Erstellt am: 18. 7. 2011 - 14:38 Uhr

Like a Shakespearian tragedy...

In Britain, heads are rolling at the top of the police force, and in Egypt, there are conflicting stories over the health of Hosni Mubarak.

"The number of dead bodies on the stage is beginning to resemble the final scene of a Shakespearian tragedy".

Not my words, I wish I’d thought of that line. It comes from today's Guardian Newspaper, whose journalists investigated the whole UK phone-hacking scandal intensively from the beginning, and pursued it when everyone else seemed to be losing interest. I like a news story that keeps moving and is full of twists and turns, and this story certainly has that. The latest is that Britain’s top cop – the head of London’s Metropolitan Police - has resigned. He was unable to deflect questions about his links to a suspicious figure at the (former) News of the World. Now, if the head of the police has to go because he hired a News of the
World Deputy Editor, what should David Cameron do, who hired the Editor who’s been arrested?

Tomorrow, all eyes will be on a rather curious question and answer session between a committee of British MPs and three of the central figures in the scandal:- Rupert Murdoch, his son James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks (another former Editor of the News of the World). I suspect there’ll be a lot of grandstanding by the honorable members of parliament and much avoidance of answering anything by the Murdoch clan. Still it’ll produce great television in seeing arguably the most powerful media people of the last decades trying to claw back shreds of credibility.

Ivor Gaber, the director of political journalism at City University, London, gave me his thoughts on the latest developments.

Rumours are rife around Hosni Mubarak

Egypt's former president, Hosni Mubark, is scheduled to face charges of corruption and ording the killing of protests when he goes to trial on August 3rd, but will he be fit enought to appear? His lawyer has been casting a gloomy picture of Mubarak's state of health, and at the weekend was saying that he has had a stroke and is in a coma, but our Cairo correspondent, Karim El-Gawhary, says this might just be a stragegy to get him out of the trial.

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