized from a private investigator used by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid to hack into voicemails, a case management hearing to decide how best to handle the flood of lawsuits against the paper heard. At the hearing in the high court, Jason Beer QC, representing the Metropolitan police, gave an idea of the scale of the scandal. Beer said that the number of potential victims is “substantially” higher than 91 people. The figure of 91 is significant. Previously police had said they had recorded a total of 91 pin numbers – necessary to access a mobile phone’s voicemail – in the possession of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the News of the World. The police counsel told the hearing: “It is wrong to say that 91 is the answer, that that is the maximum [number of victims], it may be on a bigger scale.” The court hearing also heard of the offer to Miller, which was designed to reflect the number of times her phone had been targeted. Her case is one of the most advanced of the phone-hacking lawsuits, and arguably the highest profile because of her celebrity. Mulcaire was convicted of intercepting voicemail messages in January 2007, along with the News of the World journalist Colin Goodman. During the course of the original investigation, police seized paperwork and records from Mulcaire, who was employed by the tabloid. Subsequently, John Yates, the Met’s acting deputy assistant commissioner, who handled a previous phone-hacking investigation, said that the police had only identified 10 to 12 victims. That figure is far lower than the level identified by the fresh investigation team, which is under the leadership of deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers. Yates said earlier this month that he had quoted the figure on at least four occasions because prosecutors had told police they needed to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but also that this had been done before the messages had been heard by the intended recipient. So far, 24 public figures who believe their voicemail messages were intercepted by journalists at the tabloid are suing News International, the UK newspaper arm of News Corp. Many more are expected to come forward after News International apologised to eight victims last week and said it would set up a compensation scheme. Law firm Mishcon de Reya, which is acting for several of the claimants, says it has received an unprecedented number of inquiries since News International published its statement, and estimates there could be more than 6,000 potential claimants. Judge Justice Vos said that four test cases – those of Sky Andrew, Kelly Hoppen, Sienna Miller and Andy Gray – could be heard as early as December, but no later than February 2012. •
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