is because i was so keen to have my privacy. i feel a sense of duty to expose them, as they've exposed us. prince harry and sir eltonjohn have launched legal action against the publishers of the daily mail. action is being taken- against the sun newspaper. legal action against the mirror group over allegations of phone hacking. who did you hack? it would be quicker to say- who i didn't hack, wouldn't it? it'd be easier. celebrities, politicians... i was living in this sort of super highway of illicit information. it was exciting. you felt like a spy.

as the years have gone by, - the story has grown and grown. it's 100 times worse - than the press admitted to. these are frankly eyewatering claims. bugging cars, listening to and recording live phone calls, paying police officials for sensitive information. i don't know to this day how many people have heard my deepest secrets, my desires. ...that phone hacking was not. practised by the mail on sunday or the daily mail. i didn't feel like i was working in some sort of underground illegal news gathering operation. i was working at the sun. what you saw was what you got. you have just about anybody who's ever appeared in a tabloid newspaper saying, "give me large wadges of cash, please." i think it's actually a legal scandal. it's not the money i'm after. it's to expose their guilt. it's justice. there was undoubtedly phone

hacking — about 30 something years ago, i .ot about 30 something years ago, i got out _ about 30 something years ago, i got out of— about 30 something years ago, i got out of prison _ about 30 something years ago, i got out of prison and _ about 30 something years ago, i got out of prison and i— about 30 something years ago, i got out of prison and i read - about 30 something years ago, i got out of prison and i read an i got out of prison and i read an ad in_ got out of prison and i read an ad in the — got out of prison and i read an ad in the paper, _ got out of prison and i read an ad in the paper, and _ got out of prison and i read an ad in the paper, and it- got out of prison and i read an ad in the paper, and it said, . ad in the paper, and it said, wanted, _ ad in the paper, and it said, wanted, private _ ad in the paper, and it said, i wanted, private investigator, no experience _ wanted, private investigator, no experience necessary, - wanted, private investigator, | no experience necessary, and wanted, private investigator, . no experience necessary, and it turned — no experience necessary, and it turned out _ no experience necessary, and it turned out i _ no experience necessary, and it turned out i had _ no experience necessary, and it turned out i had a _ no experience necessary, and it turned out i had a knack- turned out i had a knack for investigations, _ turned out i had a knack for investigations, because - turned out i had a knack for investigations, because i. turned out i had a knack for. investigations, because i knew exactly— investigations, because i knew exactly how— investigations, because i knew exactly how criminals - investigations, because i knew exactly how criminals think. i i started working for the british tabloids, | around 1986. i'm the guy that tracked down jeffrey epstein's girl- that was with the prince, that famous photograph. tracked her down to australia. i was asked to search for a lot of british celebrities who hadl either lived in the - united states or come here to do some work. david beckham, when he moved here, they wanted me to know.

about all of his neighbours, how he was being received i in the neighbourhood, that sort of thing. - john cleese, of course, was one of them. - it was explained to me that someone had been getting it was explained to me that danno in the la had been for a very long time been getting information. i met danno, i liked him enormously, he was very sympathetic, little bit of a rogue but i like people like that. what i was puzzled was, some of the stuff that he was having was things like social security numbers and national health numbers. i said, "well, that's hardly fatal to my career!"

he said, "no, you don't understand, once they have "that, it's very easy to persuade people that you're "allowed to have certain confidential information." it's what i referred to as the keys to the kingdom. what's going to happen is if somebody calls up the phone company, the first thing they're going to ask them, what's your social security number? what your date of birth? what's your date of birth? you know, what's your favourite pet's name? if you have the information from the database, they will just give you everything. if there was a scandal and the person had any kind of footing in the united states, the tabloids just knew that i could find somebody in a few minutes. and they were willing to pay. i was making $20,000—$30,000 a month from them.

even though i am probably brilliant on databases, and i say that myself, i know what i can do. i'm really naive when it comes to trusting human beings. they wouldn't tell me anything about what the story was about. they would simply say, we want to find this person and we want to know everything about them. and so i didn't know what the results were from what i did. with litigation against mirror group continuing, attention turned to the country's biggest red—top tabloid. so the news of the world and the sun was sister

newspapers based on the same building. obviously, everybody knew phone hacking was going on at the news of the world, it was always denied it was going on at the sun. it has been difficult to find out information. but we say we have got evidence. sex scandal and soap have made the sun the biggest selling - newspaper in the - english—speaking world. the sun newsroom felt like a war room. it was 90 mph, it was frantic, real commercial pressure, we had to sell better than our rivals. we had to do better than our rivals. we were told on days where the mirror had got a great front page that heads will roll and somebody is going to have to be sacked for this because we should have had that, not the mirror. always, it was about exclusives, because it was the exclusive stories that sold the paper. four years after they were married, sir paul mccartney and heather mills are splitting up. of course it was never going to be a quiet life,

marrying a former beatle, but in a statement today the couple said the level of intrusion into their private lives had been so great, it made a normal relationship almost impossible. paul mccartney was untouchable because he was paul mccartney! national treasure, and nobody wants to pick up a paper that is slagging him off, simple. so heather mills kind of went through this, quite literally, honeymoon period. but when their relationship hit the rocks and it went wrong, the gloves came off. the press had it in for me, they took the side in my divorce and decided they would try and absolutely annihilate me and make me out to have a bad character and i wasjust vilified and abused. they generally started making up loads of rubbish. but then, elements of truth started to come in and i was, like, how could they have known that? that was a phone

conversation we had. we collected hours and hours and hours of this filming, i was like, "0k, they are still hacking, this "is still going on." we started writing incessantly, again, to the press complaints commission, who said they would deal with it, and they still never did. he is coming round with his camera! from then on, i always had two phones. at one point, i ended up with six. in the end, it felt like they started to find out all my numbers and work out where i was going. it made me afraid, you know, where are they? are they following me? what are they doing? and frightened to talk on the phone because you knew you were being listened to but nobody would believe you. the most notorious private investigator in the phone hacking story is named glenn mulcaire.

he was hired by news of the world to hack phones and he hacked the phone of milly dowler, the schoolgirl who was murdered and when that emerged in 2011, it shocked the country and the news of the world had to close. he was, for a while, the most hated man in britain. today, a rare sighting of glenn mulcaire. the private investigator in the eye of the storm. the man who phone hacked for the news of the world. i made a statement yesterday, and due to legal constraints, unfortunately at this stage i can make no more comment at the moment. with no apparent irony, he'd asked the media to respect the privacy of his family. we believe that glenn mulcaire worked for other newspapers on fleet street, including the sun. i listened to heather mills' voicemails for the sun. i hacked not only the target, heather mills, but friends and families and associates so they could get access to material from voice messages left by heather.

so glenn's skill was he was able to blag the phone company and he did that by posing as an employee of the phone company in one department, and calling somebody else in another department, pretending to be a colleague, and getting access to the internal database. so you've got somebody�*s telephone accounts, you can find out their itemised phone bills, the numbers they were calling, dates and times. more importantly, he could change the pin number in order to access people's voicemails. the pin number protected the voicemails, if he reset it to the default, he could hack into their phone.

once you're on the inside of any phone companies, or banks, or any institution, you're on the dance floor, you control all the information and it's got results very, very fast. glenn mulcaire was not the only private investigator used by fleet street. there were a number of other private investigators who were hired by other newspapers, for example, milly dowler, we all know that glenn hacked milly dowler's phone and was punished for it, and the news of the world closed. but there is evidence that has been aired in court that he was not the only private investigator or the only newspaper that targeted the dowler family. i was accused of deleting milly dowler's messages. that was incorrect. i wasn't the only investigator, i wasn't the onlyjournalist at that time investigating

milly dowler. do you feel sorry that you hacked the phones of murdered victims? absolutely. my brother was killed, i've lost both parents. of course. absolutely heartfelt. it wasn't crossing a line? it wasn't instructed that way. he or she wasn't a murdered victim at the time, he said this needs to be hacked or this information needs to be laid back to them. there wasn't time to have a conversation of saying, this is regarding that and can you do that? it was actually, can you turn the number around, can you get the information back, and nothing else matters. it was totally, totally carnage. are you comfortable with the fact that some of your whistle—blowers are criminals and liars? you do have to be careful, for obvious reasons, particularly with private investigators, these were people who were paid to blag, to lie for a living by the newspapers. so, as far as possible, you've always got to make sure

that what they say and what they're telling you is backed up by evidence, by documents. heather mills, she brought a claim against the news of the world and the sun in 2017. part of heather mills' claim was an e—mail exchange between greg miskiw, glenn mulcaire's main handler and he went on to be convicted of phone hacking. that e—mail exchange is between greg and the sun. this is what the e—mail says, dated the 29th of may 2006. "monitored over the weekend, and there is nothing new. "she may not be using it at the moment. "we'll keep on, but not hopeful. "have a couple of other irons in the fire." what we say there is the crucial part of that e—mail

is the sentence, "she may not be using it at the moment." we say that is a direct reference to her phone. "she is not using it at the moment," in other words, "i can't access her messages and find out where she is." there is then a reply from the sun. "ok, thanks, greg. keep looking, mate." news group newspapers deny that the e—mail telling the reporter to keep looking was an instruction to access heather mills' voicemail. they say the e—mails were about monitoring an address connected with heather mills in order to ask for comment or get a picture. in 2019, news group newspapers paid heather mills a significant sum of money to settle their claim before it came to trial. they admitted to hacking for the news of the world, but made no such admissions for the sun. news group newspapers, through the destruction of my public reputation, have also indirectly destroyed

thousands and thousands of other innocent lives, through the profoundly negative impact that this has had on my landmine and animal and children charities and our ability to raise funds. but for the claimants, this was a landmark case that paved the way for further action. the e—mail gave the claimants' lawyers the confidence that ammunition for future cases might rest with internal newspaper documents. when someone sues a newspaper. insight have to give documents to each other. in the case of the sun, they will have to give any invoices, payments records or e—mails with a claimants name on it and it's a case of piecing that together to build a picture of what happened at the sun and the unlawful information

gathering we believe happened there. they are especially important because there are no whistle—blowing journalists like dan evans who have come forward to say hacking was going on at the sun and i saw it happen and so on so new and that kind of thing. all we have is the paper trail. by analysing the documents handed over by the sun, the team were able to gain what they considered crucial clues into stories that happened years earlier. members of the liberal democrat party to decide who will be their next leader. four liberal democrat leadership candidates have had their first chance to try to persuade activists that they are the right man to lead the party. the goal is to lead his party into power. we cannot afford to spend the next century on the sidelines of british politics.

towards the end of 2005, the leader of the liberal democrats — charles kennedy's drinking was becoming a problem. he stepped down and i suddenly found myself as being one of the favourites to become leader of the lib dems. my heart wasn't in it. it was a stupid idea, i was captured by the ego of it all and people saying you should do it. i am announcing this afternoon that i'm formally withdrawing for the candidate to be a leader of the liberal democrat party. i withdrew from the leadership contest and thought, "phew, that is a big relief!" i'm going to spend the weekend with my family, have some fun, go to the pictures, do some gardening, spend time with the children! the next morning, i woke up and opened the curtains and saw a couple of black cars in the village hall opposite our house and i thought, that's odd. so, i went out to speak to the journalists and it was then that they dropped the bombshell that they had found out that

in 2004, i had seen a male escort and they wanted to know what my comments were. i think i can honestly say there is hardly a day goes by where i don't still think about that moment. after 2006 and the scandal — which is the way i try and describe it now — i moved on and tried to get my life back on track. and then, out of the blue, the met police call me. they called me in for a meeting, "your phone was hacked," and they revealed all of the details of what had happened when i was running for leader. i was in tears, i wasjust completely blown away by what they showed me. there were tapes. tapes of voice messages that i'd never, ever got. i'd never, ever heard.

these were messages from people such as the itv correspondent, tom bradby, they were messages that if i had got them, i might have done things differently. the reason i hadn't got them was because the news of the world had got them. mark oaten had been exposed on the sunday in the news of the world for a sex scandal. we believe that the sun said, can we have a piece of this? let's have a look at some of the other leadership contenders. simon hughes was one of them. it looks like you have been lying in the sun for a month! where have you been? costa del sol. we are in the middle of the campaign, the polling appeared to suggest i was in the lead. we were all in good shape and good nick.

mark oaten had been exposed on the sunday. on the tuesday, an e—mail is sent from the sun news editor. and that e—mail, remarkably, contained a summary of an itemised phone bill from simon hughes's home phone which cannot be obtained legally. there was a payment to a known private investigator. that was used to obtain phone bill data, itemised phone bills and phone numbers. this itemised phone bill showed calls to a gay chat line from simon hughes's home phone. there was a persistent call from the sun saying they wanted to talk to me personally about a personal matter and not

willing to talk to any of my team. at the time i didn't have any idea what the issue would be. the meeting with the sun journalist happened on the parliamentary state and the assertion he put to me was that they had evidence that i'd been making phone calls to a gay or man—to—man chattine _ they wanted to know what response i'd make to that. the word blackmail wasn't used in the conversation but fairly quickly i said, "yes, i accept that has happened." i've had relationships with women and men, i don't think it's a matter of public interest. it seemed to me it was better to be honest and upfront about that and hope that, in a way, that would be the end of it. i was angry and embarrassed. i had never gone public about my sexuality, i'm

a member of the christian church and it's an issue in the church. i had family members for whom this would have been difficult. my mum who was living on her own, widowed, it was difficult. effectively detonated my campaign. is lib dems policy now to lie until you're found out? mr hughes's disclosure to the sun comes just a week after an interview with the independent newspaper where he denied past homosexual experience. today, he apologised for misleading people. i went from being the favourite to being the outsider in the campaign within 24 hours. something is clearly wrong here where people can obtain private information of this sort which has no public interest in terms of how the person does theirjob, whatjob they do, it is not illegal. this clearly is wrong.

in 2019, simon hughes launched the first claim directly against the sun. the sun obtained illegally the itemised home phone bill of my associate and friend simon hughes and outed him against his will as bisexual in an article that was frankly intrusive and homophobic. dr evan harris, a former lib dems mp, discovered that his phone number was one of those listed in simon hughes' itemised phone bill. he also launched a claim against the sun and the news of the world. as with heather mills, news group paid to settle both cases before they went to trial.

as a former director of hacked off, aren't you just a campaigner and aren't using the legal system now to have a go at the tabloid? when i ran the hacked off campaign, i encountered victims of press abuse, whistle—blowers who wanted to say what had really gone on. that is a combination of knowledge and experience that is clearly helpful to claimants. the job we do as paralegals now is to assist the claimants. so, yeah, i'm a frustrated campaigner because thejob i am currently doing is focused on the legal side of things, but this appears to be the only way for the truth to come out.

hello there. generally, over the next few days, it's going to be a mixture of sunshine, but also some showers. over the last 2a hours, we have seen quite muggy air heading our way from the atlantic. it's brought with it a lot of cloud, had some rain around as well. but before the rain arrived in eastern england, it was quite warm on wednesday. suffolk was the warmest place in the country with temperatures of 2a degrees. but this was the cloud that's been streaming in from the atlantic. it's been bringing with it some steady rain as well. all on these weather fronts here, the worst of the rain is going to get moved away out into the north sea. it dries off later on in the night, but there's still a lot of cloud. and so it's going to be a much warmer start to thursday with temperatures typically 1a or 15 degrees, but a dull, misty, damp start and fog over the hills. the rain may continue on and off through the day in northern parts of mainland scotland, possibly through the english channel and along the south coast, where it's going to be breezy.

elsewhere, the winds do become lighter. it may well brighten up a little bit, as well. some sunshine coming through. that could trigger some showers, a few sharp ones in the north—east of england. but it should be slightly warmer across northern ireland, wales and western areas of england, with the highest temperatures again in eastern parts of england. first day of the fifth the test match begins at the oval and it may well be a bit frustrating. some help for the bowlers, but there may well be some rain around, especially in the afternoon. as we head into the end of the week, and we're going to keep an eye on this area of low pressure that's sort of dominating the weather at the moment. but it gets closer and brings more showers in on friday to northern ireland, especially later on in the day, perhaps into western most parts of scotland. otherwise, a few mist patches, some sunshine at times, a few showers developing here and there, but probably not too many. many places, i think, we'll have a dry day on friday. and those temperatures could still reach 2a, maybe even 25 degrees across east anglia. but another weekend, another area of low pressure — that's going to dominate

the weather again. it'll slide its way eastwards across the northern half of the uk. and this is where we may well find some persistent rain at times and there'll be some stronger winds wrapped around that area of low pressure initially in northern ireland, then moving over the irish sea into the north—west of england and north wales. so, maybe the wetter weather for northern parts of the uk. whilst there'll be some sunshine in the south, there will be some showers and it's not particularly warm.

live from washington, this is bbc news. a suspenseful day in court for hunter biden — as the us president's son leaves without a plea agreement for now. soldiers in niger announce a coup, following the military�*s detention of the country's president. plus — the women's world cup

heats up, as the us and the netherlands battle it out in sydney. hello. it is great to have you with us. we start tonight with a developing story. a group of military officers in the west african country, niger announced a coup on national television. one of the soldiers, colonel major amadou adramane, said they dissolved the constitution, suspended all institutions, and closed the country's borders. protests erupted in the streets in response to the attempt to overthrow the government. in the announcement, adramane did not reference president mohamed bazoum — who has been detained by troops from the presdiential guard since early on wednesday. translation: this day, - july 23rd 2023, we, the defence and security forces, meeting within the national council for the safeguard of the homeland, have decided to put an end to the regime you know.

this follows the continuing deterioration of the security