I'm watching the news with a beer and loving all this. But just like tits on page 3, the closure of NOTW is surely being used as a pacifier. At the moment the closure is grabbing the headlines and obscuring the real crime whch is the bribery of police.
Cameron hired Coulson. To hack? For his police contacts? Why isn't the PM being grilled? Where is he? Not one statement.
A geezer called Geoffrey Robertson QC has been the talking-head highlight so far. He took the piss most eloquently.
Fuck Milliband. Just when Labour needed a dynamic and assertive leader, up pops this fucking jackass, and all you can think is "Ben Swain's gone on Newsnight..?"
David Cameron's former director of communications Andy Coulson has been told by police that he will be arrested this morning over suspicions that he knew about, or had direct involvement in, the hacking of mobile phones during his editorship of the News of the World.
The prime minister will hold a press conference at 9.30am at which he will be under pressure over the government's handling of the phone hacking scandal and the BSkyB takeover deal, his hiring of Andy Coulson, who resigned in January, his friendship with Rebekah Brooks and his close links with the Murdochs.
I bet Cameron is bricking his pants at this point.
Saw a bloke on BBC news 24 last night saying that Murdoch has again shown his savy in closing down NOTW as once a business is closed, it's records & files can be deleted. Why the **** haven't the Police moved in sooner to stop anything like that happening? Can it be that simple that a closed business cannot be investigated?
10.12am: The Guardian's political editor, Patrick Wintour, asks if the PM is saying he had no warning that Coulson had links with a private detective accused of murder (The Telegraph's Peter Oborne and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger both said he was warned.)
"I wasn't given any specific information about Andy Coulson ...I don't recall being given any information."
:icallbullshit: :shh:
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
Duderonomy said:
Saw a bloke on BBC news 24 last night saying that Murdoch has again shown his savy in closing down NOTW as once a business is closed, it's records & files can be deleted. Why the **** haven't the Police moved in sooner to stop anything like that happening? Can it be that simple that a closed business cannot be investigated?
I'm willing to bet the comments are better informed than the article in this case. Murdoch's a savvy businessman, no doubt, but I don't think he's quite the evil genius that the Tin Foil Hat brigade seem to wish he was.
Saw a bloke on BBC news 24 last night saying that Murdoch has again shown his savy in closing down NOTW as once a business is closed, it's records & files can be deleted. Why the **** haven't the Police moved in sooner to stop anything like that happening? Can it be that simple that a closed business cannot be investigated?
I'm willing to bet the comments are better informed than the article in this case. Murdoch's a savvy businessman, no doubt, but I don't think he's quite the evil genius that the Tin Foil Hat brigade seem to wish he was.
Yeah, I hope so. The first one sums it up nicely:
The News of the World is not a corporation and, so, cannot go into liquidation/administration/receivership. The News of the World is a title/brand name owned by News Group Newspapers Ltd (???NGN???). NGN has the liabilities, the papers and the obligations. It also owns The Sun, which is not being closed down. NGN is not entering any sort of insolvency/liquidation.
The News of the World was a salacious rag, but it was run by Sir William Carr who was a member of an old establishment family. He had already received a hostile bid from the publisher Robert Maxwell. Carr hated Maxwell because he was not British (he was Czech).
Then Murdoch arrived. He wasn't British either, but he told Sir William he would buy the paper but they would run it jointly together.
Maxwell warned Sir William not to trust Murdoch. He told him - "You will be out before your feet touch the ground".
Sir William replied - "Bob, Rupert is a gentleman"
But Lady Carr began to worry. She took Rupert Murdoch out to lunch in Mayfair. She reported that he had little small talk, no sense of humour and that he had lit up a cigar before the first course.
The BBC got interested in Murdoch - and they put out a profile of him. It was shot with him at work and at home in Australia. It has a great interview with Murdoch's secretary about what a sensitive man he is - and how upset he gets when he has to fire someone.
...
Robert Maxwell would go on to become one of the greatest criminals in British business history. And then he would fall off a boat in the Atlantic and drown in 1991
But Robert Maxwell was right in his warning. Within three months Murdoch forced Sir William Carr out - and took over complete control
the doc's right, he's more of a dr evil than a darth vader. I still can't really work out what motivates the murd-octor. power? influence? money? owning things for the sake of owning things? political influence? 17th weathiest dude in the world, does he really need to get wealthier? isn't he going to die soon anyway? surely he must be thinking now that running shitty tabloid rags that bring shame to your game is more trouble than its worth?
In 1995 he dropped out of college to form an independent record label with two high-school friends. The Manhattan-based label, called Rawkus Entertainment, signed such bands as the hip-hop Rose Family and the glam-metal band Motor Baby. Further shunning his father's straitlaced corporate world, Murdoch got tattoos, died his scraggly hair blond, and pierced his eyebrow. Rawkus Entertainment was moderately successful, and it proved a good training ground for Murdoch. "I don't want to be cocky, but we're fast learners," Murdoch remarked to the New Yorker . "You learn pretty quickly when you're spending money and not getting results" (September 16, 1996).
By 1998 Rawkus was turning a $2.5 million annual profit and was bought by Rupert Murdoch and absorbed into News Corporation. James Murdoch had become part of the family business and was overseeing News Corporation's tiny music division. He then was put in charge of News Corporation's Web operations. He persuaded his father to invest in a number of Internet ventures, which eventually suffered heavy losses. At one point, News Corporation took a $300 million write-off for dot-com investments made at James Murdoch's request.
He's motivated by 'more'. Saw something on telly last night about Murdoch who was talking about another wealthy Ozzie who'd stopped investing and was taking a back-seat from it all. Murdoch apparently couldn't understand why he wasn't out chasing the dollar. Apparently this bloke owned billions of them and felt that was enough. Obviously not enough to Murdoch.
This bit should come back to haunt Cameron:
10.12am: The Guardian's political editor, Patrick Wintour, asks if the PM is saying he had no warning that Coulson had links with a private detective accused of murder (The Telegraph's Peter Oborne and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger both said he was warned).
I wasn't given any specific information about Andy Coulson ...I don't recall being given any information.
The PM says he is checking and will check whether any of his staff were warned.
Were the Tories hacking Clegg's phone in the immediate aftermath of the election result when the coalition could've gone either way?
Just before all of this stuff blew-up in the news, there was some reference to a spat between Cable & Cameron - I never found out what that was about. Anybody know anything about this? Google throws up some stories about imigration, but they're all a few months old.
1.3 Ofcom has a general duty under section 3 of the Communications Act 2003 (???the 2003 Act???) to (among other things) secure the application, in the case of all television and radio services, of standards that provide adequate protection to members of the public (and all other persons) from both unfair treatment in programmes included in such services and unwarranted infringements of privacy resulting from activities carried on for the purposes of such services.
1.24pm: Owen Bowcott has been looking into claims from the media lawyer Mark Stephens that the News of the World closure might enable a liquidator to shred a backlog of potentially incriminating emails and documents.
Owen Bowcott.
"Why would the liquidator want to keep [the records]?" Stephens told the news service Reuters. "Minimizing liability is the liquidator's job."
But the London insolvency solicitor Rodney Hylton-Potts dismissed the idea as legally implausible. "In a liquidation, a liquidator takes over all the books and records but that does not affect the obligations of a liquidator or a director to bear in mind any criminal inquiry," he said.
"The leading case in this is Enron, where the accountants, Arthur Anderson, sent around an email saying that they should shred things. They were severely criticised for that and it finished the [accountancy] firm.
"We know there are police inquiries going on into the News of the World and anybody who removed records now would be personally liable. It would be perverting the course of justice and a crime. I don't think liquidation will make any difference [to the firms records].
"Indeed, the News of the World policy since January has been to cooperate with the police and in a solvent liquidation [like the NoW], the liquidator has a duty to follow the company's policy."
1.24pm: Owen Bowcott has been looking into claims from the media lawyer Mark Stephens that the News of the World closure might enable a liquidator to shred a backlog of potentially incriminating emails and documents.
Owen Bowcott.
"Why would the liquidator want to keep [the records]?" Stephens told the news service Reuters. "Minimizing liability is the liquidator's job."
But the London insolvency solicitor Rodney Hylton-Potts dismissed the idea as legally implausible. "In a liquidation, a liquidator takes over all the books and records but that does not affect the obligations of a liquidator or a director to bear in mind any criminal inquiry," he said.
"The leading case in this is Enron, where the accountants, Arthur Anderson, sent around an email saying that they should shred things. They were severely criticised for that and it finished the [accountancy] firm.
"We know there are police inquiries going on into the News of the World and anybody who removed records now would be personally liable. It would be perverting the course of justice and a crime. I don't think liquidation will make any difference [to the firms records].
"Indeed, the News of the World policy since January has been to cooperate with the police and in a solvent liquidation [like the NoW], the liquidator has a duty to follow the company's policy."
Media lawyer Mark Stephens needs to check his legal textbooks, NoTW is not a solo entity, the Newscorp mothership scuppers this hypothesis.
Ok, my take:
Brooks has all the cards right now. Murdoch and Cameron right where she wants them. (possibly MI5 and the Royals too) She has dirt, major dirt.
If this practice has been going on as long as rumoured, she would be holding the trump card to end all trump cards...
The People's Princess dossier... Dum dum dum dum.
Could you fucking imagine.
"Rupert, David, I have Assange on speed dial - if either of you attempt to pin this on me then i send him the lot. Now, lets negotiate my golden handshake shall we"
"a golden parachute of such magnitude that her feet will never touch the ground."
When the Five-Oh are involved, and implicated, the buck will be kept in perpetual motion until the next season of the X-Factor, when John Q Citizens thoughts turn to graver matters.
2.53pm: Police have raided the Daily Star offices, the Guardian can confirm.
^^wtf? Why weren't they raiding the NOTW offices before they deleted millions of emails?
How long til It Woz Teh Sun Wot Did It too?
2.02pm: Back on the issue of the BSkyB deal, the Guardian's political editor, Patrick Wintour, tells me he understands Jeremy Hunt will ask Ofcom for a written statement on the question of whether News Corp is a fit-and-proper owner of BSkyB.
If it is found that it is not fit and proper not only would News Corp not be able to take over all of BSkyB but would have to disinvest the shares it already has. It is not clear when this will happen and is a process that could take some time.
Why weren't they raiding the NOTW offices before they deleted millions of emails?
Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard's inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.
The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005 revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International.
According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted 'massive quantities' of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a small fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January this year, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair.
B/w
News International originally claimed that the archive of emails did not exist. Last December, its Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow that the emails had been lost en route to Mumbai. Also in December, the company's solicitor Julian Pike from Farrer and Co provided the high court with a statement claiming that it was unable to retrieve emails which were more than six months old.
On 23 March this year, Pike formally apologised to the high court and acknowledged that News International could locate emails as far back as 2005 and that no emails had ever been lost en route to Mumbai or anywhere else in India.
If the fuzz can't find those fuckin' emails, then someone is going down.
Plaese for half a terrabtye of emails to appear on wikileaks.
The Police have known that something has been seriously amiss before January. Brooks' admission that they've been 'buying' info from the Police through the *cough* correct legal chanels for starters.
b/w
For the fuck of it I decided to fill in an Ofcom complaint online, just to register my thoughts on Murdoch and BSkyB. You get a lovely email receipt:
Thank you for contacting Ofcom. Your views are important to us as they help to ensure broadcasters follow the rules set out in our codes. These codes set standards for all programmes on TV and radio.
We understand that sometimes people see something on TV, or hear a programme on radio, which they think is offensive or inappropriate, and they want to complain to us about it.
Ofcom assesses each complaint it receives to decide whether it raises a potential issue under its codes.
If your complaint does raise a potential issue, we will start an investigation. Once that???s concluded, we???ll write to you to let you know of our decision. However, if we???ve received a very high number of complaints about a particular programme, it may not be possible for us to write to each complainant individually with the outcome of our investigation.
If your complaint doesn???t raise potential issues under the codes, Ofcom will not normally write back to you.
However, whether or not we believe an investigation is required, please be assured that your comments and feedback are always considered, and all our decisions are published in the Broadcast Bulletin.
Ofcom publishes its Broadcast Bulletin, every fortnight, on this website. This includes the latest decisions about the complaints we???ve received.
Please REMOVE the tick if you do not want us to pass your contact details to the broadcaster concerned. Please note that if we need to investigate the issue, we may send a summary of your complaint (without your name) to the broadcaster for their views. Reloading this page will reset this box to ticked.:
You may disclose my details
Programme title:
BSkyB
Date and time of broadcast (e.g. 01 January 2009 23:00):
01 January 2009 23:00
Channel / station:
BSkyB
Subject:
the 2003 Act
Description (please use 1500 characters or less):
1.3 Ofcom has a general duty under section 3 of the Communications Act 2003 (???the 2003 Act???) to (among other things) secure the application, in the case of all television and radio services, of standards that provide adequate protection to members of the public (and all other persons) from both unfair treatment in programmes included in such services and unwarranted infringements of privacy resulting from activities carried on for the purposes of such services:
Rupert Murdoch. NO to the BSky B deal, for reasons given above relating to unwarranted infringments of privacy.
many thanks,
XXX
I'm sure it won't do shit, but there's no harm in it.
after the guardian first broke the story, rebekah brooks was asked how it would all end and she apparently replied: "with alan rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy".
after the guardian first broke the story, rebekah brooks was asked how it would all end and she apparently replied: "with alan rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy".
:puto: :get_on_my_level:
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
Also, this. FWIW, I'm inclined to say, yes. Yes, it is.
Rebekah Brooks has said the decision to close the NOTW was taken because they envisaged at least another two-years-worth of similar trouble ahead of them. After a week like this.
There can only be one place where all this is going to lead...
Comments
I'm watching the news with a beer and loving all this. But just like tits on page 3, the closure of NOTW is surely being used as a pacifier. At the moment the closure is grabbing the headlines and obscuring the real crime whch is the bribery of police.
Cameron hired Coulson. To hack? For his police contacts? Why isn't the PM being grilled? Where is he? Not one statement.
A geezer called Geoffrey Robertson QC has been the talking-head highlight so far. He took the piss most eloquently.
Tonight, quite brilliantly, he is at the Police Bravery Awards. Hosted by The Sun.
FFS, SMH. Bet he doesn't refer to journalists as hacks for a while.
Murdoch's son is a pro bullshit artist. Never seen/heard him in action before.
Fuck Milliband. Just when Labour needed a dynamic and assertive leader, up pops this fucking jackass, and all you can think is "Ben Swain's gone on Newsnight..?"
I bet Cameron is bricking his pants at this point.
:icallbullshit: :shh:
You mean this story?
I'm willing to bet the comments are better informed than the article in this case. Murdoch's a savvy businessman, no doubt, but I don't think he's quite the evil genius that the Tin Foil Hat brigade seem to wish he was.
Yeah, I hope so. The first one sums it up nicely:
The News of the World is not a corporation and, so, cannot go into liquidation/administration/receivership. The News of the World is a title/brand name owned by News Group Newspapers Ltd (???NGN???). NGN has the liabilities, the papers and the obligations. It also owns The Sun, which is not being closed down. NGN is not entering any sort of insolvency/liquidation.
I agree. Above all he is incredibly persistent and ruthless.
Adam Curtis wrote an interesting blog post about him at the beginning of the year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/01/rupert_murdoch_-_a_portrait_of.html
EDIT - wrote that simultaneously with paul's post above.
This bit should come back to haunt Cameron:
Were the Tories hacking Clegg's phone in the immediate aftermath of the election result when the coalition could've gone either way?
Just before all of this stuff blew-up in the news, there was some reference to a spat between Cable & Cameron - I never found out what that was about. Anybody know anything about this? Google throws up some stories about imigration, but they're all a few months old.
Could this scupper the deal?
Media lawyer Mark Stephens needs to check his legal textbooks, NoTW is not a solo entity, the Newscorp mothership scuppers this hypothesis.
Ok, my take:
Brooks has all the cards right now. Murdoch and Cameron right where she wants them. (possibly MI5 and the Royals too) She has dirt, major dirt.
If this practice has been going on as long as rumoured, she would be holding the trump card to end all trump cards...
The People's Princess dossier... Dum dum dum dum.
Could you fucking imagine.
"Rupert, David, I have Assange on speed dial - if either of you attempt to pin this on me then i send him the lot. Now, lets negotiate my golden handshake shall we"
Now back to The Guardian. F5 F5 F5
When the Five-Oh are involved, and implicated, the buck will be kept in perpetual motion until the next season of the X-Factor, when John Q Citizens thoughts turn to graver matters.
^^wtf? Why weren't they raiding the NOTW offices before they deleted millions of emails?
How long til It Woz Teh Sun Wot Did It too?
2.02pm: Back on the issue of the BSkyB deal, the Guardian's political editor, Patrick Wintour, tells me he understands Jeremy Hunt will ask Ofcom for a written statement on the question of whether News Corp is a fit-and-proper owner of BSkyB.
If it is found that it is not fit and proper not only would News Corp not be able to take over all of BSkyB but would have to disinvest the shares it already has. It is not clear when this will happen and is a process that could take some time.
Please m-f**kin' please.
Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard's inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.
The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005 revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International.
According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted 'massive quantities' of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a small fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January this year, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair.
B/w
News International originally claimed that the archive of emails did not exist. Last December, its Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow that the emails had been lost en route to Mumbai. Also in December, the company's solicitor Julian Pike from Farrer and Co provided the high court with a statement claiming that it was unable to retrieve emails which were more than six months old.
On 23 March this year, Pike formally apologised to the high court and acknowledged that News International could locate emails as far back as 2005 and that no emails had ever been lost en route to Mumbai or anywhere else in India.
If the fuzz can't find those fuckin' emails, then someone is going down.
Plaese for half a terrabtye of emails to appear on wikileaks.
b/w
For the fuck of it I decided to fill in an Ofcom complaint online, just to register my thoughts on Murdoch and BSkyB. You get a lovely email receipt:
I'm sure it won't do shit, but there's no harm in it.
Also, this. FWIW, I'm inclined to say, yes. Yes, it is.
Rebekah Brooks has said the decision to close the NOTW was taken because they envisaged at least another two-years-worth of similar trouble ahead of them. After a week like this.
There can only be one place where all this is going to lead...
RICHARD DESMOND VINDICATED!
And when it happens, England will fucking implode.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/08/news-corp-murdoch-news-of-the-world-closure