Murdoch’s Newscorp In British Hot Water

  Looks as if the Murdoch clan has been playing a little bit of illegal spying on the other side of the ocean.

Murdoch's Newscorp Might Be in LOTS of Trouble

by ericlewis0        Fri Apr 08, 2011         DKos

For the past five years, Rupert Murdoch's British Tabloid newspaper, News of the World, had been denying any widespread or executive involvement in a phonetapping scandal. Members of the Royal Family, Movie Stars and Government Officials -- possibly thousands of people in all -- were alleged to have been tapped.

But earlier today, Newscorp. 'accepted liability' in the case and agreed to set up a sort of disaster-relief-style fund to compensate proven victims of the operation. The gesture amounts in essence to a guilty plea. Murdoch hopes this desperate offer will keep at least two-dozen lawsuits against Newscorp. from proceeding to trial.

One can assume Murdoch has been nervous since Tuesday, when Scotland Yard arrested two News of the World reporters  “on suspicion of unlawfully intercepting mobile phone voice-mail messages." The two reporters who were detained have been unofficially identified as Ian Edmondson, who was fired as the tabloid’s news editor this year; and Neville Thurlbeck, the paper’s chief reporter.
Scotland Yard investigators searched the paper’s newsroom while the two were being questioned, he said.

article about the Tuesday arrests
http://www.nytimes.com/...

from The Independent:

In the first acknowledgement from the company that its employees' phone hacking was far more widespread at the NOTW than it has ever admitted during five years of investigations, the company confirmed it was settling the cases of eight public figures, including the actress Sienna Miller and the former cabinet minister Tessa Jowell, and setting up a compensation scheme to deal with potential claims from dozens more victims of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

...

But there was little immediate sign that News International's offers had been accepted. Ms Jowell said: "It's now for the lawyers to do their work." The more claimants accept the offer, the less evidence will be aired in public.

The apology also raises the prospect of News International possibly facing criminal prosecution as a corporation at a future date, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

Who knows what else the Murdoch Empire that is Newscorp may have been doing with this illegally obtained information. For example, what if Rupert bought or sold stock as a result of tapped business calls?

Also, was Murdoch ever under oath about this scandal? Because I found this in an article from 2009:

News International has always maintained it had no knowledge of phone hacking by anybody acting on its behalf.

Murdoch told Bloomberg news last night that he knew nothing about the payments. "If that had happened I would know about it," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/...

Technorati Tags: Rupert Murdoch,Newscorp,News Of The World,Current Events

The Budget Cuts? Creative Numbers

Budget deal details reveal painful cuts, but some creative accounting too

Jed Lewison for Daily Kos      Tue Apr 12, 2011

Late last night, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees revealed the final details of the compromise funding deal for fiscal year 2011. Based on numbers released by the House Appropriations Committee, here's a chart summarizing the spending level changes.

Keep in mind that we're talking about non-emergency discretionary funds here, comprising roughly 30% of the overall budget, and that taken as a whole, federal spending will actually increase in FY2011 relative to FY2010. However, within the non-emergency discretionary funds, there have been substantial cuts, particularly considering the cuts are really only for seven months of the fiscal year.

House Republicans are boasting that they cut "nearly $40 billion" in spending, but based on the numbers they released the overall cut is actually $34.1 billion. Presumably, they are simply not counting the roughly $6 billion in spending increases going to defense and the Veterans Affairs/Military Construction budget. The only way that sort of accounting makes sense is if you're more interested in cutting domestic priorities than in actually cutting overall spending, but then again, that pretty much describes the GOP, so their new math sort of makes sense, at least in a twisted kind of way.

TPM identified some of the most painful and counterproductive cuts:

• Environmental Protection Agency funding cut by $1.6 billion, a 16% decrease, including $49 million cut from climate change programs
• Roughly $750 million cut from energy research and development programs
• $1 billion cut from efforts to prevent the spread of HIV and other diseases
• $600 million cut from community health centers
• $78 million cut from research on reducing health care costs

Other cuts include $390 million cut from the LIHEAP energy assistance program and a 0.2% across-the-board cut to all non-defense line items. And one of the worst cuts was the elimination of Ron Wyden's program to allow under-insured workers to buy insurance in health care exchanges.

But while many of the cuts are severe, CBS and AP report that a significant chunk of the cuts actually reflect accounting and budget gimmicks.

Many of the cuts appear to have been cuts in name only, because they came from programs that had unspent funds.

For example, $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census; $3.5 billion in unused children's health insurance funds; $2.2 billion in subsidies for health insurance co-ops (that's something the president's new health care law is going to fund anyway); and $2.5 billion from highway programs that can't be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation.

About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks - pet projects like highways, water projects, community development grants and new equipment for police and fire departments. Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.

Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule -- used for years by appropriators -- placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as "budget savings." The savings are awarded year after year.

In all, that's $24.9 billion. I think the report is wrong about the co-op funding not actually being cut, but cutting them doesn't impact the discretionary baseline from next year. And not all of it is smoke and mirrors—earmarks are real spending (though Republicans had previously promised to ban them) and, as David Dayen argues, zeroing unspent funds represent an opportunity loss. Still, they aren't cuts to existing programs, and that's important when considering that funding levels for current programs provide a baseline for next year's budget.

But even if the actually story of the spending cuts isn't as bad as the GOP's top-line claim of "nearly $40 billion" might suggest, there's still nothing good about what happened here. The only problem we have with domestic discretionary spending is that we're not spending enough of it, and this deal cut it, while holding the line on homeland security funding and increasing our military budget, which actually should be a real source of savings. And to the extent we have a long-term spending issue, it's driven by health care costs, yet this deal actually cuts funding to research ways to reduce health care expenses.

So given political realities, this deal is probably less bad than it otherwise could have been, and at least in my view, it's better than shutting the government down. But that doesn't mean it takes us in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: 2011 Budget,Deficits,Republicans,Defense,Current Events,Politics