London Burning; Hundreds Rioting With Businesses and Cars Torched Across City

Three days of rioting is leaving its mark, and the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) is looking to deploy more than 10,000 police to quell the rioting. There's even word that the government will send in the Army to stop the protests.

At the same time, the police said they had launched a murder inquiry after a 26-year-old man, who was not identified by name, was shot and killed in a car in Croydon, south of London, late Monday as rioters torched and looted buildings — the first known fatality since the unrest began in another part of the city on Saturday.

Mr. Cameron spoke after cutting short a vacation in Tuscany to return home as violence convulsed at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area late Monday and early Tuesday and broke out for the first time in other locations including Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham.

Coming after a cascade of crises, the measures announced by Mr. Cameron seemed to represent a bid to restore some appearance of official authority after nights of chaos and near-anarchy with rioters taunting or outmaneuvering the police, raiding stores and torching buildings.

This is a black eye on the government with the 2012 Olympics just a year away. Some of the businesses near Olympic sites have been hit by rioters.

And there's word that the rioting has spread to other cities as well.

So, what started the riots? Well, it appears to be traced back to the death of a suspected drug dealer at the hands of police. Yet, the riots went from being one of protest about the death to a general riot for the sake of rioting and copycatting. Some are also tracing the protests to cuts in various programs as part of the government's austerity package to bring the government spending in line with receipts.

The riots appeared to have little unifying cause — though some involved claimed to oppose sharp government spending cuts, which will slash welfare payments and cut tens of thousands of public sector jobs through 2015.

Others appeared attracted simply by the opportunity for violence. "Come join the fun," shouted one youth, racing along a street in the east London suburb of Hackney, where shops were attacked and cars torched.

Rioters were left virtually unchallenged in several neighborhoods and able to plunder from stores at will or attempt to invade homes. Restaurants and stores fearful of looting closed early across London.

Expect the damage to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars before all is said and done - as businesses close in fear of damage and people attempt to recover from damage done to their properties.

News Corp Gearing Up For Scandal Spreading To US?

News Corp is busy hiring big-name lawyers to represent different portions of the company in the US against possible legal action from the hacking scandal that threatens to overtake the company in the UK.

The company's nine independent directors hired former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who served under President George W. Bush.

The directors are said to be increasingly concerned about Rupert Murdoch's stewardship of the firm and appear to be bracing for new U.S. legal trouble.

By denying knowledge of the phone hacking, bribery and hush money rampant at News of the World, experts said Rupert Murdoch and his son James may have left themselves open to shareholder charges of incompetence.

Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported News Corp. hired Washington lawyer Mark Mendelsohn, a top expert in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

These are prudent moves that any corporation would have to take, but it also signals just how serious the company is considering the possibility of charges in the US. They're worried about shareholder suits and criminal investigations.



At the same time, there are reports that there are still other news outlets in the UK that engaged in similar behavior, including ones that aren't affiliated with News Corp. They include The People (operated by The Mirror Group) and even Piers Morgan was accused of such tactics before coming to CNN.

On Tuesday, a member of Parliament accused the CNN anchor Piers Morgan of phone hacking when he was the editor of The Daily Mirror. Mr. Morgan strenuously denied the accusations and demanded an apology. And last week, news reports showed that the actor Jude Law has brought a hacking lawsuit against The News of the World’s sister newspaper, The Sun.

Five former journalists at The News of The World’s rival Sunday newspaper, The People, run by the Mirror group, said in interviews that they regularly witnessed hacking in that newsroom in the late 1990s to early 2000. “I don’t think anyone quite realized the criminality of it,” said one former reporter at The People, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A former reporter for the Sunday Mirror, another News of the World rival, described the extensive use of private detectives to obtain personal information. A former senior News of the World editor, Neil Wallis, who has been arrested on unspecified accusations of phone hacking, left The People in 2003 to join the Murdoch tabloid.

Nick Fullagar, director of communications for Trinity Mirror, the parent company of The Daily Mirror and The People, said, “Trinity Mirror’s position is clear. Our journalists work within the criminal law and the P.C.C. code of conduct,” referring to Britain’s press regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission. Within Mr. Murdoch’s empire, the flagship daily tabloid The Sun has also been accused of hacking phones. The lawsuit by Mr. Law, filed last month, says that four articles published in 2005 and 2006 were based on intercepted voice mail.

It also comes as no surprise that News Corp affiliates are soft-pedaling the news coverage; the Fox News Network has devoted a fraction of the coverage that CNN or MSNBC has done, and the NY Post has all but buried the scandal as compared to either the Daily News or the NY Times. The Wall Street Journal has covered the story prominently, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

The scandal is also threatening to take down the British government as new revelations about the hiring of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as Prime Minister David Cameron. Apparently, he didn't undergo the usual top level background checks of others up for similar positions.