#Leveson #MurdochMafia : Charlotte Church Stands Her Ground Against News International.

Charlotte Church, loved by the tabloids as both angel and wild child, yesterday became the last woman standing against Rupert Murdoch's media empire after she and her family were left as the last participants in a damaging public trial which threatens to reveal the full inside story of phone hacking at the News of the World.

The Cardiff-born singer, who claimed that her management advised her as a child to sing at Mr Murdoch's New York wedding to Wendi Deng in 1999 in return for favourable press coverage, has refused to settle her claim for damages against the defunct Sunday tabloid which centres on four years of hacking of both her and her parents' phones.

News International's concern that a public trial will further damage an already-tainted brand was evident as their lawyers repeatedly appealed in the High Court yesterday to have the trial delayed, potentially indefinitely. The demand was dismissed by the presiding judge, Mr Justice Vos, stating simply: "We're ready for trial."

Ms Church found herself the unlikely lone protagonist in the legal battle against the "industrial scale" hacking that was rife inside the now-defunct Murdoch title after a further tranche of settlements involving other phone hacking victims was announced. The payouts left her and her parents, Maria and James, as the last remaining victims with viable cases in the first wave of damages cases.

Now 25, and having survived what she has called the "brutality" of Britain's tabloid press, the Church trial is set to begin on 27 February and could become a legal landmark, bearing testimony to the musician's determination to expose what she described as years of intrusion and rough treatment by newspapers. At the core of her complaints against the NOTW, which wrote 33 articles about her that she considers to be the product of illegal newsgathering, is a story that was headlined: "Church in three in a bed cocaine shock." The story was not about the singer, but her father and she said it led to her mother trying to kill herself.

Mr Justice Vos had been expected to use the civil trial of selected victims to construct a framework of damage levels that would be used in new claims on phone hacking against the NOTW.

The Independent was told last week that the number of additional hacking cases being looked at by solicitors is over 100. This week, the head of Scotland Yard's investigation, Sue Akers, told the Leveson Inquiry 829 "likely victims" had been identified.

Counsel for NI, Michael Silverleaf QC, has argued that with only Ms Church left, a trial was unnecessary. He also attacked the evidence so far prepared in the Church case which will involve the financial impact the reports had on the family's business and the mental health of her mother.

The company claimed that possible proceedings by Steve Johnson, a former boyfriend of Ms Church, meant that the hearing of her case should be delayed until all linked complaints were in a position to proceed.

But the judge's determination to have a trial, means the Murdoch empire's UK subsidiary now have three weeks to try to reach a deal with Ms Church before it begins. The court agreed to subject Maria Church to a new medical appraisal to determine her mental health while NI and Ms Church's counsel, David Sherborne, will examine the family's business affairs between 2002 and 2006.

Celebrity actions: The second wave

The announcement yesterday of six new legal actions against News International suggests that although Charlotte Church is technically the last woman standing in the company's fight to avoid a trial, others are queuing up in the second tranche of hacking claims.

The High Court heard that another 50 formal hacking claims have been launched in recent weeks. This backs up information given to The Indepen- dent which suggests that more than 100 victims have recently contacted leading solicitors associated with illegal voicemail access. Among the list, according to one law firm were "some astonishing names".

Listed yesterday were the singer James Blunt, the UK Independence Party politician Nigel Farage, the footballer Peter Crouch and his wife Abbey Clancey, the former wife of the golfer and former Ryder Cup captain Colin Montgomerie, Eimear Cook, and the footballer Kieron Dyer.

Another five remaining cases that are not scheduled for the new trial date for legal and technical reasons, are the cases involving Mary Ellen Field, the former adviser to the supermodel Elle Macpherson, the footballer Ryan Giggs, the former royal butler, Paul Burrell, the former Scotland Yard detective, Dave Cook, his wife, also a former police officer, Jacqui Hames, and the PR consultant Nicola Phillips.

This week at the Leveson Inquiry, the head of the Scotland Yard team investigating phone hacking, Sue Akers, revealed that out of the names found in the notebooks of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator commissioned by the NOTW to illegally access voicemails, 829 "likely victims" had so far been identified.

James Cusick

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/charlotte-church-stands-alone-as-hacking-victims-settle-6676524.html

#Leveson Inquiry : Heather Mills Denies Playing Voicemail Messages To Piers Morgan

The former wife of Sir Paul McCartney never authorised former News of
the World editor Piers Morgan, or anybody else, to listen to her
voicemails, she told the inquiry into press standards today.

 

Chat show host Morgan has previously told the inquiry he listened to a voicemail message left to Mills by Sir Paul, but refused to say when or where he heard it because he wanted to protect a "source".

Today Ms Mills said she had never authorised Morgan, or anybody, to access or listen to her voicemails, and neither had she ever played a recording to the former editor.

"I couldn't quite believe that he would even try to insinuate, a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years, would relish in telling the court if I had played a voicemail message to him," she said.

Ms Mills told the inquiry that in early 2001 she and Sir Paul had argued about a trip she was planning to Gujurat, and while she stayed with a friend in Middlesex he left a series of messages on her voicemail.

"In the morning, when I woke up, there were many messages, but they were all saved messages which I did not quite understand, because normally they wouldn't be but I didn't think too much of it.

"I thought I must have pressed a wrong button.

"There were about 25 messages all asking for forgiveness of what had happened.

"One of them said, 'please forgive me' and sang a little ditty of one of his songs on the voicemail.


"So that afternoon I went back and all was forgiven."

She told the hearing she had never recorded the messages and deleted them straight away.

But she said she was then called by a former Trinity Mirror employee - who the inquiry heard was not a Daily Mirror journalist, nor anybody working under the supervision of Morgan - saying they had heard a recording of the message.

"I said, 'there's no way that you could know that unless you have been listening to my messages'," she told the inquiry. "And he laughed."
She said she threatened to take action if the story was published, and it wasn't.

But in 2006, in a piece in the Daily Mail, Morgan referred to having listened to the message.

Giving evidence in December, Morgan told the inquiry he would not disclose a source who played him a tape of a message that Sir Paul left Mills.

He said: "I am not going to discuss where I heard it or who played it to me.

"I don't think it's right. In fact the inquiry has already stated to me you don't expect me to identify sources."

Lord Justice Leveson told him the only person who would be able to lawfully listen to the message was Mills or somebody authorised on her behalf.

He told Morgan: "I am perfectly happy to call Lady McCartney to give evidence as to whether she authorised you to listen to her voicemails.

"She may say she did in which case you're not compromising anybody, but if she didn't then we can proceed on the premise that it's somebody else, can't we."

Asked by counsel for the inquiry Robert Jay QC: "Did you authorise Mr Morgan to access your voicemail?", she replied "never".

He asked: "Did you authorise Mr Morgan to listen to your voicemail?"
"Never ever," she answered.

Mr Jay also asked: "Have you ever played to Mr Morgan or authorised him to listen to a recording of this or any other voicemail left on your messaging system?", she replied "Never, never".

And asked if she had ever done this to anybody, she answered: "No".

PA

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/heather-mills-denies-playing-voicemail-to-piers-morgan-6699363.html

Leveson Inquiry : Christopher Meyer's Witness Statement Now Online

 #Meyer

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Witness-Statement-of-Sir-Christopher-Meyer.pdf

#Leveson

#McCann

The #Times #NightJack And the Whole Terrible Story

By Andrew Pugh

It was revealed yesterday that The Times is facing the prospect of fresh legal action from the NightJack blogger as the Leveson Inquiry looked in forensic detail at the paper's involvement in hacking the police blogger's email and concealing that fact from the HIgh Court.

Times editor James Harding yesterday issued an apology over the illegal hacking of Richard Horton's email account in 2009 and revealed he had also personally apologised to both Horton and to Mr Justice Eady over the fact that information was witheld from him during an injunction hearing.

Lord Justice Leveson told Harding: “Nothing that you are discussing today is relevant to the litigation between Mr Horton and the Times. If Mr Horton wants to pursue some remedy that will be a matter for him, to take advice and do what he feels is appropriate.”

Later into the hearing Harding told the inquiry that he had recently attempted to get in touch with Horton after he learnt about the email hacking allegations but found that he had already instructed lawyers. Press Gazette understands that lawyer Mark Lewis is acting for Horton.

Much of yesterday’s evidence focused on a High Court hearing held in June 2009 in which Horton had an injunction banning publication of his identity overturned by The Times.

Harding said that he had no knowledge of the story, or that that the legal action was being defended, until after the hearing....read more

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=48710&c=1

#Murdoch Is Here To Stay As News International Signs Sponsorship Deal With Global Radio The Sun, Times and Sunday Times Newspapers To Sponsor Shows On Heart, Capital And Classic FM Stations

The Sun and the Times are to sponsor programmes on the Global radio network. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

News International has signed a deal with Ashley Tabor's Global Radio that will see its newspapers become key sponsors of programmes on the Capital and Classic FM stations.

The Sun will sponsor the Capital FM breakfast show as well as advertorial features in its Big Top 40 Sunday afternoon chart rundown, while Classic FM's More Music Breakfast will be broadcast in partnership with the Times and Sunday Times.

Other tie-ups between the two groups include the Heart network's Club Classics Friday evening show, with the Sun and Fabulous magazine, and talk station LBC 97.3, which will run special features, news round-ups and advertorials with the Times and Sunday Times.

The partnership was described as long term in Monday's announcement and is expected to last at least six months.

News International chief marketing officer Katie Vanneck-Smith said the Global stations were a perfect fit and it was a like-minded company.

Mike Gordon, Global Radio's commercial managing director, said: "This is the first time that Global Radio and News International have joined forces on such a scale to reinforce their respective positions as the largest commercial radio group and the leading newspaper publisher in the UK."

• 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". 

#Leveson : #RichardDesmond - Who Is Claiming The Police Are Leaking To The Media ? - The MEDIA Are Gagged BUT Wish It To Be Known The McCanns Have NOT Been Cleared .

The Blacksmith Bureau

MONDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2012

Paranoia ahead


http://blacksmithbureau.blogspot.com/


Richard Desmond crying with shame

Despite the tears of remorse that Fleet Street’s finest shed when testifying about how ashamed they were of persecuting the McCanns, the story itself remains a magnet for the tabloids. And not buried on the inside pages, either, but as we can see, still taking over front pages.

Had Mr Richard Desmond really meant it when he said how dreadfully sorry he felt for the parents then one can assume he would ask his editors to leave stories concerning the pair and their friends—rather than the “search for Maddie—alone. But no: Murray’s article is a gratuitously “unhelpful” piece which highlights yet again some of the extremely questionable elements of the collective version such as the Jane Tanner sighting and the Mathew Oldfield unsighting.

And the Mail, the skilled and cynical voice of Mr and Mrs Average Opinion, had no hesitation in following the story up. Lord Justice Leveson, the greatest defender of the untouchable sanctity of the grieving parents (the person who prevented the wild“McCanns-ate-their-baby” headlines from the written submissions being read out to the inquiry) has, most ironically, brought the period of press silence about the case—rather than the search—to an end.

Such is the wide-ranging ferocity of the UK libel laws that the media could, until recently, have been warned off such a story. Not because of super-injunction nonsense but because Carter Ruck could claim that, in the absence of significant new events, reporting the possibility of re-interview could imply that the T7 have information that had not been provided before and was, therefore, potentially libellous. Any press defence would have to prove that this was not the case. So, no story.
That, for example, is why James Murray, in his 2010 Express piece year about Praia da Luz CCTV, carefully covered his paper by referring to the person who may have stashed a body nearby as “the abductor”, even though he knew that Amaral was talking about the Smith sighting and his belief that the person carrying the child may have been Gerry McCann: referring to the “abductor” avoided any libel problem.
Now, however, there are significant new events, both the hearings themselves and, more importantly, the Scotland Yard review, and as long as the media hang their stories around these twin towers they are safe.

****

Keeping track

When attempting to make sense of the rumours that will increasingly surround the review until its completion the safest bet is to assume that none of them, now or in the future, come from Scotland Yard. The Yard, like Leicester Police, have shown a rigid determination not to leak about the case, illustrated by their attempts to keep references to their operations out of the Portuguese case files before publication. They are not about to jeopardise that record now.

Thus stories about the progress of the case, other than official statements from a Yard spokesman, are likely to reflect jockeying for position by the two public sides in the affair, not inside information. One side is now a press which senses that changes are afoot and doesn’t want to miss out, and the other is the careworn and faded Team McCann. Significantly, the days of Clarence Mitchell setting the agenda are gone and he is now reacting to the media instead of—with the aid of the lawyers—leading it. The press are going to continue twisting his tail, as Murray has done in this case.

Murray, in fact, claims that his information derives from the Tapas group, not the police: “the Sunday Express has learned that the Tapas Seven “fully expect” to be asked to go over the statements they made to Portuguese officers shortly after Madeleine vanished on May 3, 2007.” Neat, eh? Since they aren’t in daily contact with each other they don’t know whether one of them has been talking to Murray or not. And if Clarence rings them all up – on whose behalf? –to find out then the Yard will draw the appropriate conclusions. The paranoia count rises.

Richard Desmond is someone very determined in his own interests and a games player who doesn’t give a shit. Both qualities were exemplified when Desmond, a Jew, lost patience in complex negotiations with a major German printing group some years ago and started goose-stepping up and down and giving the Hitler salute in front of the stunned executives. £375,000 and costs is certainly an interest to be determined about.

Expect much more.

****

They never learn

The line about SY possibly asking for retranslations has brought out our intellectual friends, the internet McCann supporters. The Portuguese, they claim, are wily and dishonest translators; one of their most unreliable and dishonest bloggers, they say, is Duarte Levy:* he provided the rogatory interviews to the UK and deliberately mistranslated parts of them in Goncalo Amaral’s favour before doing so. Clearly, they conclude, the Yard know that they have been corrupted and that nobody can trust this supposed “evidence”.

This claim, which is demonstrably wrong in every particular, was first made on a blog which is supposedly dedicated to careful critical analysis and refutation of anti-McCann “myths” [loud and prolonged laughter.] It illustrates the inability to handle evidence and the sheer determination to avoid the truth which characterises the work of that crowd. The Bureau has corrected them before but, yawn and stretch, we’ll do it again.

RECORD OF TAPE RECORDED INTERVIEW
Police Exhibit No
Person Interviewed:
Jane TANNER
Number of Pages
35
Place of Interview:
Force Headquarters, Enderby
Signature of Interviewing
Date of Interview:
08.04.08
Officer producing exhibit
Time Commenced:
16.29 hours
Time Concluded:
17.25 hours
Duration of Interview:
56 minutes
Interviewing Officer(s)
DC 4078 FERGUSON
Tape Reference nos:
SVF/110
Other Persons Present
None
             
Tape counter times
Person speaking
Text

00.04
4078
"Right it’s sixteen twenty nine and it’s the afternoon of Tuesday the eighth of April in the year two thousand and eight. This I think is our fifth interview and I’m DC Sophie FERGUSON from the Major Crime Unit and you are?”
Reply
"I’m Jane TANNER.”
4078
"Thank you Jane. We’ll carry on, well I say from where we left off, we won’t, we’ll go over some things that I want to just clarify with you.”
Reply
"Mm.”
4078
"Firstly, the (inaudible) label should be attached to your plan that you’ve drawn which we refer to now as JT one, so can I just ask you to sign that please there. And whist we’re talking about plans, this is a copy of exhibit reference DM two, that refers to whoever it is that’s drawn it, it’s their initials. Now we
The rogatory interviews were not distributed in the UK by Duarte Levy* : he was given access to them at the same time as a small number of others, including members of the Bureau. We all stayed quiet except Levy* who set up an English language members-only forum and fed edited extracts from the interviews to its readers.

The original documents were not translations but  prints of the English language Microsoft Word original transcripts, as shown in the example above, complete with timings synchronised to the DVD record.Examination and analysis showed that they had not been tampered with in any way, that the personal details, telephone numbers and addresses etc. were correct and would have been unknown to anyone except the participants and the police and that there was no evidence of interpolation. Furthermore, as anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of English and Romance language grammar and usage would have noted, the language was demonstrably original English throughout..

The legal questions surrounding the reproduction of the documents in their original Word format meant that it was safer to publish only edited and unformatted versions and this is probably why Levy  did so. Still, to some of us it was unsatisfactory that one group was publishing edited parts of them not to the public but only to selected forum members—all “antis” — without showing the originals.

Out of fairness, therefore, one of the recipients sent one unedited facsimile copy to a notoriously pro-McCann and anti-Amaral UK internet researcher and  forum poster (calling herself “Nicked”) and one to a more or less neutral and reliable UK poster (who used the name “Cushty”), giving them permission to use and circulate the material as they saw fit. This ensured that any attempt to provide inaccurate versions of the documents, either for or against the McCanns, would be easily identified and challenged. From then on they were gradually circulated throughout the net.

Scotland Yard will have been using exactly the same facsimiles in the review since there are no other transcripts.

Our intellectuals won’t correct their stories though: they never correct anything. That’s why they’re stuck in May 2007.

* But we have to make a correction: we called him Reis instead of Levy when this blog was originally posted, a remarkably stupid error. Apologies to Paulo Reis

****

Inside the Labyrinth

Finally, the Portuguese legal system remains shrouded in mystery to us, despite our attempts to master it. So we were fascinated to be told by a Portuguese legal expert that the McCanns will have to prove the truth of each of their libel claims against Amaral, not merely make a suggestive case.

As we know, the only member of the British public that the McCanns have shown the 36 page writ to is the dodgy Lori Campbell of the Mirror, so we have to depend on that paper to feed us a few scraps. Still, it will be interesting to see how they prove the truth of their claims that they suffer "permanent anxiety, insomnia, lack of appetite, irritability and an indefinable fear" because of his book, as well as the claim that Kate McCann is "steeped in a deep and serious depression".

Then there is the claim that the couple are "totally destroyed from a moral, social, ethical, emotional and family point of view, beyond the pain that the absence of their eldest daughter causes them". Quite, we’ll go with that.  But what was the book to do with it? We shall see.

“Proof”, rather than anecdotal opinion, that the book has hampered the famous search for Madeleine might be slightly hard to find as well.

#Leveson Inquiry : Paul Dacre - Ten Questions For The Tits And Bums Daily Mail

The timing couldn't be better. Just as Paul Dacre prepares to appear before the Leveson inquiry, his newspaper appears to be vindicated over its calls for Fred "The Shred" Goodwin. Coming so soon after Dacre's slightly odd appearance on his own website, proclaiming the value of his publication's campaign in the Stephen Lawrence case, it's a time to celebrate the Daily Mail, isn't it? While it will be easy to point to the inflated role of the press in general -- and the Mail in particular -- in the Stephen Lawrence case, there's not as much to shout about when it comes to Mail Online.

Sure, it's the No 1 news website in the world; which would be a real bauble worth having if most of the traffic came there to look at news. But get beneath the bold headlines and political comment and you'll see a bewilderingly high number of stories about obscure (to British readers, anyway) American celebrities on holiday, wearing bikinis or being "poured into" (a favourite phrase, this, of Mail Online's) swimwear or little black dresses. As The Media Blog pointed out last week, you have to ask whether this recipe for success is really something to shout about.
..read more

http://onlyinamericablogging.blogspot.com/2012/02/daily-mail-tits-bums-ten-questions-for.html