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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Police: Remains Found Believed To Be Missing Girl

Associated Press

This Dec. 1, 2010 photo released by the Louisville Metropolitan Dept. of Corrections shows Heather Leavell Kenton. Police are still searching for two missing Alabama children: five-year-old Natalie DeBlase and three-year-old Jonathan DeBlase. Their father, John Deblase, was arrested in Florida and charged with child abuse and two counts of abuse of a corpse. The children's step-mother, Heather Keaton, was arrested h in Louisville last week.

Enlarge Associated Press

John DeBlase, father of the two children who are missing and presumed dead, is arraigned on charges before Judge Charles McKnight Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010, in Mobile, Ala. (Press-Register, Mike Kittrell)

Associated Press

Enlarge Associated Press

Investigators work a crime scene along Miss. 57, several miles north of Vancleave, Miss., where a body was discovered on Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010. Mobile Police Officer Chris Levy said authorities are convinced the remains found Wednesday morning about 50 feet off a highway in rural Mississippi are those of Chase DeBlase, but they will conduct tests to confirm the identity.

Associated Press

Enlarge Associated Press

Associated Press

Enlarge Associated Press

In this 2009 photo provided by Richard DeBlase, Natalie, front right, and Chase DeBlase, back right, are shown. Uncovering how the two missing Alabama children died has police picking through wildly different tales from two suspects _ the father and stepmother _ as allegations of poison, rage and abuse swirl.

Associated Press

Associated Press

In this undated photo provided by Richard DeBlase, Natalie, left, and Chase DeBlase are shown. Uncovering how the two missing Alabama children died has police picking through wildly different tales from two suspects _ the father and stepmother _ as allegations of poison, rage and abuse swirl.

Searchers found human remains Saturday in the woods off a rural Alabama road believed to be the daughter of a man already charged with murdering the girl and her younger brother, police said.

Mobile Police Maj. Kara Rose said search teams found the remains at 9 a.m., just half an hour after authorities began scouring the woods along six miles of a rural county road.

John DeBlase, 27, is charged with two counts of felony murder and two counts of corpse abuse. Skeletal remains found Wednesday in the woods of rural Mississippi are believed to belong to his 3-year-old son Chase.

The remains found Saturday are believed to be that of Natalie DeBlase, Rose said. Natalie would have turned 5 in late November.

Police have said DeBlase's common-law wife, Heather Leavell-Keaton, also is responsible for the killings. She has been charged with child abuse but has not been charged with murder. She was being extradited to Alabama and was expected to arrive there Sunday.

DeBlase's court-appointed attorney, Jim Sears, has said DeBlase maintains that he is innocent and that Leavell-Keaton killed the children. She has blamed DeBlase for the children's deaths. Police have said they share responsibility for the slayings.

Attorneys for DeBlase have said he will plead not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Sears said Friday that comments made by friends that called into question DeBlase's mental health are "certainly not without reason."

Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Jo Beth Murphree said Friday that authorities would soon be upgrading Leavell-Keaton's charges from child abuse to more serious aggravated child abuse counts. She also was to be charged with two counts of corpse abuse.

DeBlase had told police he dumped his daughter Natalie in the woods north of Mobile in March. He said he discarded the boy's body, dressed only in a diaper and stuffed into a plastic garbage bag, in Mississippi in June on or around Father's Day. Police say the children were killed separately, then immediately disposed of.

DeBlase and Leavell-Keaton were arrested last week on the abuse charges, and authorities began their search for the children's remains in Alabama and Mississippi over the weekend. Neither child had been seen for months.

An investigation into their disappearance didn't start until late last month after Leavell-Keaton sought a protective order against DeBlase in Kentucky, Levy said. She said in the Nov. 18 filing that DeBlase may have killed his children, and that she feared for her life because he was abusive. The couple had a child together this summer. That child is in state custody in Kentucky.

"I am afraid that he is going to do something to harm our daughter because of what he has done to the other children," she wrote.

Meanwhile, arrest warrants in the case accuse Leavell-Keaton of abusing the boy and girl.

The documents accuse Leavell-Keaton of binding the girl's hands and feet with duct tape, putting a sock in her mouth and stuffing her in a suitcase in a closet for about 14 hours.

The warrants also accuse Leavell-Keaton of duct-taping the boy's hands to the side of his legs, strapping a broom handle to his back and shoving a sock in his mouth, then forcing him to stand in a corner all night while the adults went to bed.

The documents say the abuse happened sometime after March 1.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131813054&ft=1&f=

Mike Huckabee

So Who's Holding the Unemployed Hostage Now?

John Merline, AOL News
John Merline Opinion Editor Subscribe to http://feeds.news.aol.com/synfeeds/collect/10/rss.xml24 MINUTES AGO47 MINUTES AGO16 MINUTES AGO1 HOUR 10 MINUTES AGO55 MINUTES AGO32 MINUTES AGOONE MINUTE AGOONE MINUTE AGO2 MINUTES AGO16 MINUTES AGOONE MINUTE AGOONE MINUTE AGODiscover inspiring videos on TEDWomen where people are reshaping our future with ideas.Sacred sighting by a pub in Australia36 Christmas trees falling on 35 peopleExpensive-looking, but all under $70How to throw a chic holiday bashIf web browsers were celebrities.Latest news,...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2010/12/11/so_who039s_holding_the_unemployed_hostage_now_247191.html

Aung San Suu Kyi Queen Elizabeth II King Abdullah Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Omar al-Bashir

Amen, Brother

...the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."

Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation."

For his part, Assange has not been shy about expressing his contempt for the failure of traditional reporting to inform the public, and his belief in the utility of his own methods. "How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?" he told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It's disgraceful."

Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional - terms that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.

--from The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange by David Samuels, who ascribes this barrage of bad faith, banal psychologizing, and moral showboating to the ineffectuality of corporate journalism in this decade of fear and austerity:

It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest - and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.

The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put together - a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job...

Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. The likely arrest of Assange in Britain on dubious Swedish sex crimes charges has nothing to do with the importance of the system he has built, and which the US government seems intent on destroying with tactics more appropriate to the Communist Party of China -- pressuring Amazon to throw the site off their servers, and, one imagines by launching the powerful DDOS attacks that threatened to stop visitors from reading the pilfered cables.

In a memorandum entitled "Transparency and Open Government" addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing." The Administration would be wise to heed his words -- and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

I would add that the Pulitzer Prizes should have been abolished a long time ago--they confer a piety on too many recipients that gets converted into sanctimony and released from their blowholes until their blowholes can blow no mo', to quote from blues scripture.

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/12/amen-brother.html

Rev. Al Sharpton Than Shwe Aung San Suu Kyi Yulia Tymoshenko Elizabeth Windsor

Something Wiki This Way Comes

Viana: What is your opinion about the freezing of your money transfers by the business PayPal, and that Amazon removed your site? How do you see those acts?

Assange: It is fascinating to see the tentacles of the corrupt American elite. In some ways, seeing the reaction is as important as the material we have released. PayPal and Amazon froze our accounts for political reasons. With PayPal, 70,000 euros were frozen. With our defense fund, that was 31,000 euros.

Viana: What do they allege?

Assange: They say that we were conducting ?illegal activities,? and that clearly is untrue. More, they are echoing the accusations of (US Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton about publishing embarrassing US government documents. However, the head of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security bragged to the press about how he had called Amazon and demanded they shut us down.

Viana: What is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself from the freezing of its donations?

Assange: We have lost 100,000 euros this week alone as a result of the freezing of our assets. We have accounts in other banks - in Iceland and Germany, for example, that the public can still use. We have a website. We also accept credit card donations.

Viana: What more is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself?

Assange: We are counting on a diversity of support from good people. We have more than 350 websites in the world that are reproducing our content. We value that more than anything.

--from an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by Natalia Viana at Narco News.

And be sure to read Al Giordano's long take on the WikiLeaks furor. He argues that the mass docu dump resulted in a ball of confusion obscuring the value and importance of the more vital, telling cables.

Sure, WikiLeaks has increased the reach of its own brand name. Was that the primary goal? Again, I don't know. But it has also hastened the day by which other, newer ventures, will replace it in the work of making secret documents public, because, fair or not, it is not at all clear that WikiLeaks itself can withstand the intense scrutiny, reaction and repression now upon it. We?re sympathetic to WikiLeaks. We oppose those attacking it. We will defend it from spurious prosecution (our attorneys, who essentially wrote the law that protects WikiLeaks, are also on standby). We hope it can withstand the firestorm. But we?re reality-based and have seen radical celebrity stories turn quickly to flashes in the pan before. This game ain?t tiddlywinks. There are real consequences at play. And it's tough for metal to go through fire if it wasn't forged in fire, first.

What will remain, though, and it?s a wonderful thing, is that the whole world now knows that anyone can make unseen documents shoot ?round the world in the course of a day. A thousand whistleblowers, in every land, are pondering the new landscape, with itchy trigger fingers on the send button. And Washington, methinks, protests too much, because the next waves will surely include leaks of documents from other countries, too, probably including from many of its adversaries. And then their Secretaries of State will be likewise screaming bloody murder and issuing stern threats to the media that expose them. The tactic of exposing hidden information is not wed to any ideology or ?ism.? It is merely a tool that can be made to work for all sides in any conflict. Don?t be surprised if the next big data dump comes from leaked documents from Iran, or North Korea, Russia or any number of State powers at odds with the United States. This pox will soon be upon all houses of State and upon private corporations, too. (I?ve long said: The next Daniel Ellsberg will have to come from inside the New York Times rather than leaking to it.) And that, too, is as it should be: Information is Life! It finds a way!

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/12/something-wiki-this-way-comes.html

King Abdullah Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Omar al-Bashir Gloria Arroyo Joe Biden

US embassy cables: Iraqi president calls on Iran to release British sailors

Wednesday, 04 April 2007, 09:22
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 BAGHDAD 001157
SIPDIS
SIPDIS
EO 12958 DECL: 04/01/2017
TAGS PGOV, PREL, SA, IR, SY, IZ
SUBJECT: TALABANI WELCOMES AMBASSADOR, DISCUSSES ARAB
SUMMIT, BAGHDAD SECURITY, DE-BA'ATH
Classified By: Ambassador Ryan Crocker per 1.4 (b) and (d)

1. (C) SUMMARY: The Ambassador met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari March 31 to present his credentials. They discussed Talabani's trip to Riyadh for the Arab Summit and the side meetings he held with other Arab leaders, including a discussion on Kirkuk and the PKK with Turkish PM Erdogan. Talabani claimed that the Baghdad security initiative was going well and had successfully brought in the Sunnis. He also expressed his willingness to meet with resistance leaders. He said that the Presidency, PM, and SCIRI leader Hakim had approved the compromise draft de-Ba'athification law which he said had been forwarded to the Council of Representatives. Talabani has written a letter to Iran asking for the release of the British sailors but received no response. The President was mentally sharp and growing in strength, although by the end of the meeting he was showing signs of fatigue. END SUMMARY.

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Welcome

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2. (C) Talabani welcomed the Ambassador and expressed his conviction that he and Iraq and are real friends of the U.S. He said Iraq and the U.S. were partners in the fight for democracy and against dictatorship. He made apologies for not meeting the Ambassador the day before, blaming his staff of overprotecting him and failing to tell him of the request for a meeting. He said he is prepared to meet with the Ambassador at any time and invited him to a meal in the near future.

3. (C) The Ambassador told Talabani he was glad to be back in Iraq and praised Talabani's efforts to build a relationship with the U.S. He said he would do everything in his power to support democracy and prosperity in Iraq. He thanked Talabani for his help on a number of important issues, including de-Ba'athification and hydrocarbons. He said the U.S. is here to support Iraqi policy. The FM Zebari echoed this sentiment, saying that the Iraqi people need to understand that these are Iraqi goals.

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Arab Summit

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4. (C) Talabani said he "explained everything" in his speech to the Arab League. He spoke of the liberation of Iraq and how Coalition troops were welcomed by the Iraqi people in 2003, but lamented the passage of UN Resolution 1483. In response to King Abdullah's negative comments about the US's "illegal occupation" of Iraq, he thanked coalition forces and called for a resolution condemning terrorist activities. He told the League they cannot be divided, they must all be working for reconciliation. He said Iraq was proud to be independent and did not follow the dictates of countries to the east and north (alluding to Iran and Turkey). He claimed that the Iraqi Shia were independent from Iran and explained to the League that oil is a national asset shared by all Iraqis and difficulties in this area will be worked out.

5. (C) Talabani said in his side meeting with Amr Mousa, Secretary General of the Arab League, he criticized the

SIPDIS exclusion of crimes and terrorism taking place in Iraq in the Secretary General's report, to which Mousa responded that he

SIPDIS would add it. He said he also had private meetings with the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and with Turkish PM Erdogan, whom he invited to send a delegation to Kirkuk to examine the situation and prove that Turkomen are not being treated poorly. He told Erdogan that Kirkuk is a cultural issue that cannot be decided by strong words from both sides. He expressed bemusement that Erdgoan still thought of him and KRG President Massoud Barzani as tribal chiefs. He told Erdogan that he and the KRG condemn any terrorist activity against Turkey, to which Erdogan responded positively. On the PKK issue he told Erdogan tat currently Iraq had to devote all its resources to securing Baghdad, but he said PKK activity is against the interests of the Kurdish people.

6. (C) He also spoke with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Riyadh and asked him why they had seen no results from their agreement to cooperate on security matters made when Talabani visited in January. He said Assad promised to begin cooperating.

---------------------------

BSP and Sunni Participation

---------------------------

7. (C) According to Talabani, the Baghdad security initiative has been successfully implemented in a way that

BAGHDAD 00001157 002 OF 002

targets not just Sunni areas, but all parts of the city. He said even Iran was cooperating in some ways by directing the Sadrist Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) militia to cease targeting Sunnis. This will reduce sectarian tensions, he said. Iran had also stopped helping Thar-Allah, a Shia militia group in the south, according to Talabani.

8. (C) He said the situation was much better than a few months ago, referencing the PM's involvement of the Sunnis in the security plan. Talabani said he hoped that the Ambassador's arrival was another step forward in this regard.

9. (C) He said before his illness he had a discussion with the PM on steps to reach out to Sunni parties within the GOI. They agreed on the need for regular meetings between the Presidency and the PM, as well as regular PCNS meetings. He said the Presidency must also hold regular meetings to coordinate on the issues. He said it was vital for them to be on the same page in the fight against terrorism or at least to use the same language so that they do not send confusing messages to the press and public.

---------------------------------

Reconciliation/De-Ba'athification

---------------------------------

10. (C) Talabani said they are continuing their efforts for national reconciliation and told the Ambassador that the people are forming groups to fight terrorism and cooperating with government forces against the terrorists. He said he has been contacted by members of the national resistance movement and reported that before traveling to Riyadh he met with the UK Ambassador to Iraq and the ranking UK General in Iraq and discussed meeting with members of the resistance.

11. (C) The Ambassador thanked Talabani for his critical role in reconciliation efforts and inquired on the status of the draft de-Ba'athification law. Talabani told him that it had been sent to the Council of Representatives (CoR) for debate and approval (Note: according to Embassy contacts at the CoR they have not yet received it and it is with the Council of Ministers. End Note). Talabani said that the PM had signed the draft law for the government and he had signed in the name of the Presidency because the two Vice-Presidents were out of the country but had given him their approval. He said he announced the law at the Arab Summit where it was received with approval. He also discussed the draft law with SCIRI leader Abdelaziz al-Hakim and Hummam Hammudi, SCIRI CoR member and Foreign Relations Committee Chair, who were with him at the Summit as "houseguests" and who he claimed both approved it.

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British Detainees

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12. (C) Talabani said he wrote a letter to the president of Iran which called for the release of the British sailors. In it, he told the Iranians that the Shat al-Arab is important and the Brits were trying to prevent smuggling. He dispatched an envoy to deliver the letter but the envoy returned empty-handed - the Iranians want an apology from the United Kingdom. Talabani added that the Iranians were concerned about his health, joking that the one thing that the US and Iran have in common is concern for "the health of Talabani."

13. (C) Comment: Talabani appeared tired and seemed to have more difficulty than usual speaking English. His staff, probably concerned for his health, had refused to schedule any meetings for March 30. CROCKER

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/103070

Omar al-Bashir Gloria Arroyo Joe Biden Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud King Abdulla

You think David Cameron's bad, Morrissey? Most of them don't even like music | Suzanne Moore

The Smiths are half-right to disown the PM's fandom. But it's people with no musical convictions who are most suspect

Good old Morrissey should keep his quiff stiff and not worry too much about whether David Cameron likes the Smiths or not. Though Big Mouth Strikes Again, for he has ranted at length about why he did not not write Meat is Murder or The Queen is Dead for the likes of fragrant Dave. You don't say?

He was supporting his erstwhile bandmate Johnny Marr, who had simply tweeted, "David Cameron, stop saying you like the Smiths, no you don't. I forbid you to like it." I have every sympathy, but once your music is out there in the world, rather like your kids, you have no control over its strange new friends. Even Morrissey admitted in his rant that music is "a universal language" and "belongs to all". Indeed it does, and this week prime minister's questions turned into a pub quiz, with Labour MP Kerry McCarthy and Cameron trading Smiths song titles in an exchange about tuitions fees. Students liked the Smiths! Geddit?

Cameron also professes to liking the Jam's Eton Rifles ? or Eating Trifles as we used to sing in my house. That time Paul Weller objected: "Which part of it doesn't he get?" At least Cameron may have heard these songs, unlike Gordon Brown and his Arctic Monkeys fiasco.

If you didn't think things could get any worse than that, let me tell you they can. I go to the party political conferences every year, and every year the music gets more inappropriate. Political conferences are full of people who get drunk and dance on carpets in hotels. I am not saying all of them are devoid of discrimination when it comes to music, but let's put it this way: I am not voting for a party that cannot get a decent playlist together. I'm with Rosa Luxemburg. If I can't dance I don't want to part of your revolution.

Call me superficial, call me a snob, call me a bloke ? but music matters, and I don't trust people who don't think it's important. No one expects the Tories to be sussed, even though this year they had a stab at inoffensive preppy modernity with Vampire Weekend and the Killers. Sorry, but I can't hear the Killers without hearing Bill Bailey's brilliant riff on their meaningless "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" lyric, which he has as "I've got ham but I'm not a hamster".

Labour did my head in. It always does. I got there early for the leadership announcement, and as usual Labour went quite ravey. One expects them to hand out MDMA instead of graphs about SureStart. One year they played Right Here, Right Now even though Norman Cook was vociferously against the Iraq war.

Most of the people around me seemed not to care about the music, rather about whether it was going to be Ed or Dave. But I couldn't not listen. Van Morrison and then Cockney Rebel? "It's just a test/ A game for us to play/ Win or lose/ It's hard to smile/ Resist, resist/ It's from yourself you have to hide."

What a lovely track to play as we waited for fratricide! Still, the best was yet to come. All around me stood to cheer Gordon Brown. I was in shock. He was coming on stage to Soul Man (Sam & Dave not James Brown). "Comin' to you/ On a dusty road/ Good lovin'/ I got a truckload".

Whoa Gordon ? I'm a soul man, yes I am! Who chose this? Peter (Dancing Queen) Mandelson or Alastair (Ne Me Quitte Pas) Campbell?

Wasn't the key issue dogging Brown's leadership his, er ? lack of soul? Reading accounts of all this afterwards, in a hotel lobby playing an easy listening version of Pretty Vacant, I realised I was a fish out of water. Music doesn't matter to these guys ? it is simply something to induce mood. What was I expecting? Sunn 0)))?

Still, I can never accept the divide between political culture and actual culture. Right here, right now, we are in the midst of all sorts of exciting protests. Where is that soundtrack? The last time the Tories were in power we had the Specials and the Pop Group, but I don't want to look back, I want to look forward. We see protest music nostalgically because we define it so narrowly. Music of protest is seen as belonging to the past. Sure, no one is going to write Neil Young's Ohio again, or Give Peace a Chance. But Jarvis Cocker did write Common People. A key anthem. Look at hip-hop, at Jay-Z, Kanye and Public Enemy, never mind the more underground stuff, and tell me this is not music of protest. Look at the new folk scene.

Unsurprisingly, our top politicians' musical choices don't stray into what is politely referred to these days as urban music ? ie, black music. The riskiest stuff they go for is a bit of Bowie and some glum Radiohead. Cameron didn't choose any Roxy Music, despite Bryan and Otis's penchant for killing wild animals. But perhaps he doesn't remember A Song for Europe. At a civil liberties event a couple of years back, Brian Eno turned up to speak, and most people in the green room didn't know he was. "It's Eno," I kept saying. "You know, Roxy? Ambient?" They didn't. These serious political types. Eventually I persuaded some security guy to let him onstage.

What is so odd to me is this lack of musical curiosity. It is as if the political classes have erased their youth. Yet we distrust politicians without "hinterland". William Hague (teenage Meat Loaf fan) suffered from precisely this. But then when one happens on a politician who does like music, it's unsettling. My mate ended up next to Geoff Hoon at a Dylan concert. Quite spoiled it for him. Then Hoon, when not defending cluster bombing, found time to write paeans to Pink Floyd! Set my controls for the heart of the sun.

There is no accounting for taste. And I would prefer a Hoon to the Blairs, who were the epitome of naffness. It's hard to imagine them, or Brown, ever Lost in Music ? even the Fall's magnificent version.

I am not a tyrant. Not everyone has to like what I like, but I can't imagine a better world without a better soundtrack. And isn't it telling that Ken Clarke, everyone's favourite Tory, didn't care about fashion or focus groups when he did Desert Island Discs a few years ago? He just picked what we know he gets off on: Charlie Parker, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

I like the courage of his convictions. Those without musical ones are suspect to me. But then, I will always be 15. And there will always be Mot�rhead. And their new single, Get Back in Line, has just arrived! "We live on borrowed time/ Hope turned to dust/ Nothing is forgiven/ We fight for every crust ? Why do we vote for faceless dogs?/ We always take the bait/ All things come to he who waits/ But all things come too late."

All this to a video with Lemmy and co taking a baseball bat to some bankers.

The only thing that could spoil that for me is finding out it's on George Osborne's iPod.

Suzanne Moore

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/11/suzanne-moore-morrissey-david-cameron

Sam Brownback Laura Bush George W. Bush George H. W. Bush Jimmy Carter

'Russian spy' researcher used MP's email and controlled his computer

Ekaterina Zatuliveter was 'flirty and intimate' with MP Mike Hancock, according to two former interns

A parliamentary researcher awaiting deportation to Russia for suspected espionage controlled the office computer of the MP for whom she worked and used his parliamentary email address.

Ekaterina Zatuliveter, the assistant of Mike Hancock, was also the subject of a complaint to the Liberal Democrat whips' office after accusing an intern of trying to read files stored on the office hard drive, the Guardian has learned.

The disclosures raise fresh questions about Zatuliveter's access to information and whether she could have used Hancock's email to seek privileged information without his knowledge.

Zatuliveter, 25, was taken into custody on Thursday last week, reportedly on MI5's orders. Her presence was claimed to be not "conducive to national security". She is alleged to be the first Russian spy caught in parliament since the cold war.

She had worked for Hancock for two years when she was arrested and detained on immigration charges. Two former interns told the Guardian last week that Hancock had a "flirtatious" and "intimate" relationship with Zatuliveter, known by friends as Katia. Hancock tonight declined to comment on those allegations.

Hancock confirmed this week that Zatuliveter had access to his official email and sent messages from it. He has admitted he did not use one of two computers in his parliamentary office and left it to her.

Asked if he was aware she was sending emails from his parliamentary address, Hancock said: "Of course I was. I didn't use the address at all. I had my own private address that she didn't use. Other members of my staff in Portsmouth also access my parliamentary emails.

"I don't use the computers ? I just occasionally look at the internet. When I need to use it, I have to call up the computer people in the house for the password.

"I don't think she used my email address to do anything behind my back."

Zatuliveter was the subject of an official complaint in 2009 to the Lib Dems' office by a fellow intern for alleged paranoid behaviour.

Zatuliveter accused the young woman, who had worked in the office for two weeks, of trying to read Hancock's emails and personal files including bank accounts stored on the parliamentary computer.

The intern, who had already decided to leave her post, wrote in an email to Hollie Voyce in the whips' office that the allegations were false and that Zatuliveter had shouted at her and acted in an unprofessional way.

A Lib Dem source said that the allegations from the intern were looked into by the whips' office, who contacted Hancock. The MP said that at the heart of the dispute was a personality clash, but he stood by Zatuliveter's version of events.

"The whips were told by me what had happened and were happy with this explanation," he said.

Russia's most senior diplomat in London this week warned that any attempts to remove Zatuliveter could result in recriminations in Moscow. Alexander Sternik, the charg� d'affaires at the Russian embassy, claimed the allegations were a smokescreen to hide Britain's embarrassment over the WikiLeaks allegations and England's failure to beat Russia in the race to host the 2018 World Cup.

Zatuliveter started working for Hancock in 2008 and had previously been an intern at the House of Commons. She was first stopped in the summer and police have interviewed her at least four times since.

She came to Britain three years ago to study for a master's degree in peace studies at Bradford University. She has vowed to fight her deportation case.

Today the Russian embassy's consul and doctor visited Zatuliveter at Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire. They described her as in good spirits and confident that "justice will be done".

The embassy said Zatuliveter had still not been given an explanation for her arrest, despite "numerous requests". It described the reasons for her detention as "unsubstantiated".

Rajeev Syal

Luke Harding

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/10/russian-spy-researcher-used-hancock-email

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