WILL “SMOKING GUN” BE FOUND IN NEWS CORP EMAIL?

Supposedly lost internal email messages among editors and reporters working for News International, the division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp that oversees its British newspaper and TV news operations, may throw new light on allegations of telephone hacking activities by the company’s Sunday tabloid, News of the World, the London Independent reported today (Monday). During a criminal trial in Scotland last November, News of the World editor Bob Bird testified that the emails had gone missing after being transferred from the newspaper to a storage site in Mumbai, India. However, the Independent reported that the email files exist intact in the U.K. and that none had been transferred to India. In an interview with the newspaper, Labor MP Tom Watson noted that Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to follow the evidence in the telephone hacking scandal wherever it might lead. “We now know it leads to a data warehouse in London containing all News International emails from 2005 onwards,” Watson said.