Report: UK tabloid hacked into voicemails

[coffin_dodger]

This whole commons committee malarky is pretty much theatre AFAIC.

The real scandal here is that our politicians should be above reproach. They should be representing us as MP's, not themselves and their buddies. If some slime like Murdoch or one of his minions approaches a politician with the promise of a cushy place in his organisation further down the line or just plain money in their bank account and a guaranteed election victory for some quid pro quo, that public servent should report Murdoch to the authorities.

This is all about keeping the corrupt political necks as far from the chopping block as possible. We can only hope that the few honest MP's (if there are indeed any - Cable comes to mind, but he's been beaten down by all this) keep hounding this story in conjunction with The Guardian.

This sounds niave, I know. I suffer from high hopes.

[Searcher08]

Becky is doing great.

She is giving an absolute masterclass in evasion.

She was nowhere near as convincing as Andy Hayman, though. Those sweaty hours of rehearsal with the lawyers, all the expensive body-language and speech coaching... it really paid off.

DAMMIT! I SHOULD HAVE BEEN GIVING HIM MY ELITE NLP COACHING (TM)!!!

[AhabsOtherLeg]

'No third party' in Hoare death

Last updated 19 Jul 2011 - 7:50 pm


Detectives hope toxicology tests will solve the death riddle of phone-hacking whistleblower Sean Hoare. [ I bet they do!]

Third party involvement has been ruled out as post-mortem examinations were completed on the former News of the World reporter.

Mr Hoare, who made claims in a New York Times article about the Prime Minister's former communications chief Andy Coulson, was discovered at his home in Watford, Hertfordshire, on Monday.

Examinations on the body confirmed the death is "non-suspicious", a Hertfordshire Police spokeswoman said, and she added that it could take several weeks for toxicology test results to be released.

Neighbours of the ex-journalist, who did not want to be named, described him as "paranoid" and unwell in the weeks before his death.

One said his friend - who battled alcohol abuse - had told residents about voicemail interception long before it hit the headlines.

Last year, Mr Hoare publicly claimed that Coulson was aware of phone hacking while he was editor at the News of the World.

He gave an interview to the New York Times, and then to the BBC, about the use of phone hacking at the newspaper, and told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that the practise was "endemic" in the industry.

Mr Hoare, who worked on the Sun before being recruited by Mr Coulson to work on the NoTW, said: "He was well aware that the practice exists. To deny it is a lie, simply a lie."

Mr Coulson denies the allegations.
http://breakingnews.heraldscotland.com/ ... 100636809A

If the coroner turns out to be Freddy Patel I might just die myself.

DAMMIT! I SHOULD HAVE BEEN GIVING HIM MY ELITE NLP COACHING (TM)!!!

It sounds like somebody in the background says "Christ!" at just how false and stupid Hayman sounds in his initial response. It's probably his lawyer.

[Searcher08]

I was wondering -

How does a guy who looks like a clown, carrying a plate covered in shaving foam, manage to get through security that apparenetly features pat downs, sniffer dogs and metal detectors??

[AhabsOtherLeg]

He didn't have the foam in a can, as that would've been detected, but instead carried a pre-foamed paper plate into the room ina carrier bag that nobody checked.

That's the story they're going with right now, but it'll surely have to change 'cos it's just too stupid. Either that or they'll use it as an excuse to exclude the public from further hearings/the Parliament building in general.

[One Dog Watching]

Disgusting:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43810656/

More rampant "celebutizing".

This seems to be a formula now, taking the wife of some creep like Murdoch and turning her into a celebrity. Now she'll be offered a reality show and an endorsement deal, no doubt. Wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was staged to draw attention to her and thereby sympathy for him. Not surprised at all that the article seems to serve no purpose other than to "fill us in" on "who this woman is", in glowing terms of course...as if that has fuck-all to do with the matters at hand:

Details emerged of the woman behind the power hit.
• Deng was born in Shandong, China, in 1968 to engineer parents. She was named Wen Ge, which is shorthand for "Cultural Revolution."
• She played volleyball in China.
• She married Jake Cherry, who along with his first wife had sponsored her student visa in 1988, The Business Insider reported. They divorced years later.
• She studied at Cal State before earning an MBA from Yale University.
• Deng met Murdoch at a News Corp. party in Hong Kong in 1997. They married in 1999, weeks after his former marriage was dissolved.
• News Corp. paid Deng $92,000 in 2010 for "strategic advice" on MySpace's expansion into China, according to the Insider.
• Deng is Murdoch's third wife, and they live in Manhattan. They have two daughters, Grace and Chloe.
• She produced the film “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” which opened last week. At a weekend showing at the Southampton UA theater that Deng hosted, guests included Barbara Walters, Rudy Giuliani and designer Tori Burch.

Found this in the comment section:

"If you really want to get the conspiracy theories rolling, do a little digging into Wendi Deng's relationship with the PRC's heaviest group of hardline communists.
What is somewhat common knowledge in China and never really brought up in the states (or the western world much at all) is that she wields signicant influence specifically with the worst of the worst Machiavellian element of China's governmental despots and has deep connections with the media control agency as well.
The supposed staunch advocate of the Right is literally married to the darkest heartland of old school Maoist militant thuggery.
Not all of china's government is bad, but the crew she sails with are waist deep in everything from Tiananmen Square to the violent crack downs on Falun Gong. I'm no fan of FG, but I'd set myself on fire before lying down with these guys; they have the meanest hard-on for crushing pro-democracy elements and human rights in their country."

and

"Wen Di 'Wendi' Deng - a communist whore who slept her way to the US, while breaking marriages left and right, now within a breaths distance away from one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, with stakes and intrigues brought from her communist interests. With her controlling 30% of the voting bloc, with two of her spawns ready to vie for power when the old frog croaks, it is not only the US manufacturing capacity that China has apparently domineered, they are already prepared to stream and censor its way onto your everyday interaction with media. Here's hoping that Murdoch doesn't expire until the ripe old vinegary age of 108, and FOX to be drawn and quartered between the feuding scavengers.
The only justice deserved for the murderers of the New Corp whistleblower Sean Hoare, sons of bitches that picked apart murder victims and widowers for morsels of rotten news."

[Searcher08]

Rupert = S A T A N

[AhabsOtherLeg]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43810656/

"'Wendi' Deng - a communist whore..."

From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs. Seriously, though, that's not very nice. And MSNBC's supposed to be the "progressive" place, isn't it?

The other comment was interesting, though.

This is too, from the Guardian Live Blog:

"Blindingly obvious" evidence of corrupt payments to police officers were found by the former director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, when he inspected News of the World emails, the Home Affairs select committee was told yesterday.

Explaining how he had been called in by solicitors acting for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation board, Lord Macdonald said that when he inspected the messages it took him between "three to five minutes" to decide that the material had to be passed to the detectives.

"The material I saw was so blindingly obvious that trying to argue that it should not be given to the police would have been a hard task. It was evidence of serious criminal offences.

He first showed it to the News Corp board in June this year. "There was no dissent," he recalled. "They were stunned. They were shocked. I said it was my unequivocal advice that it should be handed to the police. They accepted that."

That board meeting, the former DPP said, was chaired by Rupert Murdoch. Lord Macdonald shortly afterwards gave the material to Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick at the Metropolitan Police.

Shit. Half of the evidence probably gets deleted while already in police hands, and to a professional standard. News Corp won't even have to scrub their hard-drives in advance, since the cops have (allegedly) better tech to do the job.

And is everybody just handing their evidence over randomly to anybody who happens to be in uniform? Tabloid phone-hacking ends up being investigated by anti-terror officers, for some reason, and Lord MacDonald decides to give his material direct to Cressida Dick instead of the dedicated teams who are already investigating the matter, like Ops Weeting, Elveden, Tuleta, etc...

Crazy times.

[Telexx]

Heh Searcher08 that pic is fantastic

[One Dog Watching]

More shit:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ju ... gel-moment


Notice how the entire thing now is being framed around, "Oh that poor old man...how could someone DO something like this?! His wife is a hero!" WTF? Why are we supposed to be rooting AGAINST the pie thrower, according to the supposedly impartial media? Why are we supposed to care one way or the other?

It's funny how primal imagery is evoked: TIGER...LIONESS...DEFENDING HER MAN....people love this shit because it makes it so the average know-nothing consumer can actually have something to contribute in a "discussion of the news" around the water cooler/twitter: "Yeah yeah yeah man, whatever to the trial about the phone hacking and all that shit,...I didn't even know who Murdoch WAS until I saw his fine-ass TIGER-WIFE jump up and DEFEND HER MAN...I was like, WHOA...Who IS this chick?", No knowledge of the actual facts of the case required.

Moot points I suppose since the entire thing was probably staged from the get-go to get exactly the kind of reaction and attention it's getting right now.

[marycarnival]

"Yeah yeah yeah man, whatever to the trial about the phone hacking and all that shit,...I didn't even know who Murdoch WAS until I saw his fine-ass TIGER-WIFE jump up and DEFEND HER MAN...I was like, WHOA...Who IS this chick?", No knowledge of the actual facts of the case required.
.

This is basically what one of my coworkers said today. Awesome.

[Joe Hillshoist]

From the wendi deng wiki page:

It should also be noted that she is a gold digging whore, and that her husband is one of the biggest scumbags on the planet, and that they should both be charged with treason and hanged in a globally broadcast public execution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendi_Deng

Thats a bit much for a wikipedia page isn't it? I certainly think the public execution would suit her husband.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

From the wendi deng wiki page:

It should also be noted that she is a gold digging whore, and that her husband is one of the biggest scumbags on the planet, and that they should both be charged with treason and hanged in a globally broadcast public execution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendi_Deng

Thats a bit much for a wikipedia page isn't it? I certainly think the public execution would suit her husband.

I think that section might breach Wikipedia's NPOV and impartiality rules. I'm not sure, but it does seem a bit slanted. The editors'll have to have a heated multi-page discussion about it over the next few days.

Anybody else wonder if there's a concerted effort underway to turn the villains into victims here, by publically victimizing them in really stupid, petty, and counter-productive ways?

I mean, foam-pies being put in the faces of seated octogenarians, just before they spectacularly fail to answer a very important question about confidentially clauses and million pound payouts... it doesn't help anybody. Now the unveiled misogyny and thinly-veiled racism against Deng. Fox and the WSJ clearly want everybody to weep for a great man and his lady, who were wronged and brought low by the jealous vengeful left. So does The Sun. This kind of silliness furthers that agenda (even if the earlier lulzsec hack was fucking brilliant).

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah, it seems a bit silly and obvious. It would have been better to get him at a press conference or outside.

[Joe Hillshoist]

And he should have used a bucket of holy water.