Jonathan Chapman, the former director of legal affairs with News International, said Rupert Murdoch wasn't being accurate when he told Parliament that he blamed the London law firm Harbottle & Lewis for failing to uncover the scope of the hacking scandal back in 2007. News International is the British arm of Murdoch's global News Corp. media empire.

"I don't think Mr. Murdoch had his facts right," Chapman told lawmakers. "He was wrong."

Chapman was one of four executives fielding questions from Parliament's media committee about what they knew and when -- and all have already cast doubt on key aspects of the testimony given by the Murdoch family earlier this summer.

The hacking scandal has decimated Murdoch's British newspaper arm, leading to the closure of its top-selling Sunday tabloid, News of the World, and the arrests of more than a dozen journalists.

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An eerie calm prevailed in the capital, where hundreds of shops were shuttered or boarded up as a precaution, but unrest spread across England on a fourth night of violence by brazen crowds of young people.

Scenes of ransacked stores, torched cars and blackened buildings have frightened and outraged Britons just a year before their country is to host next summer's Olympic Games, bringing demands for a tougher response from law enforcement. Police across the country have made almost 1,200 arrests since the violence broke out over the weekend.

In London, where armored vehicles and convoys of police vans patrolled the streets, authorities said there were 16,000 officers on duty -- almost triple the number present Monday night.

The show of force seems to have worked. There were no reports of major trouble in London, although there were scores of arrests. Almost 800 people have been arrested in London since trouble began Saturday.

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France halted the sale of fenugreek, mustard and arugula sprout seeds from British mail order seed and plant company Thompson & Morgan after eight people were hospitalized following an E. coli outbreak. French investigators found that two of them were sickened after consuming sprouts from the three seed types in the southwestern town of Begles, a suburb of Bordeaux.

Some of those affected were infected by the same strain of E. coli that has killed 44 people -- all but one in Germany -- and sickened more than 3,700 in recent weeks.

In a statement, Thompson & Morgan said the link being made by French officials was unsubstantiated, adding that it believed that "something local in the Bordeaux area, or the way the product has been handled and grown, is responsible for the incident rather than our seeds."

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Hungarian-born economist Piroska Nagy voiced "doubts about Dominique Strauss-Kahn's suitability for running an international institution," according to the person, who was familiar with the letter's content but declined to be identified, citing the sensitivity of the matter.

Nagy, who had worked at the IMF for decades, left the organization after the affair with Strauss-Kahn in 2008. Although the relationship has long been public knowledge, and an IMF-commissioned investigation into the case cleared Strauss-Kahn of wrongdoing, it is back in the news after the 62-year-old Frenchman's incarceration on sex crimes charges in New York.

The New York Times published an excerpt of the letter, along with an account that alleged Nagy had been aggressively pursued by her boss, who sent her sexually explicit messages and at one point even had her summoned from the bathroom to speak to him.

Nagy did not return an email Tuesday seeking comment on the report, but the person close to her said it was accurate. Nagy now works with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London.

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Encouraged by the largely successful peace process in Northern Ireland, the queen will on Tuesday become the first British monarch to set foot in the Republic of Ireland, where troops and even ground-to-air missiles were being deployed amid tight security.

When a British sovereign last visited, a full century ago, all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom.

The monarch's presence is resented by some in Ireland who bristle at the legacy of British rule, with some predicting violent street clashes and others fearing a terrorist attack.

London's Metropolitan Police said the bomb warning -- which was received late on Sunday -- did not include a specific location or time.

Officers were conducting sweeps across the city and closed down to traffic parts of the British capital, including roads near the queen's official residence.

"Londoners should continue to go about their business as usual but we encourage the public to remain vigilant," police said in a statement.

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People and politicians around the world have followed Egypt's 18 days of pro-democracy protests with a mixture of awe and hope, and celebrations echoed the jubilation in Cairo's Tahrir Square when President Hosni Mubarak bowed to protesters' demands and resigned.

In the Tunisian capital, cries of joy and a thunderous honking of horns greeted the announcement that Mubarak has handed power over to the military.

"God delivered our Egyptian brothers from this dictator," said a smiling Yacoub Youssef.

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Micro-blogging site Twitter has been buzzing with screen grabs from Vodafone's Egyptian customers showing text messages sent over the course of the protests against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year-old regime.

A text message received Sunday by an Associated Press reporter in Egypt appealed to the country's "honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honor." The sender is identified only as "Vodafone."

Vodafone Group PLC said in a statement that the texts had been scripted by Egyptian authorities. The company said authorities had invoked emergency rules to draft the messages, whose content it said it had no ability to change.

"Vodafone Group has protested to the authorities that the current situation regarding these messages is unacceptable," the statement said. "We have made clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator."

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But Visa Europe Ltd. said Wednesday it would continue blocking donations to the secret-spilling site until it completes its own investigation. Company spokeswoman Amanda Kamin said she couldn't say when Visa's inquiry, now stretching into its eighth week, would be finished.

Visa was one of several American companies that cut its ties with WikiLeaks after it began publishing a massive trove of secret U.S. diplomatic memos late last year. U.S. officials have accused the site of putting its national security at risk -- a claim WikiLeaks says is an attempt to distract from the memos' embarrassing content.

When it announced its decision to suspend WikiLeaks donations on Dec. 8, Visa said it was awaiting an investigation into "the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules" -- though it did not go into details. The Norway-based financial services company Teller AS, which Visa ordered to look into WikiLeaks and its fundraising body, the Sunshine Press, found no proof of any wrongdoing.

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Here's a look at what the consequences of the cables' release has been so far, and what the future could hold for WikiLeaks.

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IT'S LIFTED THE VEIL ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

WikiLeaks has given the world's public an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at U.S. diplomacy. Among the most eye-catching revelations were reports that Arab countries had lobbied for an attack on Iran, China had made plans for the collapse of its North Korean ally, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had ordered U.S. diplomats to gather the computer passwords, fingerprints and even DNA of their foreign counterparts.

Some of the most controversial cables dealt with a directive to harvest biometric information on a range of officials. U.S. diplomats have been forced repeatedly to deny spying on their counterparts -- although none have specifically addressed the instructions to gather personal details, sensitive computer data, and even genetic material or iris scans.

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WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said he believed other American Internet companies such as Facebook and Google may also have been ordered to divulge information on himself and colleagues.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a subpoena ordering Twitter Inc. to hand over private messages, billing information, telephone numbers and connection records of accounts run by Assange and others.

The subpoena also targeted Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of supplying the site with classified information; Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum, both of whom have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.

The subpoena, dated Dec. 14, asked for information dating back to November 1, 2009.

Assange blasted the U.S. move, saying it amounted to harassment, and vowed to fight it.

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Assange spoke from snowbound Ellingham Hall, a supporter's 10-bedroom country mansion where he is confined on bail as he fights Sweden's attempt to extradite him on allegations of rape and molestation. Assange insisted to television interviewers that he was being subjected to a smear campaign and "what appears to be a secret grand jury investigation against me or our organization."

He did not elaborate, but said he had retained an unnamed U.S. law firm to represent him.

Assange has repeatedly voiced concerns that American authorities were getting ready to press charges over WikiLeaks' continuing release of some 250,000 secret State Department cables, which have angered and embarrassed U.S. officials worldwide.

U.S. officials are investigating WikiLeaks and considering charges, a case that if pursued could end up pitting the government's efforts to protect sensitive information against press and speech freedoms guaranteed by First Amendment free speech right. The government suspects WikiLeaks received the documents from an Army private, Bradley Manning, who is in the brig on charges of leaking other classified documents to the organization.

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Assange showed no reaction as Judge Howard Riddle denied him bail in an extradition case that could see him sent to Sweden to face allegations of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion.

Assange denies the accusations and has pledged to fight the extradition, while a spokesman for his organization said the U.S. diplomatic secrets would keep on flowing -- regardless of what happened to the group's founder.

"This will not change our operation," Kristinn Hrafnsson told The Associated Press ahead of Assange's hearing. As if to underline the point, WikiLeaks released a cache of a dozen new diplomatic cables, its first publication in more than 24 hours.

Assange appeared at before City of Westminster Magistrates' Court in London after turning himself in to Scotland Yard earlier Tuesday, capping months of speculation over an investigation into alleged sex crimes committed in Sweden over the summer.

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The American company EveryDNS said that it stopped hosting the website wikileaks.org late Thursday after cyber attacks on the site threatened the rest of its network. WikiLeaks responded by moving to a Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch -- and calling on activists for support.

The Guardian newspaper took down an live online question-and-answer session with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after being swamped with visitors. The Guardian, one of the papers that has been posting hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, said it had received questions, and that Assange's answers would come in shortly.

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops," Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow said in a tweet reposted by WikiLeaks to its 300,000-odd followers.

EveryDNS said that "Wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure."

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Sweden's Supreme Court upheld a order to detain the 39-year-old Australian for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual molestation that could lead to his extradition. The former computer hacker has been out of the public eye for nearly a month, although attorney Mark Stephens insisted that authorities knew how to find him.

"Both the British and the Swedish authorities know how to contact him, and the security services know exactly where he is," Stephens told The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, cables published to WikiLeaks' website detailed alleged financial support for North Korea and terrorist affiliates by Austrian banks; an allegation by a Pakistani official that Russia "fully supports" Iran's nuclear program; and a deeply unflattering assessment of Turkmenistan's president.

Accused in Sweden of rape, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of unlawful coercion, Assange's last public appearance was at a Geneva press conference on Nov. 5.

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The organization made the announcement in a brief message posted to its followers on Twitter, giving no information about the content of the coming release or its exact timing -- although it did refer to "the coming months" in a separate tweet sent about an hour later.

Although the website has been spilling secrets for years, WikiLeaks shot to international prominence this year with a three leaks. One exposed a classified U.S. helicopter video that appears to show an attack on two Reuters employees and other civilians. The second made public 77,000 ground-level U.S. intelligence files covering the war in Afghanistan. The third put out 400,000 more such files exposing the daily grind of attacks, detentions and interrogations in Iraq.

Although it isn't clear what WikiLeaks is planning to release next, it allegedly has a huge cache of classified U.S. State Department cables whose publication could give a behind-the-scenes look at American diplomacy around the world.

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The seagoing mammals would be particularly vulnerable to the sun damage in part because they need to spend extended periods of time on the ocean's surface to breathe, socialize, and feed their young. Since they don't have fur or feathers, that effectively means they sunbathe naked.

As Laura Martinez-Levasseur, the study's lead author, put it: "Humans can put on clothes or sunglasses -- whales can't."

Martinez-Levasseur, who works at Zoological Society of London, spent three years studying whales in the Gulf of California, the teeming body of water which separates Baja California from the Mexican mainland.

Photographs were taken of the whales to chart any visible damage, and small samples -- taken with a crossbow-fired dart -- were collected to examine the state of their skin cells.

Her study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, seemed to confirm suspicions first raised by one of her whale-watching colleagues: The beasts were showing lesions associated with sun damage, and many of their skin samples revealed patterns of dead cells associated with exposure to the powerful ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun.

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The documents are among nearly 400,000 released Friday by the WikiLeaks website in defiance of Pentagon insistence that the action puts the lives of U.S. troops and their coalition partners at risk.

Although the documents appear to be authentic, their origin could not be independently confirmed, and WikiLeaks declined to offer any details about them. The Pentagon has previously declined to confirm the authenticity of WikiLeaks-released records, but it has employed more than 100 U.S. analysts to review what was previously released and has never indicated that any past WikiLeaks releases were inaccurate.

The 391,831 documents date from the start of 2004 to Jan. 1, 2010, mostly by low-ranking officers in the field. In terse, dry language, they catalog thousands of battles with insurgents and roadside bomb attacks, along with equipment failures and shootings by civilian contractors.

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U.S. officials said Friday they were racing to contain the damage from the imminent release, while NATO top official told reporters he feared that lives could be put at risk by the mammoth disclosure.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said any release would create "a very unfortunate situation."

"I can't comment on the details of the exact impact on security but in general I can tell you that such leaks ... may have a very negative security impact for people involved," he told reporters Friday in Berlin following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A team of more than a hundred analysts from across the U.S. military, lead by the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been combing through the Iraq documents they think will be released in anticipation of the leak.

Called the Information Review Task Force, its analysts have pored over the documents and used word searches to try to pull out names and other issues that would be particularly sensitive, officials have said.

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The official response, according to documents unearthed by The Independent newspaper, was that the handout might prove to be an embarrassment if word got out. The paper quotes an unnamed functionary as gently reminding the royal household that the money was meant for local authorities, housing associations, and the like.

"I also feel a bit uneasy about the probable adverse press coverage if the Palace were given a grant at the expense of say a hospital," the paper quoted the official as saying. "Sorry this doesn't sound more positive."

The newspaper said royal aides were looking for a way to pay the queen's spiraling utility bills, which had risen by 50 percent to more than 1 million pounds ($1.58 million) in 2004. A letter written that year and addressed to Britain's culture department asked whether the queen could get a community energy grant to upgrade the heating systems at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, the monarch's favorite weekend residence.

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WikiLeaks already has published 77,000 classified U.S. military reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, an extraordinary disclosure which some say could expose human rights abuses across the NATO-led campaign.

The disclosure also has angered the Pentagon, which has accused WikiLeaks of endangering the lives of soldiers and informants in the field, and demanded that WikiLeaks refrain from publishing any more secret data.

Speaking via videolink to London's Frontline Club, Assange said he had no intention of holding back. He gave no specific timeframe, but he said his organization was about halfway through those 15,000 or so secret files previously held back from publication.

"We're about 7,000 reports in," he said, adding that he would definitely publish them. There was no indication as to whether Assange would give the documents to The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel -- as he did before -- or simply dump them on his website.

He said he had "no comment" about his current whereabouts.

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