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.”)

The AP quotes Oleg Orlov, head of the Memorial rights group where Natalya Estermirova worked, as saying that witnesses saw four men force her into a car in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Wednesday. She was later found lying on a road with two bullet wounds in her head, Russian police and activists say, the AP reports.

RIA Novosti, a Russian news service, reports that Estemirova had been investigating kidnappings and disappearances in Chechnya for Memorial. She had earlier worked with journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow in 2006 and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who was killed in the Russian capital earlier this year, the news agency reports.

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.

According to Guardian.co.uk: A review of bbc.co.uk published today by the trust shows that the actual spend in the 12 months to the end of March 2008 on the corporation’s UK web operations was £110m – almost £36m, or 48%, above what had been budgeted.

Of course, heads have started falling starting with Ashley Highfield. He’ll be replaced by Erik Huggers as the new director of future media and technology. In addition, a controller will supervise spending on new media.

I start with the absolute must-have – a Web camera.

A while back, there was a discussion about USB 1.1 vs USB 2.0 web cams. This discussion is mostly obsolete now as the majority of new web cameras are all USB 2.0. Keep in mind that being USB 2.0 doesn’t guarantee quality in any way. It simply means the camera can send more data to the computer (in theory).

Here’s what to look for in a Web camera:

• Speed: Since we’re choosing a webcam to record video online, the speed is the most important factor. You need a webcam that will do at least 30 frames-per-second (30FPS) when the lighting is adequate.
• Light sensitivity: The sensitivity to light is very important as most budget web cams give good results only in a VERY narrow window. It’s either too dark or too light for them.
• Control: In addition to getting a camera that is sensitive to light, you absolutely need to be able to control it. Look for cam that has a control panel where you can adjust the speed, the gain, and the white balance (the color of light).
• Pixels: As usual the more, the marrier but this is secondary to the points above. Anything over 640×480 is probably an overkill for web video at this time.

I have selected two different cameras that meet the requirements above. If you are not sure about a web cam you like, feel free to email me.

• Logitech Pro 9000: This is the latest cam in Logitech’s Pro series. It’s probably a bit of an overkill but it does have everything you need. It also has a lot of stuff you probably don’t – like adding a moustache effect.The list price is $99 but you can find it for less.
• Logitech Communicate STX: If you want a good budget web cam, the STX is an excellent choice. I own it myself and it does well even in low light.List price is $49 but you can find it for half that!

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)?