Is this really all The Sun had to say about the News Corp AGM?…

£1m Milly Dowler hacking payouts

Published: Today

NEWS Corp chief Rupert Murdoch yesterday confirmed he has personally donated £1million to charities chosen by Milly Dowler’s family.

The company, owner of The Sun, confirmed it is paying the murdered schoolgirl’s family £2million after the News of the World hacked her phone.

Mr Murdoch told a News Corp shareholder meeting in Los Angeles there was “simply no excuse” for the scandal.

They don’t mention anything about what else happened…

At the company’s annual meeting in Los Angeles on Friday Murdoch made a defiant and uncompromising address, insisting News Corp’s history was the “stuff of legend.” However, he was berated by shareholders and some of the world’s largest investors voted against his re-election, and that of his sons, to the News Corp board. They also did not approve of the $33m (£21m) he was paid as chairman and chief executive this year.

Murdoch owns 12% of the company but controls about 40% of the votes because of News Corp’s two classes of shares. But the fact that major investors voted against his re-election and that of his sons and other directors is a major blow for the 80-year-old chairman and chief executive.

News Corp plans to release the full details of the vote on Monday. Before the meeting, shareholders told the Guardian that James Murdoch was likely to receive the biggest vote of no confidence. If the votes go against him, it will cast further doubts on his future at News Corp. The youngest Murdoch son is already facing questions about evidence he gave to a parliamentary inquiry into the News of the World hacking scandal and shareholders at Murdoch-controlled BSkyB have called for his resignation.

Hmmm. I wonder why?

Hackers have hit The Sun newspaper, and not the sort of hackers to hack your phone.

The URL http://thesun.co.uk redirects to http://new-times.co.uk/sun/ with a fake story about Rupert Murdoch being found dead. At the end of the story there is a cartoon which explains it.

h/t to @scaryduck, who I first head if from.

Update: TechCrunch has a little more.

And Again (23.18): The admins at new-times.co.uk have revoked access, but Lulzsec still have control of the Suns’ site and have redirected it to their Twitterfeed.

And another (23.45) Lulzsec just tweeted that News Internationals’ site, containing a statement about the hack, has been hacked to direct back to Lulzsecs Twitterfeed too. http://newsint.co.uk/statement_regarding_the_sun.html

The Sun is a little bit peeved today because it’s freedom of speech is being restricted again and can’t report on someones sex life (istyosty link). I can certainly see why.

A SENIOR executive at a British bank bailed out by the taxpayer has gagged The Sun from revealing an affair with a colleague.

High Court judge Mr Justice Richard Henriques leapt to his defence in a ruling that delivered another blow to free speech in the UK.

Why shouldn’t the Sun be able to report on someones carnal activities? This person worked at a bank that received taxpayer money. We should be able to know everything about them. Doesn’t that judge know who we are? We’re bloody taxpayers, don’tcha know?

The married banker, paid a substantial six figure sum, began the illicit affair before the credit crunch erupted and plunged the country into recession.

Look! He’s paid not just a six figure sum, but a ‘substantial’ six figure sum. What is the judge playing at? Doesn’t he know the bigger the salary the more right we have to know about who he is sticking is knob in?

He was present when the Government was forced to spend almost £1trillion to prop up the banks. Ministers are axing thousands of civil servants to pay for bankers’ mistakes and more than 50,000 workers in the sector have lost their job in the past two years.

This is outragous! He was there when the government gave the banks all of *our* money. Where ‘there’ is, is irrelevant. Was he present at the bank, present in government, in his girlfriend at the time the government handed over the whopping big cheque? It doesn’t matter. He was ‘there’. We demand to know. He is connected to the government, however remotely so he must’ve been telling us not to cheat on our spouses. He must be hypocrite. How can we tell unless we know who he is?

If he’s not connected to the government or not, he gets paid a big fat wodge of dough so he must be a role model for the kids. Either way the public must know who he’s been shagging, where, when, how often and in what positions. It’s in the public interest. This information being kept from us could be a game changer in the way we live our lives.

These people cannot get away with dicking about on their poor, poor wifes without retribution. And I want the Sun to deal it.

One bank insider told the Sun: “Given what was going on at the time they got together, I’m surprised either of them had the time or the energy.”

Jesus snapping arseholes! There’s more! He got paid a big bundle by a bank and he still had free time away from the bank. What were they paying him for? Surely he must’ve been skiving, or bonking on company time. It’s the only explanation. As for having the energy to for all this horizontal excercise? Well, there’s only one explanation. Drugs.

Yeah, ok. Drugs might not be the *only* explanation for someone having enough energy to bonk their girlfriend, but how do we, the public, know unless this man is exposed to public scrutiny?

I don’t know about you but I won’t be able to sleep at night thinking about how this man that worked at a bank was shagging someone that wasn’t his wife… er, without reaping the vengeance of the public.

I demand to know!

Here’s a good site for all you Media-Watchers – istyosty.com.

Isty-who? I hear you ask.

Istyosty is a proxy service that seems to be dedicated to providing a way to read the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Express, but nothing else, without giving the papers the hits.

This is what they say, it might explain it a bit better…

WTF?

This site was set up after reading this. I thought it would be more fair to the statistics if only people who actually liked the daily mail appeared as a “hit” on the site. We are a proxy service enabling users to view that particular site without necessarily visiting it. Pages are cached here for a few days so many hits on a particular story will only count as one initial hit on that website (until the page is re-cached). Hits to the homepage however, are updated every few hours to keep it reasonably current. This system has the added advantage of providing anonymity from their invasive tracking and the advertisements from companies that should know better (we strip the ads, referer information and the javascript by default).

… and they say it’s legal.

So, if you’re linking to one of these three rags and and don’t want to increase their hits, because as far as they and their advertisers are concerned every hit is an approving hit, use an Istyosty link.

(They’re also on Twitter – twitter.com/itsyotsy)

The Sun and the Daily Mail got bollocked telling porkies about the Tamil chap that was on hunger strike last year.

New posts are at The Sun Lies, by Septicisle, and Mailwatch, by me.

OUTRAGED travellers demanded last night that Transport Secretary Lord Adonis return from holiday to tackle the UK’s travel nightmare.
The Cabinet minister had sloped off to a luxury Alpine skiing holiday in Austria while Britons slid and shivered on roads, railways and airport floors.

The above piece isn’t exactly a lie, which is why I’m posting here rather than at The Sun Lies, except that maybe travellers, although outraged, aren’t demanding Lord Adonis cut short his christmas holiday, as most probably didn’t even realise he was on holiday. The reader doesn’t find out, no travellers are quoted in the article, only bods from organisations and the like.

What has pee’d me off about this article is the way that the Sun starts off screaming about Lord Adonis ‘sloping’* off for a ski holiday while the country grinds to a halt.

*From the Suns’ position, that is a fantastic pun. Not only does it fit with Adonis going on the piste**, but it aslo goes with the sneaky, useless Labour government narrative.

**apologies for that one.

The next paragraph carries on the narrative by introducing the bumbling sidekick…

Lord Adonis, 46, left his hapless deputy Sadiq Khan to face the avalanche of fury over cancellations, delays and the road gritting shambles.

That’s the groundwork for the piece laid down: the boss has snuk (sneaked?) off and left his bumbling deputy to cope.
Naturally the shadow local government minister is gonna have pop and say that Adonis should come back, via airports that are closed, to help out with a shovel and a bag of grit.

Once all that is set up there follows a great long list of things that have happened because of the cold, as if it’s Lord Adonis’ fault:

Nine people have died during the cold snap as temperatures plunged to as low as -16C in some parts of the UK.

Two women were killed and almost 50 injured when a coach overturned on icy roads in Cornwall late last night.

In Northamptonshire Paul Litchfield, 30, and Philip Sturridge, 42, drowned as they tried to rescue their pet Labrador from a frozen lake near Ringstead.

Adonis should’ve been handing out thermal underwear, and called the bus company to tell them not to send the driver out and gone onto the frozen lake himself instead of making those two chaps go out on the thin ice themselves to rescue a fucking dog.

In Sale, Greater Manchester, recovery worker Denis Livesly, 60, was killed as he attended to a car in a snowstorm on the M60 motorway.

Malcolm Brown, 32, was also killed in Basingstoke, Hampshire, when a deer smashed through his windscreen during a blizzard.

On the island of Lewis 35-year-old electrician Donald Martin froze to death after locking himself out of his home after a Christmas party.

How could Adonis have prevented Mr Livesly from dying? Deers are a nightmare whatever the weather, is it Adonis’ fault Donald Martin didn’t have the sense to smash a window to get back in his home?

There’s more stories about people trying to save their dogs and people dying after slipping on ice and aeroplanes slipping off the end of runways and trains and the Royal Mail and Asda and Eurostar and roads and… and… and…

If only Lord Adonis was here. The country would be able to stop being so shit at bad weather.

I don’t need to tell you about the shit that Tim has had to go through whilst investigating the Glen Jenvey/Sun/Jewish hit list story, do I?

Good.

Well, Tim has asked for a hand, writing to your MP about the behaviour Patrick Mercer.

Here is my letter, via WriteToThem.com to Dr Evan Harris…

Dear Evan Harris,

I am writing because I have a friend who could do with some help.

I’m sure you remember the story about a Jewish hit-list that appeared on an Islamic internet forum and was reported by the Sun newspaper. The list featured prominent names such as Alan Sugar, Mark Ronson and David Milliband.

The story was provided to be the Sun by discredited freelance spy Glen Jenvey and subsequently, it has been proved to be a false story. The Sun has now apologised.

It was my friend, Tim Ireland, that proved the story was untrue. In the course of and as a result of his work, in his free time as he is not any sort of journalist, in getting to the bottom of this story he has had to endure a lot of stress and worry. This includes being smeared as a stalker, being mentally unstable and a peadophile. Tim has had his ex-directory phone number and his address published on the internet and also had veiled threats against his family.

Nearly all the threats and smears are as a result of the actions of Patrick Mercer MP (Conservative, Newark & Retford) or his staff.

If Patrick and his staff had behaved differently, the whole ordeal would’ve gone differently and the threats/smears would’nt have arisen or at the very least, Tim would’ve had to endure them for a shorter time.

How you can help, Dr Harris, is to take the time to read the two following articles by Tim that will explain things better than I could:

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/09/patrick_mercer_boom.asp

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/09/suburban_jihad.asp

and then ask Patrick Mercer what the bloody hell he’s playing at.

Yours sincerely

As an Editor of the Sun Lies blog I get to bask in the reflected glory of this post from Scepticisle…

it [The Sun] seems a little hazy on history as well, as this passage from the editorial makes plain:

Mr Brown has taken the country to war but is ducking responsibility for the conduct of it. The tradition of our country is that in wartime, the Prime Minister takes charge.

Lloyd George led us in World War One and Winston Churchill in World War Two.

Margaret Thatcher led from the front in the triumphant Falklands War in 1982.

John Major took charge in the first Gulf War of 1991. Tony Blair assumed full responsibility when we invaded Iraq to topple Saddam. And he did the same over the liberation of Kosovo.

Except Gordon Brown hasn’t taken the country in Afghanistan; Tony Blair did, in 2001. We’ve been there ever since. Brown as chancellor provided the funds for the war, it’s quite true, but was not personally responsible for taking us there. He also wasn’t prime minister when we entered Helmand in 2006: the defence secretary then was John Reid, who famously said he hoped that we would leave without firing a single shot. Then there’s the fact that we’re there in the country, not just on our own, but as part of the ISAF NATO coalition. Additionally, if we’re going to split hairs, Winston Churchill didn’t lead us into WW2; Neville Chamberlain did. The war in Afghanistan is also not, in any meaningful sense, a war with specific aims like all of those the Sun lists. It’s far more comparable to what we were doing in Iraq from the fall of Saddam up until our exit this year: peacekeeping, reconstruction and providing security. Missions, like Operation Panther’s Claw, which had the specific aim of clearing out Taliban so that people could vote in the presidential election, have been few and far between. As also argued above, we are quite clearly not in “wartime”.

I would like to post the lot, but that would be a little too much, I think. So, go and read the rest

Batholemews Notes on Religion has the latest on the Glen Jenvey affair (for background start here, also see here, here and here and here…

Since then, a lot has happened – and the most unexpected development has been Jenvey’s own conversion to radical Islam. Jenvey has now confessed his authorship of the “Abu Islam” posts in a message to a moderator at Ummah.com, the forum where this all began. I have had some private correspondence with Jenvey myself, and I can confirm the authenticity of this message:

Brother i’m sorry for the Allan Sugar story plant. I’m retired now from spying on Muslims. I saw a chance to install fear back in Jews who were killing Muslims.I was wrong to use you and your site.If you need any thing to help you in any way in the name of Allah just ask.

But yes the Sun did not know who posted it.I say sorry to you from my heart. if you want show the police and get me arrested. but with the first ramadaam coming i want to clear my past sin’s before i start my fasting and pray.

I would write this on your forum but im blocked out. may Allah reward you for your good work you do.Ameen

Omar Hamza Jenvey

aka

Glen Jenvey

Go and read the rest of the post.

Mediabistro…

Naked “Page 3 Girls” have helped Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid The Sun sell papers for 40 years now, but they’re not helping the paper break into the mobile marketplace. The Sun was set to be included in Newspaper(s), an iPhone app that allows readers to browse the content of over 50 newspapers, but Apple banned the app from their iTunes store on the grounds that the provocative “Page 3 Girls” are “obscene.”

The page 3 girls are obscene? They should’ve read some of the stories too!