Paul Myners left Co-op after board accused him of damaging brand

New head confronted at board meeting over interview in which he said Co-op’s reputation for being democratic was a myth Continue reading…

Why odd numbers are dodgy, evens are good, and 7 is everyone’s favourite

What’s your lucky number? An online survey threw up a hot favourite: people find 7 clever, cheery, divine. And our reactions to numbers shine a fascinating light on how our brains work, especially in the oh-so-superstitious far east

Think of the number 7. Do you like it? Do you love it? Do you remain unmoved?

You may think these are frivolous questions, but when I launched an online survey asking people to submit their favourite numbers and explain the reasons why almost 4,000 people declared a devotion to 7.

Continue reading…

Phone hacking trial: Rebekah Brooks questioned over affair with deputy

Former News of the World editor tells court she and Andy Coulson had been close enough to share secrets

Rebekah Brooks on Thursday acknowledged that she and Andy Coulson had been close enough to share secrets with each other during two periods when they are accused of conspiring to produce stories based on intercepted voicemails.

In tense cross-examination, Andrew Edis QC challenged Brooks over the meaning of a letter she wrote to Coulson in February 2004.

Edis suggested the letter showed that they had been having an affair and sharing secrets for the preceding six years, during which time they published stories about Milly Dowler and David Blunkett which, the crown claims, were generated by hacking phone messages.

Brooks repeatedly insisted that although she and Coulson had begun an affair in 1998, it had not continued for six years.

The affair had stopped and both of them had got on with their lives before it had resumed briefly in 2003. “I hadn’t been sitting there like Miss Havisham for six years,” she said.

At one point, Edis quoted part of the letter to Coulson in which she wrote: “I confide in you. I seek your advice.”

He asked her: “That included work matters, didn’t it?”

“It could have done.”

“Confide means trust – trust people with your confidences. No?”

“Yes.”

“And that would include secrets relating to work?”

“And emotional issues as well.”

Edis then referred to another passage in the letter in which Brooks wrote: “For six years I have waited.”

“It suggests doesn’t it that the relationship had lasted six years?”

Brooks said that was not correct.

“You would be telling the truth when you were writing?”

“I was in a very emotional state when I wrote this letter.”

“That’s all the more reason why you would be telling the truth. It’s your heart-felt anguish.”

“Yes.”

“Which is absolutely genuine.”

“Yes.”

He went on to repeat that the letter suggested they had had an affair for six years.

Brooks replied: “That’s not true … Andy had got on with his life. I’m clearly saying that it has been six years since we had got together… I had gone out, got married, tried to have a baby, got on with my life.

“The emotional feeling that I had towards Andy obviously came out in the letter. But we didn’t have an affair for six years. We were close friends, good friends.”

Edis turned to the state of their relationship in April 2002, when the crown claims that Brooks and Coulson plotted to use voicemail intercepted from the phone of the missing Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Brooks was then editor of the News of the World but Coulson, her deputy, was editing the paper while she was on holiday in Dubai.

“At that time were you talking with him in that confidential way?”

“We were close friends.”

“So you would trust each other?”

“I trusted him as a friend and as a deputy editor.”

“If the deputy editor was committing a crime, he might not want the editor in normal circumstances to find out about it. But he might be able to tell the editor if he really trusted her.”

Edis paused. “Was the relationship in April 2002 such that Mr Coulson could trust you with any confidence at all?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Edis then asked her about August 2004 when, the court has heard, Coulson, as editor of the News of the World, revealed an affair between David Blunkett and a woman whose name he withheld; and Brooks, as editor of the Sun, followed up the next day by naming the woman as Kimberly Quinn, publisher of the Spectator magazine.

The crown claims that Coulson obtained the story from messages which Blunkett had left on Quinn’s phone and that he then passed her identity to Brooks.

Brooks has told the jury that she wrote her letter to Coulson in February 2004 after he had told her he wanted to end their second period of physical intimacy.

In the letter, she wrote that this meant that: “I can’t discuss my worries, concerns, problems at work with you any more.”

Edis put it to her that by August 2004, they were “back talking confidentially to each other by then?”

“We were certainly talking.”

“But in that confidential way?”

“I think we were back to confiding, particularly on an emotional level by that stage.”

Edis then showed her the billing record for a mobile phone which Coulson was using in August 2004 which showed that he had phoned Brooks immediately before he met Blunkett in Sheffield to tell him he planned to publish a story about his affair.

“Do you remember what he was saying to you?”

Brooks said she could not remember, that Coulson had often called or texted her at the beginning of the day. Edis said: “He is in Sheffield, going to see a cabinet minister. Surely he told you that.”

“No. He didn’t,” she replied.

She went to say that she thought she had come up with Quinn’s name after checking stories which had previously been published which mentioned that Quinn knew Blunkett and that, based on that suspicion, she had “taken a punt” and called Blunkett’s special adviser, Huw Evans, to persuade him to confirm that she was right.

Edis said: “You would have to take a punt if you knew it was a phone-hacking story.”

“I didn’t know it was a phone-hacking story,” she said.

“Didn’t you?”

Brooks and Coulson deny conspiring to intercept communications. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
theguardian.com 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Duchess of Cambridge topless pictures: photographer investigated

An unnamed second photographer faces formal scrutiny under French invasion of privacy laws

A photographer suspected of taking topless photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge while she was on holiday in the south of France has been placed under formal investigation, according to AFP.

The unnamed photographer is the latest of several media figures to be investigated for invasion of privacy in France after pictures were published in September last year of Prince William and his wife sunbathing on a balcony in a private property in the south of France.

The editor of the French magazine Closer, Laurence Pieau, had already been placed under formal investigation earlier this month, Agence France Presse reported.

In April, the head of the publisher of the French edition of Closer magazine, named as Ernesto Mauri, and another photographer suspected of taking pictures of the holidaying royal couple were put under investigation, the last step in France before being charged.

The topless photos emerged last September, and most British outlets refused to publish them in the wake of the Leveson report. French Closer did publish them and St James’s Palace launched legal proceedings against the magazine, one of the first instances of a case like this involving the royal family in modern times. The complaint from St James’s Palace sparked a criminal investigation in France.

The Duke and Duchess launched criminal proceedings against the photographer under France’s strict privacy laws. A French court granted them an injunction in September preventing Closer from publishing further shots of Kate sunbathing topless. The pictures were apparently taken on the terrace of a guest house during a brief holiday in France last year.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.

To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook

Moon may influence sleep, study finds

Even if moonlight isn’t streaming through your curtains, the phase of the moon may affect how well you sleep

Science and myth rarely agree, but new research suggests that the lunar cycle could have an effect on the quality of sleep.

The study by researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland found that even in the absence of moonlight, participants slept less deeply and for shorter periods during the full moon than at other lunar phases. It is a phenomenon already known in other organisms as the “circalunar rhythm”, but has never before been shown in humans.

Christian Cajochen, who was the lead researcher on the study, said: “A lot of people complain about bad sleep during moon stages, or they claim that ‘it was the moon’, and there’s a lot of myth involved. We decided to go back in our old data to see whether we could effectively quantify such an effect.”

Previous research has found no association between the phases of the moon and human physiology or behaviour. “While I’m quite cautious and sceptical about the data myself, I have to say after a proper statistical analysis that, to our surprise, we found something there,” said Cajochen. “There is a circalunar influence.”

The brain pattern, eye movements and hormone secretion of volunteers were studied while they slept. Participants were also asked for subjective assessments of their sleep quality.

The results, published in Current Biology, showed that around the full moon, subjects’ brain activity associated with deep sleep decreased by 30%, they took 5 minutes longer to fall asleep, had 20 minutes less sleep overall and lower levels of melatonin – a hormone known to regulate sleep. These findings correlated with the volunteers’ own perception that sleep quality was poorer during the full moon.

“I think one issue in the past was that they compared a lot of people by mixing different laboratories, different devices, and including data from patients, so the entire thing was not standardised,” Cajochen said. “The advantage here is that we really had a standardised protocol.”

The data was taken from a previous study that was not originally looking at the moon’s influence. Participants were kept in a very controlled environment, with artificial lighting, regulated temperature and no way of checking the time. This ensured that internal body rhythms could be investigated independently of external influences.

“The only disadvantage with such a standardised procedure is that we could only investigate 33 people,” said Cajochen. “What I would like to do in the future is to increase the number of subjects and then to follow up each person through the entire moon cycle.”

But such a study would have problems of its own, he added. “If you’re actually going to tell people you’re investigating the influence of the moon, then you may trigger some expectation or sensitivity in them. Sleep is also a psychological thing, of course.”

If true, the mechanisms responsible for the phenomenon are unknown. Malcolm von Schantz, a molecular neurobiologist at Surrey University, said: “Essentially it could be either two things: the moon itself has a gravitational pull which somehow affects our physiology. I find that very unlikely as the gravitational pull of the moon is fairly weak. It doesn’t cause tides in lakes for example, only in large oceans. In fact, if you’re sitting within 15 inches of the wall right now then the wall has a stronger gravitational pull on you than the moon does. So I don’t think we have a sort of mini-tide in ourselves.

“The alternative is that there is a ‘counter’, a mechanism which keeps track somehow of the phases of the moon.”

Marine animals are already known to follow a circalunar rhythm and some believe it is tightly intertwined with the circadian rhythm – the other internal clock that many organisms, humans included, have which is entrained to the sun. “In worms, at least, there is a crossover between these two clocks,” said Cajochen. “But we are not worms any more.”

Other researchers have wondered why a human circalunar clock should exist in the first place. Michael Hastings, a neuroscientist studying circadian rhythms at Cambridge University, said: “In evolutionary terms, it sounds plausible to me at least. If you were a hunter gatherer, you’d want to be out there on a full moon, not a new moon. It might be that there’s something about suppression of sleep under those circumstances because you should be out hunting.

“I think at best it’s intriguing. There’s a biological plausibility, if we take the hunter gatherer scenario, with regard to the mechanisms … It is such a striking and unexpected finding that replication by other sleep labs is absolutely critical.”

Not everyone is concerned that there were only 33 subjects – von Schantz even said these numbers are “fairly sizeable” for such a study.

“It’s true, the body of negative data on the effects of the moon on a huge number of parameters is fairly impressive,” he added. “It’s entirely conceivable that all those previous studies are correct, but that there is also an effect in a limited number of other parameters, one of them being sleep, for reasons we don’t yet understand.”

Sexual abuse victim’s suicide sparks call for review of court procedures

Vera Baird QC raises concern after Frances Andrade’s son accuses police and CPS of letting his mother down

One of Britain’s most senior lawyers has called for a review of how courts handle sexual abuse cases following the suicide of a professional violinist after giving evidence at the trial of her former music teacher.

The former solicitor general Vera Baird QC raised concern over claims by the family of Frances Andrade, who killed herself days after testifying against Michael Brewer, that the cross-examination by the defence had been hostile and aggravated her trauma.

Baird, now the police commissioner for Northumbria, said the family’s assertion that the police had advised Andrade not to receive any therapy until after the trial was appalling.

“That is the police, in a very out-of-date way, treating the court as a sort of theatre,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“The theory used to be unless literally the pain of being sexually abused comes out, because she hasn’t had help to come back to normal, the jury will be unimpressed.

“If that is the way they thought then it is firstly … abysmal psychiatry and secondly it is an appalling misjudgment. The wellbeing of the victim must be far, far higher than this ludicrous tactical consideration.”

Jurors in the case against Brewer, who was found guilty of five counts of indecent assault on Friday, were not told of Andrade’s death until after they had reached a verdict.

Her son Oliver criticised the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), claiming she had been left to “cope on her own” with the traumatic impact of the case despite previous attempts to kill herself.

In a statement issued after the verdicts, he said: “Being repeatedly called a ‘liar’ and a ‘fantasist’ about a horrific part of her life in front of a court challenged her personal integrity and was more than even she could bear.

“She was forced to relive the many times Michael Brewer had sexually abused her as a child, both to the police on multiple occasions and in court to a hostile party.

“Having been heavily advised by the police not to receive any form of therapy until the end of the case (a process of almost two years) she was forced to cope on her own with only the support of her family and very close friends.

“This meant that, even after several attempts at her own life, she did not get the help she needed. The court system let her down.”

Javed Khan, chief executive of Victim Support, said the case tragically illustrated the trauma that victims of sexual abuse go through when they give evidence in court.

“Aggressive cross-examination like this is far too common an event,” he told the Today programme. “In our adversarial justice system the victim is only a bit-player in the process.”

The CPS has defended its handling of the trial. It said a dedicated witness care officer was assigned to explain the trial process and Andrade was offered a familiarisation visit to the court in advance.

It added that she had agreed to give evidence in court rather than by video link and restated her willingness to do so on several occasions before and during the trial. She was also consulted before the Brewers were charged.

The prosecutor, Peter Cadwallader, was selected for his skill in handling sensitive cases and the CPS also applied for special measures to shield the victim in court but she declined to use them so she could face the defendants, the CPS said.

She confirmed her choice to proceed without special measures in a conversation with the prosecutor immediately before she gave evidence, it added.

She was a combative, confident and emotional witness. When Kate Blackwell QC, Brewer’s barrister, alleged her account of being raped by the Brewers at their house was “utter fantasy”, Andrade loudly replied: “Bollocks”.

“You have told this jury a complete pack of lies about the visit to this house,” said Blackwell.

Andrade replied: “This is why cases don’t come to court. This happened.”

The trial judge, Martin Rudland, said on Thursday that Blackwell had been “perfectly proper and correct in her examination of all the witnesses in this case”.

The Guardian has learned that Andrade, 48, texted a friend three days before her death to say she felt like she had been “raped all over again” after appearing in the witness box at Manchester crown court last month to face Brewer.

Complaining about a robust cross-examination by Blackwell, who accused her of telling “a pack of lies”, she wrote sarcastically: “I’m a fantasist with the Electra complex seeking attention.”

Andrade did not initiate the police investigation which led to the trial. Friends said she did not present herself as a “victim” and would have hated to be seen as such. They say she never wanted to give evidence against the Brewers.

She killed herself the day after Brewer started to give evidence. In the witness box he called her a “fantasist” who was “largely living a fantasy life”. The day before her death she had also been told that the judge had directed the jury to find Brewer not guilty on five of the indecent assault charges on the original indictment. The judge said those charges fell outside the statute of limitations because Andrade admitted in evidence that she may have been over the age of consent at the time.

When the judge heard of Andrade’s death, he adjourned the case for three days. Oliver Andrade added that it was “of the utmost importance” that victims of sexual abuse were made to “feel safe and supported” throughout the court process.

“This is the only way that we can ensure people can and will come forward in these circumstances and justice can be served.”