Exclusive: Former British PM urges police to reopen inquiry – and claims media executive Will Lewis attempted to incriminate him

• I have now spoken to police officers who say they were misled by Murdoch’s empire. I won’t let this rest | Gordon Brown

The former prime minister Gordon Brown has made a new complaint to British police over allegations that Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire obstructed justice, after stating he has spoken to officers involved in the original phone-hacking inquiry.

Writing in the Guardian, Brown says one of the detectives alleged they believed there was “significant evidence� that News Group Newspapers (NGN) deleted millions of emails to pervert the course of justice.

Event took place with no Trump, no comedian and notably fewer politicians or Hollywood stars than in past years

Journalists rallied in defence of press freedom on Saturday, insisting they “are not the enemy of the people� at a Washington media gala snubbed by Donald Trump.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner was a muted affair with no US president, no comedian and notably fewer politicians or Hollywood stars than in past years.

The broadcaster on radioactive tomatoes, his suburban upbringing and still being a showoff

Born in 1965 in Epsom, Surrey, Jeremy Vine is a journalist and broadcaster. Vine’s media career began at the Coventry Evening Telegraph before he landed a job at the BBC in 1987, where he has worked in a number of roles including as a political reporter, Africa correspondent and Newsnight presenter. As well as his weekday programme on BBC Radio 2, he presents a self-titled weekday morning show on Channel 5. His new novel, Murder on Line One, is out now.

My dear old mum would have pulled this costume together. If you dress a boy as a soldier, he will almost certainly crawl around the floor like a sniper, which I did. Shortly after this was taken, I decided to launch a large log over my shoulder as if it were a bazooka. The back of it hit my head on the way past. I did myself a bit of mischief that day.

Workers at contractor in Accra say they have suffered from depression and anxiety as a result of their work

• ‘I didn’t eat or sleep’: a Meta moderator on his breakdown

Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse.

Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

President’s tensions with CBS show barely scratch surface of crusade against media he calls ‘enemy of the people’

Donald Trump’s battle with a US media he considers an “enemy of the people� has been a signature fight of his second term in office, sparking warnings of an erosion of press freedoms in America and fears over the independence of key publications owned by billionaires seeking to become close to the president.

But one struggle has now taken center stage that puts one of the most prestigious brands in US journalism in a direct legal fight with the White House, which has also dragged in a gigantic multibillion-dollar Wall Street deal by the corporate owners of one of America’s main broadcast networks.

From Johnny Depp in Somerset Life to Barack Obama in Dogs Today, Bernard Bale’s litany of starry interviews offers a rare insight into the engine room of celebrity journalism, and is every bit as intriguing as the thought of Jack Sparrow tending his Somerset garden

In the spring of 2023, subscribers to the British local lifestyle magazine Somerset Life were eagerly anticipating their April edition – a Gardens Special promising top tips for green-fingered readers and the best places to see seasonal bluebells.

But when the magazine landed on readers’ doormats, a story bigger than blooming gardens of south-west England was on the cover. In what appeared to be a world exclusive interview, the Hollywood A-lister Johnny Depp had confessed his love for the bucolic county. More than that, he had bought a secret hideaway in the area.

• Former Arsenal striker ‘disappointed’ by Aluko interview
• ‘I’ve seen your apology, but I can’t accept it’

Ian Wright has admitted he was “very disappointed� about Eni Aluko’s recent comments regarding his involvement in women’s football and says he “can’t accept� her apology.

In an interview this week, Aluko claimed men such as Wright “should be aware� of the opportunities they take in the women’s game, claiming female broadcasters should not be “blocked� from having a pathway. On BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, the former England forward said: “I’ve worked with Ian a long time and, you know, I think he’s a brilliant broadcaster. But I think he’s aware of just how much he’s doing in the women’s game. I think he should be aware of that.�

When the Glen Innes Examiner stopped circulating a print edition in the northern NSW town in September, a local volunteer newsroom formed to fill the gap

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Four months after the launch of the Glen Innes News in the New England region of New South Wales, the president of the masthead’s voluntary committee, David Lewis, has some good news: it’s still in the black. The fortnightly newspaper achieved break-even within two weeks of the launch of its first print edition on 16 January, he says, and is still “paying its bills� via advertisers and donors. For a town that lost its previous print newspaper due to reduced revenue, that’s no mean feat.

Written by unpaid community journalists, the publication has a guiding principle of transparency and is covering candidates ahead of the federal election. The fortnightly paper edition with a circulation of 1,500 is printed in nearby Guyra and distributed at outlets across the region. The website attracts 3,500 unique visitors monthly.

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Filming in Los Angeles is at a historic low, with some suggesting the city might go the way of Detroit

When screenwriter David Scarpa visits the great Hollywood studios these days, he is struck by what is missing. “It used to be you’d walk around those back lots and you’d see many people and they were very busy,� Scarpa muses. “They were like small cities. Now often you’ll walk around and have nobody else there. It feels empty. You definitely feel the absence of life on those lots.�

Like the once proud industrial factories of the midwest, the dream factories of southern California are in decline. Last year was the worst for on-location filming in Los Angeles since tracking began 30 years ago apart from pandemic-hit 2020. Of all the TV shows and feature films that North American audiences watch, only one-fifth are now made in California.

Memo from attorney general about criminal leak investigations calls conduct of leakers ‘treasonous’

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has revoked a Biden administration-era policy that restricted subpoenas of reporters’ phone records in criminal investigations.

An internal memo, first reported by ABC News, shows Bondi rescinding protections issued by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, for members of the media from having their records seized or being forced to testify in the course of leak investigations.

Annual event likely to prove gloomy affair amid Trump attacks on press and rise of Maga media ecosystem

It is no laughing matter. The annual dinner for journalists who cover the White House is best known for American presidents trying to be funny and comedians trying to be political. But this year’s edition will feature neither.

Instead the event in a downtown Washington hotel on Saturday night will, critics say, resemble something closer to a wake for legacy media still trying to find an effective response to Donald Trump’s divide-and-rule tactics and the rise of the Maga media ecosystem.

Evidence suggests an elaborate cover-up. The Met must act

• Former UK prime minister makes criminal complaint against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire

The groundbreaking apology to Prince Harry from Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) has not closed an era of investigation and litigation into media corruption. It has opened it up. Far from ending one of the most sordid chapters in British media history, it is raising fundamental, troubling and as yet unresolved questions – and today I am making a criminal complaint to the Met and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) alleging that I am, along with many others, a victim of the obstruction of the course of justice by NGN.

This is not an allegation made lightly. It is informed by recently available evidence, and by the statements of senior officers involved in the original investigations into unlawful newsgathering, who have now stated to me that they were misled.

Gordon Brown was UK prime minister 2007 to 2010

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She faced endless opposition and threats to her life. This has become a reality for far too many journalists

• Maxine Peake is an actor who appears in the new film Words of War

What drives someone to become a journalist? A good journalist, someone whose keyboard is a tool for exposing injustice, a truth-seeker who would risk life and limb to report their experiences back to the world? I know I couldn’t do it. I’ve interviewed people for a research project and was hopeless. I found myself shying away from asking the really difficult questions. There’s no way I could confront a corrupt official, or race to file a breaking story before a hostile regime tried to silence me, possibly for ever. I like to think of myself as the kind of person who would speak truth to power, but would I really, if my life was in the balance?

One of the many privileges of being an actor is that it affords you the opportunity to dip your toes into other worlds and experiences from the safest possible distance. In the upcoming film Words of War, I have the honour of portraying the Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya – a woman with immense courage and integrity who, despite numerous threats to her life, continued to be a blazing beacon of truth in a time and place where speaking truth was extremely dangerous. The film, which was partly inspired by Politkovskaya’s obituary in this newspaper, allowed me to delve into her remarkable life and work. The experience gave me a deeper appreciation for the journalists who risk everything to tell the stories that inform and shape our world.

It’s behind you! Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu find themselves at the mercy of a terrifying invisible enemy … and he really shouldn’t have called an evil officer ‘babes’

A lot of science fiction and fantasy franchises love to commission sequels but have a patchy record on delivering second stories that match up to the first. Russell T Davies and Sharma Angel-Walfall got close to pulling it off here, but the much-touted Disney+ bigger budget may have worked against it out-scaring the original.

Midnight, where we first met this galvanic radiation-soaked entity in 2008, had a cast of eight trapped on one space transporter set barely bigger than a couple of SUVs. By contrast, the base and sets on planet 6767 were huge, and lacking the claustrophobia that could have made this even more terrifying.

Britain loves a gameshow. But the contestants here compete in puzzles so unthinkably boring and complex that you’re baffled from the get-go. Then someone gets locked in a cage …

Britain loves a good gameshow. And if there weren’t enough on our screens already, the quizmasters-in-chief, ITV, recently announced that they would be bumping off the reality-focused ITVBe in favour of a new channel dedicated to them. Hopefully it will have some better programmes than Genius Game (Wednesday 30 April, ITV1), a new series that answers a question no one was asking. Namely, what if we had more light entertainment shows that felt like being back in GCSE maths?

Frustratingly, Genius Game should be good. David Tennant is the host, for God’s sake (though he joins the show via Zoom – maybe he’s elsewhere in the studio, or even at home, perhaps already aware it wasn’t worth the three-hour round trip from London, where he lives, to Maidstone in Kent, where it was filmed). Based on a South Korean series, a group of “geniuses� must compete in puzzles and games based on strategy and social manipulation, with Tennant confined to a TV screen in the corner, doing a very loose impression of Richard O’Brien in The Crystal Maze. Contestants include Bodalia, an NHS doctor who is also a touring DJ; entrepreneur Bex, who doesn’t think academic qualifications are the be-all and end-all, but does proudly possess a 100m swimming badge; and comedian Ken Cheng, who is easily one of the funniest people on LinkedIn, known for his satirical posts that send up “hustle and grind� business culture. There seems to be real potential at the outset, with the sense that this bunch were cast for their charisma as much as their IQs (or, as lecturer Benjamin puts it, “I applied for gay Love Island, so I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here!�) Oh, and there’s a £50,000 prize pot, which isn’t to be sniffed at.