Phone hacking list of victims grows; HR head quits; BSkyB in trouble

Lisa O’Caroll, The Guardian:

The number of possible victims of phone hacking by the News of the World private investigator Glenn Mulcaire is now close to 5,800, the Metropolitan police have confirmed.

This is 2,000 more than previously identified by detectives tasked with trawling through 11,000 pages of notes seized from Mulcaire’s home.
…
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: “…This figure is very likely to be revised in the future as a result of further analysis.”

And Mulcaire was only one of several investigators.

And the top HR lady is quitting to spend more time with her family. Dominic Rushe, The Guardian:

News Corp’s top human resources executive has quit the media conglomerate as it deals with the effects of a phone-hacking scandal at its UK newspapers.

Beryl Cook, who had been with News Corp for 22 years, had been a long-time colleague of James Murdoch, now under parliamentary investigation for his role in the hacking scandal that has so tarnished News Corp’s image.

Cook worked with Murdoch at British Sky Broadcasting in London, when he ran the satellite TV service. She moved to New York in 2007 and was seen as a key ally of James Murdoch…

HR people know where the bodies are buried; specifically, they know why people get fired, why they get financial settlements, etc.

And the BSkyB thing is shaky. Josh Halliday, The Guardian:

The culture secretary declined an opportunity to throw his support behind James Murdoch’s continuing chairmanship of BSkyB, with the minister saying he could not give a settled view until police and public inquiries had concluded.

Jeremy Hunt, answering questions in the House of Commons on Thursday, said that “the most important thing is that the truth comes out” when asked if James Murdoch was a “fit and proper” person to run BSkyB.

General strike watch, Oakland update1

As peaceful as yesterday was, the overnight was less so. Kristin J. Bender, Sean Maher and Cecily Burt Oakland Tribune

The general strike Wednesday, the first one in Oakland since 1946, was mostly calm, peaceful and organized during the day.
…
But there was a ruckus at 11th Street and Broadway after two people were hit by a motorist.

About 8 p.m., a man and a woman were struck by a car at 11th Street and Broadway. The male driver of a silver Mercedes ran a red light and struck the pair, said Joe Jackson, 37, of Oakland, who witnessed the incident.

Onlookers said the driver deliberately ran over the protesters, and accelerated after a man hit the hood of the car. The windshield was splattered with what appeared to be a milkshake. After the car stopped at the other end of the intersection, the driver switched seats with his female passenger. About 40 people gathered in the intersection and some pulled open the driver’s door.

The woman inside shouted: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” The injured man and woman were taken away in ambulances.
…
Throughout the day, at least five businesses were vandalized, mostly banks and a Whole Foods Market.

At the Whole Foods at 27th and Bay streets, a splinter group wearing black clothing and face masks threw paint balls, left graffiti, tore up a fence and broke a window before the larger crowd turned on them and forced them to stop. About 75 people were inside the store at the time. No injuries were reported.
…
At Bank of America in downtown Oakland, some protesters pounded on the locked doors, defaced ATMs and broke a window before moving down the street to Wells Fargo.

Several windows were also broken at the Wells Fargo at 12th and Broadway by a splinter group as the majority of demonstrators urged them to stop.
…
There were also some unhappy truckers at the port when the protesters blocked the roadways.

From the blog:

Fences and dumpsters dragged across the roadway at 3rd and Adeline streets are preventing trucks and other vehicles from entering the port this morning. About a dozen protesters have had some scuffles with truckers.

Monique Agnew got in front of a truck with a camper shell that was forced its way in. When it charged, she hit it with a
sign she was carrying.

She said she has been there for several hours.

“These people tried to kill us. I can’t believe they are being that aggressive over a paycheck, over your own people fighting for you.”
…
After protesters called for help several times, an ambulance finally arrived to take away the injured man.

Graham Holoch, a student at the California college of the arts in Oakland, was a volunteer medic who tended to the man, using medical supplies he brought in a backpack.

“When we got him on the stretcher,” he said, “his vitals were pretty shaky.”

Holoch said he believed the man had been shot in the knee with a rubber bullet and gassed.
…
Interim police chief Howard Jordan says between 30 and 40 people have been arrested in downtown Oakland, although he could not provide an exact number.

First, do no harm

Harriett Sherwood, The Guardian:

Medical professionals in Israel are being accused of failing to document and report injuries caused by the ill-treatment and torture of detainees by security personnel in violation of their ethical code.

A report by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), claims that medical staff are also failing to report suspicion of torture and ill-treatment, returning detainees to their interrogators and passing medical information to interrogators.

The report, Doctoring the Evidence, Abandoning the Victim, to be published later this month, is based on 100 cases of Palestinian detainees brought to PCAT since 2007. …

Alleged ill-treatment of detainees, some of whose cases are detailed in the 61-page report, includes beatings, being held for long periods in stress positions, hands being tightly tied with plastic cuffs, sleep deprivation and threats. Israel denies torturing or ill-treating prisoners.

An alert observer will notice that many US prisoners are also being tortured (see, for example, here). So, we cannot claim moral superiority. But still, shame on physicians in whichever country who serve the torturer by concealing his crimes.

Amy Brendmoen: Stealth Republican?

Considering she’s backed by the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, and her supporters have enough money to be plastering my neighborhood with pricey full-color billboards and glossy direct-mail ads (see above), and she’s running against a perfectly good DFL councilmember, Lee Helgen, I strongly suspect so. Yeah, she touts both union and progressive endorsements, but the unions involved are police and fire, traditionally conservative Republican in their stances, and the scuttlebutt is that the one progressive endorsement was garnered in a rather suspicion-raising way in which her backers took advantage of Take Action Minnesota’s desire to punish various councilmembers for a single vote that TAM didn’t like (or they just felt like pushing a set of Green candidates and decided to endorse Brendmoen without caring about her conservative Chamber/cop backing).

I think I’ll stick with Lee Helgen, thanks.

UPDATE: Another telling thing: The St. Paul Police Federation’s Dave Titus is a good buddy of former Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, who was defeated by Matt Bostrom last year after a serious of scandals (Metro Gang Strike Force, RNC 2008 brutality, etc.). Bostrom backs Helgen, so one suspects another reason for Titus’ backing Brendmoen is as a way to get revenge for Fletcher’s loss and the downfall of the coterie of thumpers associated with Fletcher.