Nancy Martinez – Bird’s In The House (LP)
54 minutes ago
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Phone hacking: Australian PM promises 'hard questions'
The Australian branch of Rupert Murdoch's media empire will face "hard questions" in the wake of the phone hacking scandal in Britain, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said.
She said she was "disturbed" by revelations about his UK business.The Greens, which hold the balance of power in the upper house, have called for a parliamentary inquiry into News Limited, Mr Murdoch's Australian firm.
Mr Murdoch appeared before a UK parliamentary committee on Tuesday.
"When people have seen telephones hacked into, when people have seen individuals grieving having to deal with all of this, then I do think that causes them to ask some questions here in our country," Ms Gillard told reporters in New South Wales.
"Obviously News Limited has got a responsibility to answer those questions when they're asked."
Australian journalists' unions said they backed the call by Greens party leader Bob Brown for an inquiry.
Different dominance.
Ms Gillard told the Greens she was ready to discuss the holding of an inquiry into Murdoch company practices in Australia, but would not jump to conclusions.
"I'm not going to engage in running commentary on testimony but I do believe Australians... are looking at News Limited here and are wanting to see News Limited answer some hard questions," she said.The company dominates Australian media - it controls 70% of the newspaper readership and has extensive holdings in television, the internet, and other media.
The BBC's Nick Bryant in Sydney says that largely because News Limited owns most of the tabloid titles, the competition in Australia for stories and gossip is nowhere near as cut-throat or intense as that in Britain.
The tabloid agenda is also different, he says, without the same preoccupation with sex scandals and nowhere near the same salaciousness.
News Limited boss John Hartigan has launched a review of all payments made by the group in the last three years and has said he is willing to co-operate with any inquiry.
He has also denied allegations by governing Labor party members that News Limited has been running a campaign against them, describing his group's journalism as aggressive but fair.
The government has reportedly stalled a ruling by an independent panel in favour of Mr Murdoch's part-owned Sky News to run Australia's taxpayer-funded overseas TV service.
The panel had unanimously backed the Sky bid to run the Australia Network but the government imposed a "national interest" bar on the process.
News Corp has also been attempting a takeover of the Australian broadcaster Austar.
@'BBC'
The Monkees of Invention
Mike Nesmith and Frank Zappa switched places on 'The Monkees' - Episode 57 (out of 58) titled 'Monkees Blow Their Mind' which was filmed in April 1967, and first aired on 11 March 1968.
Bonus clip of Tim Buckley (aged 20) performing 'Song To The Siren' on 'The Monkees' after the jump...
Bonus clip of Tim Buckley (aged 20) performing 'Song To The Siren' on 'The Monkees' after the jump...
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
Menthol: The 'gateway' cigarettes?
If he has a beef with the family, Candlers is puffing away.
And if his late model Ford Explorer breaks down on the Atlanta freeway, as it did recently, Candlers will be headed to the corner store to re-up on the nicotine sticks.
"It just died on me," Candler says between long drags off a cigarette. "So I was like real stressed and I think I smoked half a pack of cigarettes waiting on the tow truck."
Like about 19 million other Americans, Candlers smokes menthol cigarettes - for now. The Food and Drug Administration is currently considering whether to ban menthol from cigarettes. Candlers, a stocky man with a beard and a wide smile, says that would be a bad decision.
"They gonna have a war on their hands," Candlers says of the FDA. "I know a lot of folks that smoke menthols, and it would be wrong just to ban one type of cigarette."
But the U.S. government has already banned other types of cigarettes. Flavored beedies, cloves, cigarettes with spices, peppermint and vanilla have all been banned in an effort to discourage teenagers from picking up the habit. Basically, anything that makes tobacco easier to taste or inhale has been targeted by the FDA and Congress.
The FDA’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee is recommending menthol be banned. The committee issued a report earlier this year finding that menthol cigarettes are overwhelmingly smoked by the poor, the young and African-Americans...
Continue reading
John Sepulvado @'CNN'
Taliban blames US for Mullah Omar death reports
Two Taliban spokesmen have said their phones had been hacked and messages sent out that their leader Mullah Omar was dead, media reports say.
One of the spokesmen Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters that the "Americans have hacked our cellphones with advanced technology and sent the messages".Mullah Omar's death was reported in May by sections of the media, including an Afghan TV channel.
Pakistani and US officials had dismissed the reports.
Mullah Omar has evaded capture, despite one of the largest manhunts and is believed to be guiding the resurgent Taliban.
The AFP news agency said that a message went out from Zabihullah Mujahid's phone announcing the death of Mullah Omar.
The spokesman denied this, and said the Taliban would take "revenge on the telephone network providers".
A second spokesman, Qari Yosuf Ahmadi, also told AFP that phones had been hacked.
"That's a false message. The Westerners hacked into our cellphones and sent the message from our numbers to everyone. They want to deceive the Afghan people. It's wrong. [Omar] is not dead and is alive," he said.
@'BBC'
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