UK court jails Murdoch's foam pie assailant

Autor: Administrator

London (CNN) -- A man who threw a shaving foam pie at media mogul Rupert Murdoch while he testified over the British phone hacking scandal has been jailed for six weeks, court officials told CNN Tuesday.

Jonathan May-Bowles caused an uproar when he thrust the paper plate covered in foam towards the face of News Corp. CEO Murdoch at a hearing before lawmakers in London last month.

Westminster Magistrates Court confirmed to CNN that Bowles, a self-described comedian and activist, had been sentenced to jail Tuesday over the public order offence.

May-Bowles pleaded guilty last week to assaulting Murdoch, the British Press Association reported.

Sentencing him, District Judge Daphne Wickham told May-Bowles he would spend three weeks of his six-week term in prison, the Press Association said.

The judge said he had disrupted an important parliamentary process that should take place in a "civilized fashion," and that she had taken into account the potential alarm caused to Murdoch by the incident.

May-Bowles was also ordered to pay £250 (about $407) costs and a £15 (about $25) "victim surcharge", a levy that is attached to any fine for a criminal offense and used to provide services for the victims of crime.

The foam pie incident was captured live on television as Murdoch and his son James answered questions from lawmakers over alleged wrongdoing by the staff of News Corp.'s British arm, News International.

The swift reaction of Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, who leapt to defend her 80-year-old husband and smashed Bowles's hand with her own, also attracted wide media interest. Murdoch was unharmed in the incident.

Spain, Italy scramble to combat debt woes

Autor: irishtimes.com

SPANISH AND Italian politicians scrambled yesterday to find a fresh response to the debt crisis engulfing the two countries as their borrowing costs hit new euro-era highs.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, delayed a planned summer holiday amid growing fears Madrid could become the latest European government to require a bailout.

In Rome, finance minister Giulio Tremonti and regulators convened an emergency session of Italy’s financial stability committee. Mr Tremonti is due to meet Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the group of euro zone finance ministers, in Luxembourg today to discuss the burgeoning crisis.

With Italy’s borrowing costs soaring to new euro-era highs, Silvio Berlusconi has been forced to break a month of near-total silence to defend his economic policies and prevent Europe’s sovereign debt crisis from transforming into a full-blown political emergency for his government.

The prime minister is to address both houses of parliament separately today, aware that market pressure is translating into growing calls for him and Mr Tremonti to resign.

Consensus is also building among economists and in the ranks of Mr Berlusconi’s own coalition that the €48 billion deficit-reduction package passed by parliament last month is insufficient and that Mr Tremonti should impose extra measures after the summer recess.

The flurry of activity yesterday came against the backdrop of another big sell-off in markets. Yields on benchmark 10-year Spanish and Italian bonds peaked at 6.45 per cent and 6.25 per cent respectively.

The premiums Madrid and Rome pay to borrow over Germany also reached new euro-era highs of 404 and 384 basis points.

Both the yields and premiums are close to levels that pushed Greece, Ireland and Portugal into bailouts. The premium France pays to borrow over Germany also hit a euro-era high of 75 basis points.

Analysts said it was difficult to see what could stop Spanish and Italian rates continuing to climb, particularly in light summer trading. “What can be announced to really break that? It is difficult to see,” said Laurent Fransolet, head of European fixed income research at Barclays Capital.

The sell-off follows continued uncertainty among investors about whether the European bail-out mechanism is big enough to deal with either Spain or Italy.

It has been heightened by worries about the possibility of recessions in the US and Europe, which has led to frenzied buying of perceived haven debt including Germany, the US and Britain.

German 10-year yields dipped below the domestic rate of inflation briefly yesterday, for the first time since at least 1960. US 10-year yields hit new year-lows of 2.65 per cent.

In Spain, government ministers and officials dismissed the tensions in the bond markets as “transitory” and “speculative”.

Like the European Commission, they ruled out the idea of a bailout for Spain.

Shares in Italian banks dropped sharply yesterday again, with Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo leading a 2.5 per cent drop in the FTSE MIB index of shares in Milan. Spanish shares dropped 1.2 per cent.

Fergal O’Leary of Dublin fixed income firm Glas Securities said while Irish bonds had seen a “positive” increase in turnover, Italy and Spain have been coming under pressure.“To put it in context, Ireland initially received its aid package at a cost of about 5.8 per cent,” he said. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)

Norris admits 'human error' as he exits presidential race

Autor: irishtimes.com

SENATOR DAVID Norris yesterday withdrew his candidacy from the presidential election in the autumn, admitting he made a “human error” in trying “to help a person I loved dearly”.

In a brief but dramatic address on the steps of his home on North Great George’s Street, Dublin, Mr Norris said he needed to act decisively to halt the negativity and controversy that had engulfed his campaign since the weekend. The dignity of the office of president was in danger of being tarnished by continuing lurid headlines about his past, he said.

“I deeply regret the most recent of all the controversies concerning my former partner of 25 years ago, Ezra Nawi,” said Mr Norris. “The fallout from his disgraceful behaviour has now spread to me and is in danger of contaminating others close to me both in my political and personal life.”

Mr Norris’s decision, widely expected, brought to an end almost four days of silence from the Dublin University Senator since it was disclosed he wrote a letter of clemency to an Israeli court on behalf of Mr Nawi in 1997. Mr Nawi was convicted of the statutory rape of a 15-year-old boy and subsequently spent one month in prison.

Mr Norris read from a prepared statement, expressing regret for the controversy and accepting he was wrong in writing the letter.

He struck a note of defiance in saying he neither regretted supporting nor seeking clemency for his friend but regretted giving the impression he did not have sufficient compassion for the victim. “I accept that more than a decade and a half later when I have now reviewed the issue and am not emotionally involved, when I was afraid that Ezra might take his own life, I see that I was wrong.”

According to several people who spoke to Mr Norris at the weekend, the Senator remained determined to stand until Monday night, when three Independent TDs announced they were withdrawing their support. Mr Norris told Today FM’s The Last Word yesterday that, at that stage, it became clear support was beginning to drain away and it would not have been possible to attract support from 20 Senators and TDs.

“It was going to become much nastier and much worse . . . Other people would have got caught up collaterally,” he said.

Mr Norris said he had been hurt and shocked by the abrupt resignation of key members of his campaign last Thursday, when they first learned of the existence of the correspondence with the Israeli court.

He said what hurt him most and gave him a slight sense of betrayal was that those members of his team believed he deliberately concealed the fact of the letters. He said that following earlier controversies over magazine interviews, he had trawled back 10 years to see if there were any other potentially contentious incidents or comments. He said he had genuinely forgotten about the letters, partly because of the passage of time and partly because of their context. “I am responsible for that but not responsible in a deliberate way,” he said.

Mr Norris dismissed speculation that his future in the Seanad was in question: “Time will tell. This Government may last four [more] years. At that stage I will be 71 . . . I am certainly not giving up now. There are too many things I am interested in.”

He accepted that he would have found it very difficult to recover from the controversy, even if he had garnered the necessary support.

“I believe the office of president is a very important and symbolic one that should not be tarnished. The lurid headlines being flung around would have made it difficult for me to unite the people behind me,” he said.

In making his statement, Mr Norris said he was proud to have made it possible for “a gay person to be seen as a viable candidate for the highest office in the land”. He concluded by quoting Samuel Beckett. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”