Alyssa Milano, 38, and her husband David Bugliari welcomed their baby boy, Milo Thomas Bugliari, on Wednesday at 9:27 a.m.

Little Milo weighed 7 lbs., and was 19 inches long.

She was all belly during her pregnancy and looked super cute!

CONGRATS!

photo: Wenn.com

SATURDAY, AUG 27, 2011 18:01 ET

The Other Woman has always been fundamental to our understanding of marriage. Now her role is changing

BY ELIZABETH ABBOTT

AP

Marilyn Monroe

This article is was adapted from “Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman”, arriving on September 1 from Duckworth Overlook.

I grew up knowing about mistresses because my great-grandfather Stephen Adelbert Griggs, an affluent Detroit brewer and municipal politician, maintained what my mother scornfully referred to as a “love nest” occupied by a series of “fancy” women. Great-grandmother Minnie Langley had to tolerate this, but she exacted a price: for every diamond Stephen bought his latest mistress, he had to buy one for her. This was how his love nest hatched a glittering nest egg of rings, earrings, brooches and uncut gems, which Minnie bequeathed to her female descendants.

Great-grandfather Stephen walked a well-trodden path. I realized this as I matured and met real mistresses and their lovers. The first, whom I encountered during the summer after my freshman year in university, was a young woman who shared her sometimes exciting but mostly wretched experiences with me. Katerina was an exotic, sloe-eyed East German who fled to West Berlin two weeks before her high school graduation, forfeiting her diploma in exchange for freedom. Kati was a governess — actually, an exalted babysitter — for the same family that employed me during summer vacation at their resort hotel in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Despite (perhaps because of) my parents’ objections, she and I developed a curious sort of intimacy. What they frowned on as fast and cheap, I admired as sophisticated — Kati’s lean, tanned and flat-chested body proudly exposed by her signature strapless tops; the hennaed rope of hair that swung nearly to her knees; the guttural, heavy accent that transformed me into “Elisabess,” or “Bess” for short.

That first summer, Kati was not yet a mistress. In fact, she longed to be a wife and was actually engaged to marry Charles, an RCMP officer who came calling in a long, white Cadillac convertible. But after Charles abruptly called off their wedding, Kati’s never very stable life fell precipitously apart. Not long after that, I returned to Montreal for my second year of university.

A few months later, Kati resurfaced in my life when she phoned and practically begged me to bring her a bag of groceries. She had money, she explained, but was temporarily bedridden and could not go out shopping. Kati had become the kept woman of a married lawyer who grudgingly supported her in a cramped room sublet from the unfriendly tenant of a shabby apartment. Unexpectedly, she had become pregnant.

I bought Kati the food she requested. My modest gift, it turned out, was all that she had for post-abortion sustenance. She had endured an illegal abortion alone, the abortionist having prudently banned anyone but his “clients” from the premises. I tried to ease her through the bout of severe depression that followed; shortly thereafter we resumed our very different lives.

Over the years, I saw Kati less and less. The last time was on a lake in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains. She was perched on the bow of a powerboat, her stunning mane loose and whipped by the wind. I called out and waved, and the man at the helm of her boat slowed down and steered over to my smaller craft. Kati seemed startled to see me, and she immediately put her forefinger to her lips as if to forestall my embarrassing her in front of her glamorous companions.

I understood, greeted her briefly, then smiled goodbye. I never saw her again, but I heard that she had married and then divorced. For a long time afterward, when anybody spoke about mistresses, an image of Kati came into my mind.

Mistressdom, like celibacy, is a crucial lens through which to explore how women relate to men other than in marriage; mistressdom is, in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage. Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere. In 1997, for example, when prominent journalist Charles Kuralt died, Patricia Shannon, his mistress of twenty-nine years, launched a successful claim to part of his estate. In 2000, Toronto mayor Mel Lastman’s former mistress, Grace Louie, announced that he had sired her (Mel look-alike) sons, Kim and Todd. In 2001, the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s mistress, lawyer Karin Stanford, sued for child support for their two-year-old daughter, Ashley, already in utero as Jackson advised and prayed for President Bill Clinton, under attack for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. (Simultaneously with prosecuting Clinton, the self-righteous Newt Gingrich was secretly pursuing a passionate relationship with Callista Bisek, whom he married after divorcing his wife, Marianne.) I began to make lists and take notes, trying to understand the nature of these relationships, the modern as well as the historic.

As in the past, today’s presidents and princes also succumb to their desires and take mistresses, though they, too, risk exposure by scandal sheets and mainstream media (unless, like French president François Mitterrand, they were impervious to criticism and enabled by a docile press; Mitterrand lived with his primary mistress, museum curator Anne Pingeot and their daughter, Mazarine, while his wife, Danielle, remained in the family home. At Mitterrand’s 1996 funeral, the three mourning women stood side by side, as he would have expected.) President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a very special “friend,” the Englishwoman Kay Sommersby. JFK dallied with many women, including film idol Marilyn Monroe. Though rivaled in prominence by the story of President Bill Clinton and unforgettable White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the longest-running scandal belongs to England’s Prince Charles. When I began my book, he was in disgrace. Years later, widowed and remarried to his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, his image and hers have been largely rehabilitated.

British radio and television presenter Jonathan Dimbleby’s brief affair with his dying mistress was the most dramatic and obsessive, and it destroyed his until-then happy marriage of thirty-five years. In May 2003, Dimbleby interviewed the magnificent soprano Susan Chilcott, found her enchanting and began to sleep with her. Days later, Susan was diagnosed with terminal metastasized breast cancer. Against her anguished pleas that her very new lover consider his own well-being and not ruin his life for her, Dimbleby vowed to care for her until she died, and moved in with her and her little son. “I still do not adequately understand the intensity of passion and pity that animated my decision,” he said later.

 

It felt like an unstoppable force. I knew what I was doing but I didn’t know what the outcome would be. It was odd, but I didn’t want to be away from Bel either – I felt absolutely torn. But I was entranced; and then of course we didn’t know how long she had – it might have been a few weeks or months or it might have been a few years. It was a very powerful, overwhelming experience and also a kind of test.

 

Part of that test was watching Susan’s last public performance, playing Desdemona and, garbed in white linen, singing sorrowfully, her voice rising to a crescendo, “Ch’io viva ancor, ch’io viva ancor!” (Let me live longer, let me live longer!)

Less than three months later, Susan died and Bel Mooney, Jonathan’s wife, waited for her husband to return home to her and say, “That madness is over, let us pick up the threads of our life again.” He did not, Bel moved out and on, and their tattered marriage unravelled into divorce. Susan Chilcott and Jonathan Dimbleby’s love affair was fleeting and fuelled as much by her impending death as by passion. Push back its timing to an earlier century or set it on the stage of a romantic tragedy and it looks exactly as it did at the end of the 20th century, in cosmopolitan England.

Mistressdom is inextricably linked with marriage, human society’s most fundamental institution, and almost automatically implies marital infidelity, sometimes by the husband, sometimes by the wife. Indeed, marriage is a key element in determining who is a mistress and who is not. Though many people assume that adultery undermines marriage, many others believe that, paradoxically, it shores marriage up. Frenchmen, for example, can justify the cinq à sept, the after-office-hours rendezvous a man enjoys with his mistress, by quoting French writer Alexandre Dumas’s pithy observation: “The chains of marriage are so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three.”

This association between marriage and mistressdom, and also Eastern concubinage, extends through time and place, and is deeply ingrained in almost every major culture. British multibillionaire Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, who died surrounded by wife, ex-wives and mistresses, commented famously that “when a man marries his mistress, he creates an automatic job vacancy.” Not surprisingly, Western models are more familiar to North Americans than those of the Eastern world, with their different and more elaborate versions, notably institutionalized concubinage and harems.

In all societies and at all times, the custom of arranged marriages has been most likely to produce mistressdom and concubinage because parents or other relatives selected their children’s spouses for economic reasons or to cement family, business or political alliances and usually dismissed romantic love as an irrelevant, self-indulgent and sometimes even treacherous foundation for a marital relationship. Husbands and wives were expected to cohabit and operate as an economic unit, and to produce and raise children. They were not expected to quiver at each other’s touch, to adore one another or to fulfill each other’s emotional needs.

Sometimes romantic love developed after the fact but more often, regard, tolerance and resignation were as much as anyone could hope for, and many marriages were desperately unhappy. All but the most puritanical societies permitted men unwilling to suppress or sublimate their romantic and lustful urges to satisfy them extramaritally by taking mistresses or concubines. Women, however, were almost always discouraged from straying and punished severely if they were caught. Many went ahead and took the risk.

The unbreachable chasms of class and caste have also created mistresses who might otherwise have been wives. Saint Augustine, the 4th-century bishop of Hippo, subscribed to his North African society’s proscription against marrying below one’s class, and so he lived with the lower-ranked woman he loved as his concubine. When he decided to marry, his mother found a suitably well-born girl.

Caste determined by nationality, race or religion can also relegate women to the lower status of mistress. Xenophobic ancient Greece, for instance, forbade its citizens to marry foreigners, so the Athenian leader Pericles could never marry Aspasia, his beloved Miletian concubine and the mother of his son.

In many Eastern cultures, concubinage was integral rather than peripheral or parallel to marriage, and concubines’ duties and rights were spelled out in the law or in social custom. Concubines frequently lived in their master’s house, under the same roof with his wife and other concubines. In modest homes, a concubine or two assisted the wife in her daily chores. Concubines were bound by wife-like sexual obligations, including fidelity, and confined to the same domestic sphere. There were excellent reasons for this. In sharp contrast to Western mistresses, one of the principal duties of most Eastern concubines was to bear their masters’ heirs.

In a few countries, notably imperial China and Turkey, some royals, aristocrats and men of privilege displayed their wealth and power by maintaining harems of concubines, often captured or purchased. Their crowded, eunuch-run harems were turbulent communities where intrigue, competition and conflict — to say nothing of children — proliferated. Older and less-favored harem concubines were drudges consigned to household labor. Their still hopeful younger colleagues filled their empty days with meticulous grooming and plotting, with and against eunuchs, wives, relatives, children, servants and each other. Their goal was to spend a night with their harem’s owner and, if they were extraordinarily lucky, to conceive the child who could catapult his mother from obscurity into a life of privilege and perhaps even power.

In stark contrast, the laws of Western societies have almost always reinforced the primacy of marriage by bastardizing the offspring of mistresses, from the lowest-born slave to the highest-ranked duchess. Legally and culturally, fathers had no obligation to accept responsibility for their natural children and could condemn them to the ignominy and perils of illegitimacy. Indeed, the law often made it difficult, even for men so inclined, to recognize and provide for their “outside” children.

Yet some men defied their society’s strictures against supporting their illegitimate children. Royals such as England’s Charles II, who elevated so many of his mistresses’ sons to dukedoms that five of today’s twenty-six dukes are their descendants, assumed that their bloodlines were exalted enough to outweigh such niceties as legitimacy. Commoners driven by personal passions also flouted their society’s values. A few slave owners, for example, risked serious reprisals from their profoundly racist compatriots by acknowledging paternity of a slave mistress’s children. In the Western world, however, acknowledging bastards has always been the exception to the rule.

Today’s mistress rightly expects better treatment for any child she might have with a lover. Like her precursors, she is the bellwether for female-male relations, and her status reflects how these relations have developed. The improving condition of women, the liberalization of the laws governing families and personal relationships, and the growing acceptance of DNA tests have greatly increased the likelihood that her lover will recognize, or at least contribute to the support of, her child. (John Edwards is an egregious example of this. After requesting an aide to pinch one of Frances Quinn’s diapers for a secret DNA test to determine whether or not he was her father, he systemically denied that he could be or was the father until, irreparably tarnished by a public trail of falsehoods, he admitted paternity and sought forgiveness, especially from Elizabeth, his furious wife.) At the same time, the advent of accessible and reliable birth control and of legalized abortion has substantially diminished the number of those children a mistress is likely to have.

And yet, like Rielle Hunter, mistresses do have children with their lovers. Some, like Karin Stanford, have to do battle for their children’s rights. Others, like François Mitterrand and Vito Fossella Jr. offer secret financial support. But even these cooperative fathers cannot guarantee that their legitimate children will take kindly to their “outside” siblings. Ashley Stanford-Jackson’s mother complains publicly that her daughter’s siblings have no interest in her. And Mitterrand’s son, Jean-Christophe, snubbed Mazarine in the hospital where both were visiting their father. “As long as my father doesn’t speak of this young woman, for me she doesn’t exist,” he told friends. When she was thirty-four years old, Mazarine assumed the legal surname of Pingeot-Mitterrand, explaining, “For nineteen years I was nobody’s daughter, but I’ve finally decided to add my father’s name to my identity papers.”

Feminism, expanded women’s rights and effective and accessible birth control have altered mistressdom, its parameters and its possibilities. As sexual mores surrounding premarital sex have relaxed and common-law living arrangements become increasingly the norm, the line between mistress and girlfriend has blurred. In many cases today, the answer must lie in the partners’ perception of their status and, to a certain extent, in society’s. Modern mistresses are less likely than their forebears to be married or to depend financially on their lovers. Today’s mistresses fall in love, usually with married men unwilling to divorce and regularize the relationship. The only alternative to breaking up is to reconcile themselves to an illicit relationship. But often these mistresses are reluctant to accept the status quo, and they hope that somehow, someday, their liaison will be legitimized through marriage, as Camilla Parker Bowles’ was.

Elizabeth Abbott is a research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and, from 1991 to 2004, was the dean of women. She is the author of several books, including “Sugar: A Bittersweet History,” “Haiti: A Modern History” and “A History of Celibacy.” She lives in Toronto.

Adapted from “Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman.” Copyright Elizabeth Abbott, reprinted with permission by The Overlook Press

• More: Elizabeth Abbott

 

 Copyright ©2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Let it Rip. Just let it Rip real good. This is the music….

Rent a Rock Star’s Home

By MATTHEW LINK Thursday, July 15, 2010

 

ENLARGE PHOTO+

Live like a king Or rather, the King. Elvis’ Palm Springs hideaway

Eric Van Eyke

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0,31542,2003995,00.html#ixzz1WaHPelmj

Live like a king Or rather, the King. Elvis’ Palm Springs hideaway

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0,31542,2003995,00.html#ixzz1WaH0X0JQ

If you’ve ever wondered what it costs to live like a rock god, well, try $15,000 a week. That’s the going rate for a week at Mick Jagger’s Japanese-themed Stargrove villa, www.unusualvillarentals.com, on the isle of Mustique in the West Indies.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the economic times, but Jagger and other top rockers like Eric Clapton will, for the right price, gladly hand over the keys to their palatial Caribbean estates to vetted applicants. “As a graduate of the London School of Economics, Mick Jagger is an astute businessman,” says Richard Klug of Beverly Hills – based Sotheby’s International Realty. “He understands that leasing out the property when he’s not there helps defray costs for the house.”(See pictures of modernist homes available for rent.)

The current travel industry may be on shaky ground, but vacation rental homes are one bright spot. Although $15,000 may sound steep, with its six bedrooms, beachfront location, pool, Jacuzzi, Jeep and a staff of six (not to mention Jagger’s personal photos scattered about the place), Stargrove is actually quite the deal for a group of travelers.

HomeAway.com, which claims to represent the world’s largest collection of vacation rental properties, has estimated that this growing segment generates more than $63 billion in revenue annually, or nearly half as much as the hotel industry. And with popular websites like Vacation Rental by Owner, www.vrbo.com, averaging over 65 million visitors annually, it’s no wonder celebrities want to cash in on the trend.(See pictures of Americans in their homes.)

We’ll never know if Jagger inspired him, but fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards also puts up his private Caribbean estate as a vacation rental. One of the multimillion-dollar private residences at Parrot Cay, www.parrotcay.como.bz, in the Turks and Caicos, Richards’ nearly one-hectare, three-bedroom beachfront property includes a 60-inch rear-projection TV in the living room, an infinity pool and butler service. His pad costs rather more than Jagger’s, however, at just over $8,100 a night.

Nearby, on the island of Antigua (where Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson also own homes), guitar great Clapton rents out his stunning 18-hectare Standfast Point, www.standfastpoint.com, for a cool $50,000 a week. This $14 million estate sleeps up to 14 people, comes with a full staff and consists of three huge buildings interconnected by open stone terraces. A swimming pool, a children’s playroom and a billiard room all make this rock-star hideaway surprisingly family-friendly.

Away from the star-studded Caribbean, the Southern California desert resort town of Palm Springs, about two hours’ drive from Los Angeles, has the largest concentration of celebrity home rentals in the U.S. You can overnight in the former residences of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor or Lucille Ball, but rock-music fans will want to check into the Elvis honeymoon home, www.elvishoneymoon.com. This five-bedroom space-age house on stilts is where the Presleys spent their 1967 honeymoon, and its vintage furniture, circular living room and stone walls make you feel like you have slipped into a midcentury-modern time warp. Nightly rates are a relative steal at $1,500. Not to be outdone, the King of the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra, built his four-bedroom home in Palm Springs with a pool shaped like a piano and a then state-of-the-art stereo system dominating a whole wall of the living room. Dubbed Twin Palms, www.sinatrahouse.com, this home was the site of many glamorous Hollywood parties. Weekly rates hover around $15,600.(See 10 things to buy during the recession.)

Last but not least, the former West Hollywood home of iconic Doors front man Jim Morrison can be rented by the month for just $3,000. Located within walking distance from the Sunset Strip clubs where Morrison performed, his two-bedroom, 70-sq-m apartment is adorned with Doors’ posters and memorabilia, and includes a meditation garden where Morrison wrote poetry. It was the last U.S. home he lived in before his mysterious death in Paris. Rates don’t include a Ouija board for contacting Morrison, so be sure to pack your own. See www.vacation-key.com for more.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0,31542,2003995,00.html#ixzz1WaG6LB4h

Copyright. 2010. Time.com All Rights Reserved

Rebel guard Abdel Hakim al-Sheikhli stands next to an entrance to an underground bunker belonging to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son Mutassim. The extravagant residence is surrounded by two sets of 60-ft. (18 m) walls and contains a pool, spa, guesthouse and gardens. Below ground, an extensive network of bunkers, including a fully equipped hospital, reveals a family well prepared for an uprising or attack

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2091028,00.html#ixzz1Wa3TSivz

The Gaddafis were well prepared, says Saif al-Islam al-Kebi, a Tripoli resident turned rebel who grew up next door to the palatial and heavily fortified residential compound of Mutassim Gaddafi, one of the Colonel’s sons and also the dictator’s national-security adviser. Over the course of five years in the 1990s, al-Kebi watched, mesmerized, as a team of engineers from a German company constructed a vast underground bunker beneath Mutassim’s property.

Hidden beneath the mansion and its ornate lawn, gardens and guesthouse is an underground warren of secret rooms and tunnels. Multiple sets of 10-in.-thick (25 cm) metal doors secure the elaborate hideaway, which includes bunk beds with mattresses still wrapped in plastic, sitting rooms, an industrial kitchen, a laundry room and a fully equipped hospital. “This is the main surgery room,” claims al-Kebi, marveling at the sheer volume of equipment as he gives a tour of the place.(See TIME’s photo-essay “Libya’s New Regime: Rebels Take Over Tripoli.”)

But Mutassim might not have spent much time in his bunker. On Monday, Aug. 29, Algerian officials confirmed that four other Gaddafis — Muammar’s second wife Safia, his daughter Aisha and his sons Hannibal and Mohammed, as well as their spouses and children — had surfaced in Algeria, according to the Associated Press. The report came a week after rebels said a convoy was spotted crossing Libya’s desert border into Algeria.

And according to one of Hannibal’s gardeners, Hannibal’s family hadn’t been at home for months. “The last time I saw any member of the family was in May, when Saif al-Arab died,” says “Moussa,” a worker from Niger, referring to a Gaddafi son who was allegedly killed during a NATO bombing raid. The gardener’s name has been changed because he remains in Libya and fears for his life. Moussa says Gaddafi kept a house in Hannibal’s Tripoli compound, and it was there that Saif al-Arab died in a NATO air strike on May 1 that he says may have been targeting Gaddafi. After that, the family took off, he says. And it wasn’t until a month later that he figured out where. “After the bombing, they went to Regatta,” he says, naming a wealthy suburb on Tripoli’s western outskirts where he says Hannibal kept two houses. “I know because I was told to take his parrot to Regatta.” When he drove there, he found Hannibal’s bodyguards and driver.

As for the rest of the clan not spotted in Algeria, the rebels say they have no idea where they might be, and rumors are running wild. Gaddafi’s heir apparent, Saif al-Islam, who was earlier incorrectly reported by the rebels to have been captured, remains at large. So does Khamis, the head of the feared Khamis special forces brigade, which is believed to have led the assaults against Libyan protesters and rebels since the uprising began in February. Mutassim — the son with the underground hospital and a compound surrounded by twin 60-ft.-high (18 m) walls — is also gone. And then there’s Hanna: the mysterious adopted daughter who Gaddafi claimed was killed in a 1986 U.S. air strike but whose medical-school photo ID was spotted by TIME at Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziyah home. A rebel spokesman said over the weekend that Khamis may have been killed at a roadblock. But the report could not be confirmed, and previous rebel claims that two Gaddafi sons had been captured turned out to be false.(See TIME’s video “Command Post: Was It Right for the U.S. to Formally Recognize the Libyan Rebels?”)

“They’re not going to catch them,” says K.A. Paul, an eccentric Evangelical preacher who claims to be a trusted contact of the Gaddafi family. Paul spoke with TIME on Saturday, Aug. 27, before boarding a ship to Malta; he claims to have met repeatedly with Muammar, Saif al-Islam and other regime officials in recent weeks in an effort to broker a peaceful transfer of power. The last time he saw Muammar, he says, was in an underground bunker in Tripoli on Aug. 10, but he believes both Gaddafis remain in the capital. “This is what will happen,” he says. “If they try to kill Gaddafi and Saif, they will not succeed easily. Gaddafi will continue what he’s doing, calling on his people to fight till the last breath.”

Paul is confident that the family has enough resources and supporters to disappear indefinitely. “Sixty percent of Libyans love him to death,” he says. “If they fail to catch him through the bombing, after NATO stops in a few weeks, he will try to mobilize his army and his people to create more hell.”

The manhunt continues to be a difficult one. The appearance of the Gaddafi convoy on the Libyan-Algerian border lends credence to the popular rebel suspicion that members of the family may be hiding in Sabha, a desert stronghold of the regime, from which Gaddafi recruited many of his forces and mercenaries. “I think they went to Sabha, because it’s still safe for them there,” says Abdel Hakim al-Sheikhli, a rebel who now stands guard at Mutassim’s house. “The rebels have no forces there, and it’s near the Algerian and Chadian borders.”

It may be no surprise that Algeria welcomed members of the Gaddafi clan with open arms. Gaddafi worked hardest to forge close relations with his fellow African rulers, and he often sought to portray himself as a leader for the continent. His home in Tripoli’s Bab al-Aziziyah compound is scattered with photos of Gaddafi posing with African Presidents, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and the now deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. And despite many countries’ recognition of the rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC), the African Union has so far refused to do so as long as fighting persists. Paul lists several of the easiest options for Gaddafi’s exodus: “South Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Venezuela.”

A Gaddafi spokesman, speaking from an undisclosed location allegedly in Libya, made a renewed call for negotiations with the NTC over the weekend, a proposal the council has flatly rejected. The fugitive dictator may have more leverage with the new regime if he can mobilize an insurgency and tribal warfare. As they encounter both snipers and hostile residents in the stronghold neighborhoods they’re now seeking to clear, the rebels say regime loyalists still pose a threat. But they’d rather Gaddafi be among them than in some foreign refuge. Says the rebel guard al-Sheikhli: “He’s more dangerous abroad, because if he’s here, the revolutionaries will keep looking for him, and he’ll be hiding. Abroad, he may end up in an African country that won’t surrender him to the court.” And then, who knows what mischief he might cook up.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2091028,00.html#ixzz1Wa3C68yq

Copyright. 2011 Time.com All Rights Reserved

Tuesday, 30 Aug 2011 10:22 PM

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Lawyers for Rupert Murdoch’s News International are conducting a broad inquiry into reporting practices at all of the company’s UK newspapers, according to sources who have been briefed on the probe.

Attorneys for Linklaters, the large London law firm leading the probe, will be looking for anything that U.S. government investigators might be able to construe as evidence the company violated American law, particularly the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits corrupt payments to foreign officials, a source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

In addition to conducting personal interviews with selected journalists, lawyers will also be looking at email and financial records, said this source.

Separately, Rupert Murdoch and his son, James, are to be questioned about the phone hacking scandal under oath in the UK High Court, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

A second source close to the company said that just because the internal inquiry is examining reporting standards across Murdoch’s UK papers, this does not mean there is evidence inappropriate activity occurred at News International’s currently operating British properties.

News Corp acknowledges an extensive review is under way, although the details it released have been sparse.

“As is widely known, a review of journalistic standards is underway at News International with Linklaters assisting in the process,” a company spokesperson told Reuters.

The spokesperson added the review was “part of a process that started a number of weeks ago.”

That process is under the “ultimate control” of Joel Klein, a Murdoch executive in New York who formerly worked at the White House and U.S. Justice Department; Viet Dinh, an outside News Corp director who also worked at the Justice Department; and the Management and Standards Committee.

The latter is a unit Murdoch created to handle corporate response and cleanup related to the uproar over allegations of phone hacking and questionable payments to police by News International journalists.

Journalists from the company’s surviving British tabloid, The Sun, have already been interviewed for the internal investigation.

Interviews with journalists from The Sunday Times, one of Murdoch’s two London “quality” papers, are scheduled to begin in September.

The inquiry is also expected to review reporting practices at Murdoch’s other upscale British title, the Times of London, although people familiar with the investigation say the scope of the review at the daily paper is likely to be less extensive than at its sister papers.

Two people briefed on Linklater’s activities said information about the extent of the inquiry had been widely communicated throughout the company over the last month.

One of these sources said only a selection of journalists — including reporters involved in sensitive reporting projects — were expected to be interviewed about their reporting methods.

Lawyers are also examining emails and financial records that might relate to matters under investigation by police, including phone hacking and questionable payments to police officers or other government officials.

One of the sources briefed on the inquiry said close scrutiny would be given to records of cash payouts requested or authorized by journalists at News International properties.

In early July, Murdoch unexpectedly announced he was shutting down the 168-year-old, Sunday-only, News of the World, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper.

James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and News International chairman, said the paper had lost the trust of readers due to allegations about controversial reporting practices by its staff, some of which he characterized as “inhuman.”

Both Murdochs were summoned before a parliamentary committee in late July to face questioning about the scandal.

London police also established teams of detectives to investigate allegedly abusive or illegal journalistic activities, including phone and computer hacking and questionable payments to police officers.

So far, most if not all of the News International journalists known to have been arrested and questioned by police in connection with alleged reporting irregularities were associated with the News of the World.

But one of the most prominent figures to have faced arrest, Andy Coulson, who most recently served as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s chief spokesman, edited a gossip column at The Sun before becoming editor of the News of the World in 2003.

Former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, who was also arrested and questioned by police, edited both the Sun and the News of the World.

Brooks was in charge of the Sunday tabloid at the time of the infamous incident in which the voice mail of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler allegedly was hacked. Brooks was on vacation when the incident occurred.

Although more than a dozen individuals have been arrested and questioned by police in recent months regarding alleged reporting abuses, so far none have faced criminal charges.

Most of the specific phone hacking and questionable payment allegations that have become public relate to the News of the World.

However, actor Jude Law has sued both the News of the World and The Sun for alleged phone hacking. The company strongly denied his claim, saying it was a “deeply cynical” ploy to implicate The Sun in the hacking controversy.

Some of the Sunday Times reporting practices have also faced public criticism. Britain’s former Labor prime minister, Gordon Brown, accused the paper of using questionable tactics to acquire some of his banking, tax and legal records. The paper has defended its reporting. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington and Georgina Prodhan in London; editing by Peter Lauria and Andre Grenon)

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AUG 29 2011, 1:28 PM ET