It is two minutes past six on a Saturday morning, and I've been awake two hours. It is now breakfast time and I am cooking bacon sandwiches, or rather the bacon that goes inside them. The rain which has been falling all night has stopped, and the sun is beginning to shine through, and the forecast is for a fine day.
This week has been a typical week; get up, breakfast, work, come home, cook dinner, go to bed: x 5. Nothing very dramatic, really. The cats have been fine; jools and i have been fine. It's been fine.
The weather has been cool, and it has either been rainy or windy in the evenings, and so we have not gone walking down the hedgerows, and so no photographs were taken either, which means this will be a un-illustrated blog. But, we have been happy enough, the evenings have been spent either beading or editing photographs, but to bring an air of mystery to proceedings, I won't say which one of us did which hobby.
And the latter part of the week has been spent, with moth agape as the latest news from the News of the World phone hacking scandal broke. This story, is very old, and has been ignored by most newspapers and media outlets, until it was revealed that a detective employed by the paper hacked into the phone of the then still missing Milly Dowler. Not only that, they listened to the messages and deleted some when the mail box got full; thus making her parents think there was a chance she was alive.
The next day it turned out that the phones of those killed, and their families, in the 7th of July attacks in London were also hacked. and the day after that the phones of some who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families were hacked too. 4,000 numbers are on the detective's files. And the investigation continues. In addition, it turned out that NOTW paid Metropolitan Police officers over £100,000 for information regarding cases.
Lets be clear, all of this is illegal, and the editors and detectives have been re-arrested, and an urgent inquiry is being launched as to the corrupt police officer's identities.
So quickly did public and political opinion turn against the 168 year old Sunday paper, that News Corps announced it's closure; although this may have already have been planned.
The fact that the NOTW's editor at the time of the hacking, and now a senior News Corps executive is keeping her job whilst two hundred journalists and printers are being sacked has still to be explained. All this is undermining News Corps position in Britain, and rather than be able to take over Sky TV, it may be forced to sell it's 29% stake, as in James Murdoch's words, the NOTW was running wild for years, and how can News Corps really claim with any sincerity that it could run a TV company properly whilst staying within regulations if it didn't spot the gross misconduct being carried out at the NOTW?
All heady stuff, and stuff that might bring change and even proper journalism back to the red tops, rather than celebrity muck-raking.
Or not.
Anyway, more on another day.
Today, we are heading to Chartwell, where Winston Churchill used to live for photography and general non-working stuff.
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2 comments:
I've been following the NotW stuff mostly via Twitter. I wonder if the British people will abide by the sale to Murdoch at this point.
And wasn't/isn't one of Cameron's top people involved in this mess from their time with NotW?
Andy Coulson is in a whole lot of trouble. He sanctioned payments of over £100,000 to the police, each one of those payments was against the law. and he lied in the perjury trial of Tommy Sheridan in Scotland where he denied phonetapping took place as did payment to corrupt police officers. He should be going to prison for two years, or his whole life, or possibly some amount inbetween. He was Cameron's head of media, but there were already doubts about him, but Cameron employed him anyway; he last eight months in the job.
Whether we Brits can abide by it or not due legal process has to be followed, and there is a strong probability that nothing can be done to stop the sale.
Time will tell.
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