Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated PressRebekah Brooks, left, in 2002 with Sara Payne, the mother of an 8-year-old girl who was murdered by a pedophile in 2000.
As my colleagues Sarah Lyall and Ravi Somaiya report, British police officials investigating the hacking of phones by News of the World journalists “have added to the list of probable victims a woman whose 8-year-old daughter was murdered by a repeat sex offender in 2000.”
The woman, Sara Payne, is known in Britain for a successful campaign she led to change British law following the death of her daughter, Sarah. Under the terms of the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, parents are allowed to ask the police if a known sex offender lives nearby. After a trial period, the law was implemented across England and Wales last year.
Mrs. Payne fought for the law, which became known as Sarah’s Law in memory of the murdered girl. Her killer lived within five miles of the Paynes and was on Britain’s sex offender registry, and Ms. Payne was convinced that her daughter’s death could have been prevented had she known his history.
Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of The News of the World at the time, threw her newspaper’s support behind the campaign; the tabloid even provided Mrs. Payne with a cellphone to help her with the campaign. Read more…
5:46 p.m. | Updated The police in Texas have arrested a soldier in his motel room near the Fort Hood Army base, according to news reports. An F.B.I. special agent told Reuters that the soldier had been found with what may be “bomb-making materials” when he was arrested on Wednesday.
The arrest raised fears of a new plot to attack soldiers at Fort Hood, where on Nov. 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, went on a shooting rampage at a medical facility on the base that killed 13 people and wounded 32.
Military officials at Fort Hood said in a statement on Thursday that the suspect, Naser Abdo, is not based there.
“At this time, there has been no incident at Fort Hood,” said the statement, which was posted on the base’s Facebook page. “We continue our diligence in keeping our force protection at appropriate levels.”
The statement said Mr. Abdo had been arrested by police in the town of Killeen, to the south of the base. Read more…
The Hollywood premiere of “Electronic Daisy Carnival Experience,” a documentary film about an electronic music festival, descended into chaos on Wednesday after police canceled an impromptu block party organized online that drew thousands to the front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.
The Hollywood Reporter, on hand to review the new film about a certain slice of underground dance music culture, described the scene as a “near melee” and “nothing short of absolute chaos” from about 5 p.m. to 8 p.m:
Police in riot gear fought off crowds who came to see well-known California-based DJ Kaskade in a scene recalling the worst music-related riots since Depeche Mode’s ill-fated record signing event in 1990 at the former Wherehouse Music near the Beverly Center.
Vegard Gratt/Scanpix, via Associated PressA meeting of young political activists on the Norwegian island of Utoya on Thursday, one day before a massacre there.
In the five days since the deadly attacks in Norway, the world has paid a huge amount of attention to the ideas of Anders Behring Breivik — as he no doubt intended when he posted a manifesto online before setting off on his killing spree.
As my colleague Nicholas Kulish reports, the attacker’s ideology has already entered into the political debate in several European countries — including Sweden, Italy and France — where nationalist politicians opposed to immigration were forced to denounce some of their party members who suggested that while the killings were repulsive, the killer’s fear and hatred of Muslim immigrants was understandable or even inevitable.
A good deal less attention has been paid to the ideas of the dozens of people he killed, among them young members of a Norwegian political party who were attending a summer conference at a campground on Utoya. Read more…
New videos from the moment of the blast in Oslo and its immediate aftermath have continued to emerge as Norway struggles to cope with scale of Friday’s devastating violence.
A closed circuit camera captured the force of the bomb’s shock as it ripped through the center of the city, blowing out shop windows and knocking over merchandise with the apparent force of an earthquake.
As the Norwegian national broadcaster NRK reports, the above footage came from a surveillance camera in an electronics store, Digital Impuls, which is located near Grubbegata, the Oslo street lined with government buildings where the blast was detonated. Nikolai Skoglund, an employee, said he knew it was an explosion and not an earthquake after emerging from the store to smell a strange odor and seeing a cloud of smoke and dust. Read more…
Saad Mohseni, an Afghan media mogul who owns the popular Tolo TV network, has alerted his Twitter followers to stand by for the debut next month of a new comedy series, “The Ministry,” which appears to be an Afghan version of “The Office” in all but name.
Mr. Mohseni posted a link to this subtitled trailer for the series, which is a fake documentary look at office life in the mythical country of Hechland’s ministry of garbage:
As in the original BBC series, and the American version it inspired, the comedy seems to revolve around interviews with a deluded, self-important figure — in this case, Hechland’s minister of garbage.
Hechland is a country not so far far away. The minister of So On and So Forth is even inept at is having his palms greased. His staff excel at taking tea, lots of it, all day, and do their best to do not much else. Hechland brings tears to the eyes of Afghans every Friday night at 8 p.m. – as they roll their toshak laughing.
Video broadcast on Libyan state television on Tuesday of a rally in support of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government appeared to show Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.
The public appearance in Libya comes nearly two years after Mr. Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds and said to have just three months to live.
In a copy of the video posted online by London’s Telegraph, Mr. Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent, was seated in a wheelchair, wearing a surgical mask.
According to a BBC report on the footage, Libyan state television said that the rally was being shown live on Tuesday, and an announcer declared that “half of the world” had conspired against Mr. Megrahi. Read more…
Video of James Murdoch being questioned last week by Tom Watson, a Labour member of Parliament.
The chairman of the British parliamentary panel that questioned Rupert and James Murdoch last week about phone hacking wants to hear from three men who claim that the Murdochs gave inaccurate testimony.
John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament who chairs the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, told The Evening Standard of London on Tuesday: “It is somewhat frustrating to keep hearing media reports about people wishing to correct evidence. If they have doubts about any testimony they should get in touch with us immediately.”
Mr. Whittingdale was referring to statements released in recent days by three men who all held senior positions at News International, the Murdochs’ British newspaper division, until earlier this month. Read more…
Young protesters seeking to oust Senegal’s aging president filled the streets outside a central courthouse in the capital, Dakar, on Tuesday, a day after the police arrested a rapper and prominent democracy activist.
A Facebook page for the country’s youth-driven protest movement, Y’en a Marre, or We’re Fed Up, had urged supporters to gather in peaceful protest in front of the court building in the capital where the rapper and democracy activist, Omar Touré, was brought after spending a night in jail.
Image via FacebookOmar Touré, known by the stage name Thiat, sitting on the right in this screenshot from the Y’en a Marre movement Facebook page. The image was uploaded in March.
At a news conference in Oslo on Tuesday, Geir Lippestad, a lawyer acting for Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-Muslim extremist who carried out Friday’s massacre in Norway, told reporters that his client said “he’s in a war, and he believes that when you are in a war you can do things like that without pleading guilty.”
Mr. Lippestad, who spoke in English, also said that the attacker took drugs before he set off a bomb in Oslo and embarked on a shooting rampage that left more than 70 people dead. The facts of the case, the lawyer added, indicate that his client “is insane.” This ITN video report includes more of the lawyer’s comments:
At another point in the news conference, which can be seen in video posted on the Web site of Norway’s state broadcaster NRK, Mr. Lippestad said that his client “says that he is sorry that he had to do this, but it was necessary to start a revolution in the Western world.” Read more…
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Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated PressRebekah Brooks, left, in 2002 with Sara Payne, the mother of an 8-year-old girl who was murdered by a pedophile in 2000.
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