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LONDON (AP) -- Is Rupert Murdoch's best-selling newspaper in open revolt?

The associate editor of The Sun newspaper fired off an 800-word broadside Monday at the U.K. police phone hacking investigation that has led to the arrest of some of the paper's most senior journalists. Trevor Kavanagh called the probe a phone-hacking "witch hunt" that was threatening "the very foundations of a free press."

Kavanagh's criticism was directed at police and politicians, but media watchers say its wording left no doubt he was also aiming his ire at the senior Murdoch lieutenants who have been sent in to handle the scandal, and possibly even the media mogul himself.

"Instead of being called in to questioning, 30 journalists have been needlessly dragged from their beds in dawn raids, arrested and held in police cells while their homes are ransacked," Kavanagh said in a prominent op-ed column.

Bold faced letters exclaimed that: "This witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on press freedom." That was an apparent reference to Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, where Britain ranks 28th behind former Eastern bloc countries such as Poland and Slovakia.

Kavanagh, one of Britain's most influential political journalists, said the scale of the police investigation into phone hacking was out of proportion to the alleged wrongdoing and was taking resources away from British counterterrorism work ahead of the Olympics, a claim denied by Scotland Yard.

Police released an unusual statement detailing the number of staff assigned to the investigation — 169 — and insisting that "at no stage has any major investigation been compromised as a result of these deployments."

The investigation into illegality at Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid and its sister paper, The Sun, has already led to a slew of arrests — including police officers, executives and well-known British tabloid journalists. No one has yet been charged, but the inquiry has uncovered widespread wrongdoing, including voicemail interception, computer hacking and illicit payments to public officials for information.

After an attempt to bury the scandal failed, Murdoch's News Corp. appointed a management and standards committee to get to the bottom of the criminality at his British newspaper subsidiary, News International. The committee, which reports to News Corp. executive vice president Joel Klein, has been pouring through millions of old emails and other documents in an attempt to turn the page on the scandal.

A comment widely attributed to a committee source recently spoke of the need to "drain the swamp" — a statement that has infuriated some journalists.

"The Sun is not a 'swamp' that needs draining," Kavanagh thundered in his first line. "Nor are those other great News International titles, The Times and The Sunday Times."

Observers said Kavanagh's "swamp" comments were a clear dig at the management standards team.

"Obviously that phrase — allegedly coming from a senior member of the MSC team — has deeply upset many people at the Sun," said Paul Connew, a media commentator who has held senior positions at several tabloids. "It's hardly helped the atmosphere."

Journalism professor Roy Greenslade went even further, calling the editorial "a thinly veiled attack on The Sun's owner, Rupert Murdoch."

Connew disagreed, saying that Murdoch may share Kavanagh's frustrations about having his paper at the center of a massive police inquiry.

"This may well reflect Rupert's position," he said of the column.

It may also reflect the position of other newspapers. Few journalists defended the News of The World before it was shut, but the reaction to the arrests at The Sun has been more mixed. The right-leaning Daily Telegraph said in an editorial Monday that "the hacking inquiry is too heavy handed," while the Daily Mail wondered whether police could really spare all that manpower "to investigate the alleged misdemeanors of some News International journalists."

Of course, even rival newspapers may have a self-interest in taking the heat off The Sun. Two veteran tabloid reporters told The Associated Press last year that paying police for tips — which is a crime in Britain — was common across the industry.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because they still worked in the media industry.

Allegations of bribery are particularly sensitive for the U.S.-based News Corp. America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act could be used to impose fines even in cases where activity has occurred overseas.

In the United States, Murdoch also owns the Fox television network and The Wall Street Journal newspaper.

Murdoch himself was expected in London sometime later this week.

___

Online:

Kavanagh's column: http://bit.ly/yesJD1

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Top editor at Sun tabloid attacks UK hacking probe

The 4D core is the ability to identify the emotional content, the legibility, word diversity and standardization.

LUDWIGSBURG, Germany -- Pintexx, an international company that focuses on sophisticated software solutions for the processing and optimizing of text, has announced today that it has released the Microsoft Add-In of the 4D Wording Optimizer.

Countless written communications are created without much thought because of deadlines and other pressures, even though most companies know that understandable, reader-friendly, and targeted communication is essential.

Customer-friendly letters and emails are a goal for most companies. Corporate language and communication have become extremely important in the marketplace. Companies today strive for customer friendly communication. The goal: Quality documents across the board. How can that be realized?

Legibility, standardization, diversity, and emotional content determine the success of written communication. Pintexx, a software publisher, has developed a unique Microsoft Word Add-In that includes these four dimensions. The software is for all areas of communication and all sectors, including manufacturing, retail, schools and universities, insurance and finance, and government agencies.

The 4D Wording Optimizer informs the user about strengths and weaknesses of a particular text and evaluates the text according to the four quality dimensions. The software delivers suggestions and alternatives. Company requirements and standards for written communication can easily be included in the software and thereby implemented more effectively. A multitude of useful functions helps to write more effective and efficient communication. Clear visualizations provide information about repetitions, the use of passive words, long sentences, comprehension, and if the communication reaches the reader on his or her level, among other things.

Pintexx has been able to create a unique and helpful tool based on the proven standards of the Corporate Wording? strategy and the 4-Color approach, as certified by Hans-Peter Forster, founder of Corporate Wording? and expert for corporate communication. For that reason the 4D Wording Optimizer has received the "CW Inside" certificate.

Please visit our website, http://www.pintexx.com, for further evaluation of the 4D Wording Optimizer and our other state-of-the-art tools. You can download a trial of this tool and any of our other writing tools.

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Microsoft Word Add-In helps identify document tone.

Confed flag council member

A Minnesota city councilman has a Confederate flag hanging outside his home and says he's not taking it down, no matter what people say.

"It's my house," West St. Paul Councilman Ed Hansen told the Pioneer Press. "What's the problem?"

Plenty, according to the city's mayor, John Zanmiller. The flag, visible from a busy avenue and to visitors at a nearby park, also has the word "redneck" written across it.

"I don't like it," Zanmiller said. "Do I wish the flag wasn't there? Yes."

While the mayor acknowledged he is not aware of any complaints made to the city, he reached out to Hansen on Friday about taking it down. Hansen declined, and Zanmiller acknowledged the decision is ultimately Hansen's.

Ed Hansen

Hansen, a first-term councilman elected in 2010, told the Pioneer Press he put the flag outside his house over the summer to no complaints. He said being an elected official should not matter one way or another.

"It represents sovereignty, individual rights and individual liberty," he told the newspaper. "It's my free speech, and that's my choice."

He dismissed any racist connotation the flag carries.

"I'm not a racist, and I don't think it's racist," he said. "People like to play the race card, though, when they don't get their way."

Jay Brunn, a developer who's building a house next to Hansen's, claimed the flag caused one prospective buyer to shy away.

When informed of that, Hansen told the Pioneer Press: "Good. I don't want him for a neighbor then. If people choose to be ignorant, that's their own fault. They should study history. It represents true sovereignty."

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Minn. City Councilman Defends Confederate Flag Outside His Home: ‘My Free Speech’

Originally published February 13, 2012 at 4:22 AM | Page modified February 13, 2012 at 7:46 AM

NEW YORK —

Mimi Alford was terrified in 1998 when the Monica Lewinsky scandal turned the word "intern" into a dirty joke, exposing an affair with a president. Her decades-old secret about her trysts with John F. Kennedy was still safe then.

Outed in a 2003 biography and a New York newspaper account, Alford has learned to tell her story and not be ashamed of it - from the moment she said Kennedy seduced her on her fourth day working at the White House until the affair ended shortly before his death.

In "Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath," published last week by Random House, she writes of her first encounter as a naive teenager, her "varied and fun" sex life with Kennedy, whom she always called Mr. President.

The Rumson, N.J., native was 19 and had no sexual experience when she first went to bed with Kennedy in his wife, Jacqueline's, bedroom. It was June 1962.

"Short of screaming," she writes, "I doubt I could have done anything to thwart his intentions."

Nor did she want to thwart his intentions.

"I wouldn't describe what happened that night as making love," she writes. "But I wouldn't call it nonconsensual, either." Addressing people who have questioned the encounter, she said: "I don't consider it was rape. I have never considered it rape because I was willing."

The relationship continued, even after Alford had become engaged while attending college in suburban Boston, until Kennedy's 1963 assassination, she wrote.

The two raced rubber ducks in the bathtub; they had multiple sexual encounters, though he never kissed her; when he called her at her college dorm, he would use the code name Michael Carter, she wrote.

Her account seems "quite credible," said Robert Dallek, whose Kennedy biography made a passing reference to a college sophomore who was a favorite of the president's.

"This is how he operated," Dallek said. "He was a compulsive womanizer."

A lawyer for the Kennedy family did not respond to requests for comment over the weekend.

Writing the book was liberating, Alford said in an interview last week in her publisher's midtown Manhattan offices. Now 68, Alford was slim and elegant in a gray knit dress, gray pageboy hairstyle and pearl earrings.

She was Marion "Mimi" Beardsley when she arrived at the White House press office the summer after her freshman year at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, then an all-girls school.

The affair began during her summer internship and continued when she returned to Wheaton in the fall, she wrote. It continued while she dated and until a few months after her engagement to Tony Fahnestock, a senior at Williams. She was deep into wedding preparations when Kennedy was shot.

Overcome with grief, she confessed the affair to her fiance. He told her never to breathe a word of it. She promised, fearful that the only alternative was to break off the engagement, and she largely kept the promise, telling only a trusted few. It took years for her to see the connection between her silence about the relationship and "the emotional shutting down" that had blighted much of her life.

"I needed to look at the secret and then look at the impact of having kept the secret for so long," she said.

Mimi and Tony Fahnestock divorced in 1991 and he died in 1993. Alford married again in 2005, to Dick Alford. Her two daughters from her marriage to Fahnestock are in their 40s, are mothers themselves and have supported her decision to write of her experience, she said.

The book took several years and multiple drafts. Alford supplemented her memory with research at the Kennedy Library, where she found her name on passenger logs from plane trips with Kennedy's entourage.

The story she tells is not always flattering to Kennedy or to Alford herself.

She felt no guilt, she wrote, with regard to the first lady, whom she never met.

"I do now," she said.

But at the time, "it wasn't as if I was trying to replace her or that the president was trying to replace her. I think I just went along. And so I didn't feel guilty. It's kind of embarrassing to say that."

Alford knows that readers may judge her harshly; "it doesn't frighten me," she said.

She describes Kennedy as "a kind and thoughtful man." And then, she tells stories of what she calls his darker side.

She says Kennedy once asked her to "take care of" his aide Dave Powers, who had served as the go-between facilitating the affair; she performed oral sex on Powers while Kennedy watched. The president later apologized to both of them.

On another occasion, she wrote, he asked her to do the same for his brother Teddy. She refused.

Then there was a party with a "fast Hollywood crowd" at Bing Crosby's house in Palm Springs, Calif., that she attended with the president. A guest offered yellow pills that she believed were poppers, or amyl nitrate, a drug often used to enhance sexual pleasure.

Kennedy asked her if she wanted to try one and she said no, but she said he popped the capsule and held it under her nose anyway.

"Within minutes of inhaling the powder, my heart started racing and my hands began to tremble," she writes. "This was a new sensation, and it frightened me. I panicked and ran crying from the room, praying that it would end soon."

Alford debated whether to share episodes like this, taking them out of the book and putting them back in. If she had excluded them, she said, "it would have felt like I was not telling the whole story."

When the affair with Kennedy was revealed in 2003 - the Daily News of New York published her name - Alford spent a few days holed up in her apartment with the media camped outside. Then they left and she started going to work and going grocery shopping again.

After interviews to promote "Once Upon a Secret," she expects to return to her quiet life once more.

"It's sort of like closing a chapter on that 18 months," she said, "and closing a chapter on keeping secrets."

Excerpt from:
JFK intern recounts long-ago affair in new book

MANITOWOC ? The United Way of Manitowoc County recently celebrated the 14th anniversary of National 2-1-1 Day on Feb. 11, according to a press release.

For the millions of Americans needing help every day ? from locating financial assistance during a family crisis, to finding adequate care for an aging parent, to searching for the highest-quality child care, 2-1-1 is an easy-to-remember phone number connecting people quickly to essential community resources, the release stated.

In 2011, United Way 2-1-1 answered close to 500 calls from residents of Manitowoc County. Of the total calls: 73 percent were Manitowoc residents, 15 percent Two Rivers and 3 percent Kiel. Calls also came from Valders, Mishicot, Reedsville, Whitelaw and other rural areas, according to the release.

The majority of individuals needed help with basic needs like food, utilities, housing and health care, the release indicated. Last year in a survey of 2-1-1 call centers across the country, 86 percent reported receiving more calls from those who have never used 2-1-1 before. Furthermore, approximately 90 percent reported receiving more calls from individuals who have never before accessed any form of basic needs services (food pantries, rent assistance, utility assistance, public assistance benefits).

To access 2-1-1 services, dial 2-1-1 from your home or cell phone. If in an area where dialing 2-1-1 does not work, call 1-800-924-5514. Individuals also may search for services online by visiting http://www.unitedwaymanitowoc.org. Click on the 2-1-1 icon.

For more information, contact the United Way office at (920) 682-8888.

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United Way spreads word about 2-1-1