I notice that the media is mostly ignoring or at least not drawing much attention to the fact that Murdoch owns Faux "News". I can't say I blame them. They would surely be viciously attacked by Murdoch's influential media otherwise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/world/europe/13hacking.html?_r=1&smid=fb-nytimes&WT.mc_id=WO-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-LTC-071211-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click
Lawmakers to Call Murdoch to Testify in Hacking Case
By JOHN F. BURNS, JO BECKER and ALAN COWELL
Published: July 12, 2011
LONDON — Rupert Murdoch’s once commanding influence in British politics seemed to dwindle to a new low on Tuesday, when all three major parties in Parliament joined in support of a sharp rebuke to his ambitions and a parliamentary committee said it would call him, along with two other top executives, to testify publicly next week about the growing scandal enveloping his media empire.
[.....]
A parliamentary committee on Tuesday said it would call Mr. Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, to testify next week about accusations of phone hacking and corruption at the News International papers, in what is likely to be one of the most sensational parliamentary hearings in years.
New and alarming charges came on Tuesday from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said that one of the most prestigious newspapers in the group, The Sunday Times, employed “known criminals” to gather personal information on his bank account, legal files and tax affairs.
[This included obtaining info on an illness of Mr. Brown's little boy, who is now 5 years old, which was printed in some of these papers.]
A separate parliamentary committee investigating years of indecisive police probes into The News of the World’s rampant phone hacking operations spent hours on Tuesday grilling police officers who led the inquiries.
Some of the most humbling moments for the police came as members of the home affairs committee demanded to know why John Yates, the head of the police’s counterterrorism force, spent only one day in a formal review of an earlier police investigation before concluding in 2009 that there was nothing more to it. At one point a committee member, Steve McCabe, leaned into his microphone and said, “You just don’t seem like the dogged, determined sleuth that we would expect.”
That was followed by the committee chairman, Keith Vaz, rebuking Andy Hayman, the officer (now retired) who oversaw the original investigation from 2005 to 2007: “All this sounds more like Clouseau than Columbo.”
Mr. Hayman acknowledged that he had private dinners with journalists from The News of the World during the investigation. When he defended that by saying that to “have turned it down would have been potentially more suspicious than to have it,” peals of laughter erupted in the hearing room.
The most startling revelation may have been the scope of the new police investigation, covering many more potential victims than the 4,000 previously said to have been identified in the notes of one of the men jailed in 2007. Sue Akers, the top Scotland Yard officer assigned to take over the inquiry this year, said that her team had lists of 3,870 names, 5,000 landline phone numbers and 4,000 cellphone numbers. So far, she said, only 170 people had been formally notified that their phones may have been hacked.
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