Britain’s deputy prime minister urged Rupert Murdoch Thursday to face questioning by lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal, as pressure grew on his media empire in Australia and the United States.
Police in Britain made a ninth arrest in the case as the furore which has led to the closure of the News of the World tabloid and forced Murdoch to drop a takeover bid for satellite broadcaster BSkyB raged on.
Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Murdoch’s British newspaper arm News International faced a deadline Thursday to reply to an invitation by a parliamentary committee to answer questions on the row.

Latest update on the latest from Wikileaks on the issue of 2000 Swiss bank accounts of wealthy individuals and offshore corporations.

• Assange says he wants to go the “safe route” and have professionals look at the Elmer CDs; he also says WikiLeaks has found “sources need to be protected before the information is passed out to others.”

• He says some journalists can be opportunists who “twist and hype up the material and distort the historical record” so WikiLeaks makes “primary source documents available so honest journalists rise high and dishonest journalists struggle.”

• He is also asked about the embassy cables release. Assange says 2.3% has been released and the process will continue over the coming months.

• Assange says WikiLeaks has had more legal threats from banks “than any other organisations”. (Update Elmer said of the Swiss banking system: “I started pulling on the tail of a mouse and it became a fire-breathing dragon.”)

I am on the edge of replacing paper newspapers with electronic versions for my iPad and phone; of accepting that I hardly ever wait for a conventional news bulletin; and of actually reading full-length books, with pleasure, as downloads.

Anastasiya Baburova (only 25) was shot on January 19 – minutes after a press conference at the Independent Press Center. She was walking towards the Metro station with a laywer, Stanislav Markelov.

Baburova apparently tried to stop the killer, who had walked past her after shooting Markelov; the man then shot her in the head, Kommersant reported, citing unnamed witnesses of the scene.

Markelov died immediately; Baburova died several hours later in a Moscow hospital. “It appears that Markelov was the main target,” Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, told CPJ. He added that the paper is waiting for the official results of the investigation to determine whether Baburova was also targeted.

Two hours before his assassination, Markelov had given a press conference criticizing the early release on Thursday of former Russian Colonel Yuri Budanov, a tank commander convicted and imprisoned in 2003 on charges of murdering a young Chechen girl named Elza Kungayeva in 2000, Sokolov told CPJ. Markelov represented the Kungayeva family and was planning to appeal Budanov’s early release.

It’s certainly ironic that MTV launches their music video site sooo late. Anyway, enjoy the song.

You can read it here although if French isn’t your first language, you can read a loose translation from Google.

There doesn’t seem to be any substantial improvements in the video department but here’s the feature list:

3D Effects – Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D Flash game effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.

Custom Filters and Effects – Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.

Advanced Text Layout – A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Enhanced Drawing API – Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

Here’s a few important points:

A terrorist shot in Sarajevo provided the pretext for German aggression which started World War I. 9/11 was used by the Bush Administration to launch the Iraq War. In both cases, trigger-happy leaders exploited the incidents for their own political purposes.

In both cases, the national media played along. The failures of the American media to slow or stop the descent into the Iraq War are the greatest media failures of our current era…

In short, almost all governments lie and lie relentlessly. Yet governments can be made to lie less frequently by being exposed and held to account by the professional media.

He does mention blogs (such as this one) and concludes: The problem with the internet, of course, is that it transmitted considerable flakiness alongside pithy truth telling. Blog sites, for good and ill, are unfiltered and unaccountable.

So what about getting the best of both worlds – the accountability and ethics of professional journalism AND the freedom of expression associated with the Internet (and blogs)?