He is the embodiment of Fleet Street bullying, using his newspaper to peddle his Little-England, curtain-twitching Alan Patridgesque view of the world, which manages to combine sanctimonious, pompous moralising and prurient, voyeuristic, judgmental obsession, like a Victorian father masturbating secretly in his bedroom.

... that News int destroyed a laptop that could prove it illegally paid a US army officer for Saddam pic

Bryant says the money was paid illegally to army source in US and specially set up UK account. UK and US editors must have known
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3m lisa o'carroll ‏@lisaocarroll

would expect, given what Lord Justice Leveson has already said about management at News Corporation, that there will be charges brought against senior directors, quite possibly including James and Rupert Murdoch, as part of the body corporate.

But there's one mystery that I really don't understand.

I understand from two well-placed people inside News International that in 2005 the Sun and the New York Post, both News Corporation newspapers, paid a substantial sum to a serving member of the United States armed forces in the United States of America for a photograph of Saddam Hussein. And a much larger amount was then paid via a specially set up account in the United Kingdom to that same member of the United States armed forces.

It is difficult to see how those who wrote that story up in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, and the two editors of the American newspaper and the British newspaper, could possibly pretend that they did not know how that material was obtained and that there had been criminality involved the process of securing that photo. For that matter, that they did not know that the laptop on which that information and that photograph was kept was destroyed, I believe so as to destroy the evidence of criminality.

So I urge the management standards committee to provide all the emails from Rupert Murdoch to News International staff as a matter of urgency that relates to this matter, in particular to the photograph of Saddam Hussein, because I think otherwise people will conclude in this country that News International still don't get it. They are still refusing to cooperate fully with the police.

Ha, ha.

this is funny too:



Steve Coogan on Paul Dacre.

A senior police officer in Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit telephoned the News of the World to tell them the paper's former editor Andy Coulson and five other people were being investigated by the Metropolitan police over alleged phone hacking.

In the first day of the trial at Southwark crown court in London of detective chief inspector April Casburn on Monday, prosecutor Mark Bryant-Heron told the jury she had phoned the paper at 7.51am on Saturday, 11 September, 2010 with the tip off.

She spoke with a journalist on the News of the World night desk, Tim Wood, for eight minutes and 37 seconds and offered "to sell information" to the paper about an investigation Scotland Yard had launched the day before into fresh allegations made about phone hacking in the New York Times.

Having to withdraw allegations – more prosaically publish a “correction” or “clarification” – is an occupational hazard for newspapers.

But to have to back down four times in four months suggests an attack campaign that has gone seriously wrong.

No prizes for guessing that the rag in question is the Sun, and its target has been Gordon Brown.

News Corp has claimed the Sun was clean from a phone hacking perspective, but I don't think they've claimed that about payments to police/civil servants. At least not since the whole thing blew up.