Son says Romney was reluctant to run for president again: report

 Republican Mitt Romney's family had to convince him to make a second bid for the presidency because he was reluctant to run again after failing to secure his party's nomination in 2008, Romney's son told the Boston Globe on Sunday.
In an article that examined what went wrong with Romney's losing 2012 presidential campaign, Tagg Romney said his father Mitt said he had no intention of running again after he did not become the Republican presidential nominee in 2008.
Arizona Senator John McCain secured the Republican nomination that year and lost to Democrat Barack Obama in the presidential election.
In order to overcome his father's reluctance, Tagg Romney told the Globe he and his mother Ann worked to change his mind.
"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life," Tagg Romney told the paper. "If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside."
Despite predictions that the 2012 election would be close, Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and businessman, fell well short of the 270 electoral votes needed to defeat President Obama.
In November, Obama won re-election with 332 electoral votes and won most of the battleground states, including Ohio and Florida.

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Deportations of illegal immigrants in 2012 reach new US record

The United States deported more than 400,000 illegal immigrants in 2012, the most of any year in the nation’s history, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports.
The record number, released Friday, is also important for another reason: It is a stinging reminder to Latinos that President Obama failed during his first term to pursue the comprehensive immigration reform that they seek.
The Obama administration framed its 2012 work in immigration enforcement as focused mainly on criminals – 55 percent of deportations came from convicted criminals, a record high – rather than on indiscriminately rounding up illegal immigrants and sending them home. ICE on Friday also issued new detention guidelines intended to emphasize legal action against those who have committed crimes above and beyond immigration violations.
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“While the [fiscal year] 2012 removals indicate that we continue to make progress in focusing resources on criminal and priority aliens, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we are doing everything we can to utilize our resources in a way that maximizes public safety,” ICE Director John Morton said in a statement.
In four years, the Obama administration has deported three-quarters of the number of people that President George W. Bush’s administration did in eight. And unlike Mr. Bush, Obama made no concerted effort to reform the US immigration system – a history that’s not lost on the president’s Latino supporters.
"This is nothing to be proud of,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) of Illinois, a leading lawmaker on immigration reform for a decade, in a statement on the deportation statistics.
While Representative Gutierrez lauded the crackdown on criminals as necessary, he said some 90,000 undocumented parents of American-born children continue to be deported each year.
“We must also realize that among these hundreds of thousands of deportations are parents and breadwinners and heads of American families that are assets to American communities and have committed no crimes,” the Gutierrez statement said. "Solving this problem in a humane and sensible way requires Congress to act on immigration reform and do what we have been unable to do for 25 or 30 years.”
The closest the Obama administration came to reshaping immigration policy was the summer 2012 implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, whereby some young unauthorized immigrants could gain a two-year deferral of deportation and access to work permits and driver's licenses.
Some 355,000 people have applied under the program, and just over 100,000 have been approved through mid-December, according to the latest data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. As many as 1.7 million undocumented immigrants could be eligible for the program over time, experts say.
While immigration advocates cheered the president's DACA order, they also remember his unfulfilled promise at the start of his term in 2009 to take on immigration reform, as well as the record number of deportations under his watch.
“The credibility of the president is on the line,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “The president has to lead. The president has to show Republicans and Democrats that he’s serious about this and that he’s not just going to use it as a political lightning rod.”
Obama has promised to tackle immigration reform early in 2013, and congressional discussions about potential legislation are under way between lawmakers from both parties in the House and Senate.
If Obama doesn’t, Republicans will be eager to point out that Democrats once again broke their promises to some of the left’s key voting blocs.
“I just want to remind all of you, though, that the Democrats had two years to do something about immigration reform,” said Rep. Raul Labrador (R) of Idaho after a vote on a GOP-led bill that would have[would have? didnt that pass?] killed the diversity visa lottery in favor of more visas for highly educated immigrants in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
“They had a White House. They had the House. They had the Senate. And they did nothing about immigration reform,” he said.
And that could make Latino and Asian voters, who sided overwhelmingly with Democrats in the 2012 election, susceptible to Republican overtures in the future.
“Everybody talks about the incredible turnout of the new American vote in 2012, but Latinos, Asians, and other voters are not die-hard Democrats,” Mr. Noorani says. “There’s a lot of space there for Republicans to step into.”
Until Obama and reform-minded members of Congress make good on their vows that 2013 will yield a comprehensive fix to America’s immigration system, however, Latino, Asian, and other pro-immigration forces will continue to feel uneasy about the high level of deportations under a Democratic president.

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Republicans Turn to An Unlikely Name for Inspiration: George W. Bush

As Republicans reassess their future in the presidential wilderness, seeking a message and messenger to resonate with a new generation of voters, one unlikely name has popped up as a role model: former President George W. Bush.
Prominent Republicans eager to rebuild the party in the wake of the 2012 election are pointing to Bush’s successful campaigns for Hispanic votes, his efforts to pass immigration reform, and his mantra of “compassionate conservatism.” Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000 and at least 40 percent in 2004, a high-water mark for a Republican presidential candidate.
In contrast, Romney received only 27 percent of the Latino vote, after taking a hard-line approach to illegal immigration during the Republican presidential primaries, touting “self-deportation” for undocumented workers. In exit polls, a majority of voters said that Romney was out of touch with the American people and that his policies would favor the rich. While Romney beat Obama on questions of leadership, values, and vision, the president trounced him by 63 points when voters were asked which candidate “cares about people like me.”
These signs of wear and tear to the Republican brand are prompting some of Bush’s critics to acknowledge his political foresight and ability to connect with a diverse swath of Americans, although the economic crash and unpopular wars on his watch make it unlikely he will ever be held up as a great president.
“I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush,” wrote Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the conservative National Review Online, after the election. “I still don't like compassionate conservatism or its conception of the role of government. But given the election results, I have to acknowledge that Bush was more prescient than I appreciated at the time.”
The ebb in Bush-bashing could help pave the way for a 2016 presidential bid by his brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, another proponent of immigration reform with proven appeal in the Hispanic community. “The Bush family knows how to expand the party and how to win,” said GOP consultant Mark McKinnon, a former George W. Bush political aide, when asked about a possible Jeb Bush campaign. Voter wariness toward a third Bush administration could ease if the former president and his father, who served one term, are remembered less for their failures and more for their advocacy of “compassionate conservatism” and “a kinder, gentler nation.”
“I think all that certainly helps if Jeb decides to do so something down the road, though I think he will eventually be judged on his own,” said Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who led the Florida Republican Party when Bush was governor.
President Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was tapped last week by the Republican National Committee to serve on a five-member committee examining what went wrong in the 2012 election. Two days earlier, a survey released by Resurgent Republic and the Hispanic Leadership Network found that a majority of Hispanic voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico  don’t think the GOP “respects” their values and concerns.
“One of the party’s biggest challenges going forward is the perception that Republicans don’t care about people, about minorities, about gays, about poor people,” Fleischer said. “President Bush regularly made a push to send welcoming messages, and one of the lessons of 2012 is that we have to demonstrate that we are an inclusive party.”
President Bush’s success with minority voters stemmed in large part from his two campaigns for governor in Texas. He liked to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.” Unlike Romney, who invested little in Spanish-language advertising until the final two months of his campaign, Bush began reaching out to Hispanics early; he outspent his Democratic opponents in Spanish media in both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
“I remember people grumbling about making calls in December 2003, but we kept pushing,” said Jennifer Korn, who led Bush’s Hispanic outreach in his 2004 campaign. The president’s upbeat Spanish-language ads depicted Latino families getting ahead in school and at work. “I’m with Bush because he understands my family,” was the theme of one spot.
Korn, who now serves as executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, said Republicans are constantly asking her how the party can win a bigger share of the Latino vote.
“I tell them we already did it,” she said. “President Obama just took Bush’s plan and updated it.”
Republicans are also looking at the groundwork that Bush laid on immigration reform. He has kept a low profile since leaving office, but he waded into the debate in a speech in Dallas last month. The legislation he backed in his second term would have increased border security, created a guest-worker program, and allowed illegal immigrants to earn citizenship after paying penalties and back taxes.
“America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time,” Bush said in Dallas. “As our nation debates the proper course of action related to immigration I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contributions of immigrants.”
Bush is even a presence in the current high-stakes budget negotiations between Capitol Hill and the White House. Although the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration for the wealthiest Americans have been a major sticking point, the tax policy it put in place for the vast majority of households has bipartisan support.
“When you consider that the Obama administration is talking about not whether to extend the Bush tax cuts but how much of them to extend, you see that Bush is still setting the agenda,” said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos, who worked on Bush’s 2004 campaign.
While a possible presidential bid by Jeb Bush heightens the impact of his brother’s evolving legacy, it’s not unusual for a president’s image to change after leaving office. (Look at former President Clinton, who enjoyed positive ratings during most of his presidency, infuriated Obama supporters during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008, and emerged after the election as a better Democratic spokesman than Obama.)  Gallup pegged Bush’s presidential approval at 25 percent at the end of his second term, the lowest ranking since Richard Nixon. But after President Obama spearheaded unpopular spending packages and health care reforms, Bush’s popularity began to tick up.
A Bloomberg News survey in late September showed Bush’s favorability at 46 percent, 3 points higher than Romney’s rating. Still, with a majority of voters viewing the former president unfavorably, Romney rarely, if ever, mentioned his name during the campaign. Asked to address the differences between him and the former president in one of the debates, Romney said, “I’m going to get us to a balanced budget. President Bush didn’t.” Obama seized on the comparison, taking the unusual tack of praising the Republican successor he had vilified in his first campaign to portray Romney as an extremist.
“George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher,” Obama said. “George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform. He didn’t call for self-deportation. George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”
Democrats and moderate Republicans found themselves cheering for Bush, if only for a moment. A majority of voters said that Bush is more to blame for the current economic problems than Obama, according to exit polling. If Bush wasn’t the bigger scapegoat, Obama may not have won a second term.
Veterans of Bush’s campaigns and administrations say that while learning from his mistakes, Republicans should also take note of the political risks he took by proposing reforms to immigration and education laws and boosting funding for community health centers and AIDS outreach in Africa.
“One of the issues we ran into in the 2012 campaign is that there weren’t a lot of differences between Mitt Romney and Republican orthodoxy,” said Terry Nelson, Bush’s political director in the 2004 campaign. “I think that’s something Republican candidates in the future have to consider.  The public respects it when you can show you can stand up to your party on certain issues. Bush did that.

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Why the Election Polls Missed the Mark

In the days following an election in which his organization's polls proved to be inaccurate, Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport published a blog post warning of "a collective mess."
The results of the election--President Obama's 4-point victory--was not the only indication that Gallup's polls were biased in favor of Republican Mitt Romney. Websites that average and aggregate polls showed, on balance, that Obama was in a stronger position than Gallup's polls did, which allowed some observers to paint the longtime pollster as an outlier, both before and after the votes were tallied.
Newport, in his blog post three days after the election, saw these aggregators as a threat--not only to the Gallup Organization but to the entire for-profit (and nonprofit) public-opinion industry. "It's not easy nor cheap to conduct traditional random sample polls," Newport wrote. "It's much easier, cheaper, and mostly less risky to focus on aggregating and analyzing others' polls. Organizations that traditionally go to the expense and effort to conduct individual polls could, in theory, decide to put their efforts into aggregation and statistical analyses of other people's polls in the next election cycle and cut out their own polling. If many organizations make this seemingly rational decision, we could quickly be in a situation in which there are fewer and fewer polls left to aggregate and put into statistical models."
Newport's hypothetical--that because aggregators that averaged polls or used polls to model the election results more accurately predicted the results than his traditional, phone polling--sounds a little paranoid on its face. But it underscores the effects that increasing costs and decreasing budgets are having on media organizations that cover politics and typically pay for this kind of survey work.
It also reopens a long-standing debate over poll aggregation. Some pollsters and media organizations think the practice of averaging polls that survey different universes or are conducted using different methodologies is bunk. They warn that considering cheaper, less rigorous polling on the same plane as live-caller polls that randomly contact landline and cell-phone respondents allows the averages to be improperly influenced by less accurate surveys. And, ultimately, while the poll averages and poll-based forecasts accurately picked the winner, they underestimated the margin of Obama's victory by a significant magnitude.
But others, including the poll aggregators themselves, maintain that averaging polls, or using poll results as part of a predictive model, produces a more accurate forecast than considering any one individual poll. Before an election, it's difficult to predict which polls will be more accurate and which polls will miss the mark. Averaging results together also provides important context to media and consumers of political information when every new poll is released, proponents argue.
Ultimately, this is a debate that also goes beyond the statistical questions about averaging polls. It touches on the nature of horse-race journalism and the way in which we cover campaigns.
The First Number Crunchers
Real Clear Politics began the practice of averaging polls before the 2002 midterm elections. RCP was joined by Pollster.com--which is now part of The Huffington Post--four years later. "Pollster started in 2006, and we were really building on what Real Clear Politics did," founding Coeditor Mark Blumenthal said. The statistician Nate Silver began a similar practice in 2008, and his site, FiveThirtyEight, was acquired by The New York Times shortly thereafter. More recently, the left-leaning website Talking Points Memo started its PollTracker website before the 2012 election.
Each of these organizations differ in their approaches. Real Clear Politics does a more straightforward averaging of the most recent polls. TPM's PollTracker is an aggregation involving regression analysis that uses the most recent polls to project a trajectory for the race. FiveThirtyEight and HuffPost Pollster use polls, adjusting them for house effects--the degree to which a survey house's polls lean consistently in one direction or another. FiveThirtyEight also uses non-survey data to project the election results.
All four of these outlets underestimated Obama's margin of victory. Both Real Clear Politics and PollTracker had Obama ahead by only 0.7 percentage points in their final measurements. HuffPost Pollster had Obama leading by 1.5 points, while FiveThirtyEight was closest, showing Obama 2.5 points ahead of Romney in the last estimate. The aggregators that came closest to Obama's overall winning margin were the ones that attempted to account for pollsters' house effects.
"The polls, on balance, understated President Obama's support," said John McIntryre, cofounder of Real Clear Politics. "Our product is only as good as the quality and the quantity of the polls that we use."
These sorts of house effects were why HuffPost Pollster moved to a model that attempted to control for them, but their average still underestimated Obama's margin of victory by a sizable magnitude. "One of the main reasons why we moved to using a more complex model that controlled for house effects was precisely to prevent that phenomenon from happening," Blumenthal said. "Our goal is to minimize that to next to zero."
Pros and Cons
John Sides, a political-science professor at George Washington University and the coauthor of the blog The Monkey Cage, is one of the more prominent proponents of using polling averages--and a critic of press coverage that doesn't. "You're better off looking at averages, because any individual poll may be different from the truth because of sampling error and any idiosyncratic decisions that pollsters make," he said.
Sides believes that news coverage of campaigns tends to overemphasize some polls at the expense of others. In some cases, a poll is considered newsier because it shows something different than the balance of other polling in the race. In other words, polls that are outliers are given more attention than polls that hew more closely to the average, and those outlier polls are more likely to be inaccurate, Sides argues.
"I'm not overly optimistic that the averages are going to become a more important factor in news coverage. I think there are still strong incentives to seek drama where you can find it. And that may mean chasing an outlier," Sides said. "I would like to think that it would start to creep in at the margins. So instead of saying, 'Some polls say ___,' it may say, 'A new poll showed ___, but other polls haven't showed that yet.' "
But, as this year's results show, the averages aren't perfect, and they all showed a closer race than the actual outcome. Comparing polls that accurately predicted the election--the final poll from the Pew Research Center, for example--to the poll averages at the time would have made those more accurate polls appear to be outliers.
Part of that problem, at least when it comes to the national presidential race, were the daily tracking polls from Gallup and automated pollster Rasmussen Reports. Both firms reported results that were biased in favor of Romney this cycle, but by publishing a new result every day, their polls could be overrepresented in the averages. "The one sort of Achilles' heel of the regression trend line that we've done classically on our charts, there are two pollsters that contribute most of the data points," said Pollster's Blumenthal. "Not only does that make the overall aggregate off, it can also create apparent turns in the trend line that are [because] we've had nothing but Gallup and Rasmussen polls for the last 10 days."
In addition to the ubiquitousness of surveys from some firms, poll aggregators also worry that partisans may try to game the system by releasing polls with greater frequency, or by skewing or fabricating results. A prominent Democratic strategist told National Journal last month that some outside groups conducted polls in presidential swing states and released them to the public as a means of countering polls from Rasmussen Reports that were less favorable to President Obama. Blumenthal told National Journal that his biggest fear was not the increase in partisan polls but the possibility that groups would release rigged or fabricated results, as outfits like Strategic Vision and Research 2000 apparently have over the past handful of years, to influence the averages. "My biggest concern over the last two or three years has been the potential for the repeat of something like that," Blumenthal said.
"Champagne" of Polls
The blog post written by Gallup's Newport after the election demonstrates another source of opposition to poll averages: the pollsters themselves. Pollsters all make choices about how best to sample the probable or likely electorate, and those choices vary. Additionally, more expensive live-caller polls compete in the averages with cheaper automated-phone and Internet polls that may not make the same efforts to obtain random samples of voters; merits aside, those live-caller pollsters surely want to protect their businesses from less expensive competitors. Moreover, news organizations that spend tens of thousands of dollars to conduct a poll are likely to report and trumpet their poll's results over other surveys.
"If you're merely an information aggregator, it's very hard for me to see how you're adding value to the proposition," Gary Langer, whose firm Langer Research Associates produces polls for ABC News, told National Journal in a phone interview last month. "Averaging polls is like averaging champagne, Coca-Cola, and turpentine," Langer added.
Overall, 2012 brought more attention than ever to poll aggregators, with their methods becoming more sophisticated. But where do they go from here?
"I don't think there are great advances in averaging or modeling horse-race polling data," Blumenthal said. "We are ultimately reliant on the quality of the data that's collected."
There is evidence that data are becoming less reliable, but supporters of using polling averages argue the underlying changes that are leading to more variable polls bolster their case for using averages instead of individual poll results. "It's a powerful piece of information, and it's a very good piece of information, and I think it's better than any one single poll in terms of using it as a data point to analyze a race," said RCP's McIntyre.
The questions remain open over how much attention the averages will get in the next election--and how much attention they deserve. But, for the horse-race media, 2016 is right around the corner, and some aggregators have already started keeping score.

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The Tea Party's War on Itself Now Includes a Literal Armed Rebellion

It's been more than a month since the 2012 election was decided, but the postmortems continue, particularly for the Tea Party, which continues to have its relevance questioned after a tumultuous year. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times published Christmas Day stories about competing factions within the movement — gun-toting infights and all — and how they will fight to control its mission looking forward to 2014.
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The Post story in particular underscores how deep and bitter the division can run, even among the most devoted activists. In the middle of this year's election season, former House majority leader Dick Armey found himself at odds with fellow executives at FreedomWorks, the libertarian-leaning group they helped build and run together. Armey was the chairman, while author and activist Matt Kibbe is the president.
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For years, the two men had created an effective partnership. But on September 10, according to the Post, Armey showed up at the FreedomWorks offices with his wife, and aide, and a unidentified man wearing a gun on his hip. The armed man escorted Kibbe and his top deputy out of the building, while Armey began suspending other staffers.
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However, two weeks later, it was Armey who found himself forced out. A member of the board of director threw his support behind Kibbe, pledging $8 million in new donations to FreedomWorks, which expanded into a super-PAC this election cycle, if Armey resigned and the suspended workers returned to their jobs. That's a lot more money than what Politico originally reported as a spat over a book deal.
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In addition to just being plain scary — the incident happened just two weeks after a man had been shot trying to break into the Family Research Council, another conservative lobbying group — the tale of Armey and the gun-wielding suspensions also raises questions about just who is really running the Tea Party movement. FreedomWorks has long portrayed itself as a grassroots organization, yet the donation shows how it's really become a handful of wealthy individuals who are calling the shots for these groups. The man behind the pledge, Illinois millionaire Richard Stephenson, gave more than $12 million to FreedomWorks donations before this election cycle, funneling the money through two dummy corporations set up just one day apart in Tennessee.
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The Times story, meanwhile, examines how much of the Tea Party's efforts are being redirected from major nationwide issues like taxes and Obamacare, to smaller pet causes on the state or local level. Some are pushing states to nullify health care law, while others are pursuing voter fraud cases. Meanwhile, others are focusing on individual races, which can make the Tea Party a greater election headache for moderate Republicans than Democratic opponents.
The strength of the Tea Party has always worked better when directed at smaller campaigns than through national causes. And those smaller campaign are often the pet causes of the millionaires who fund their activities. Stephenson founded Cancer Treatment Centers of America, a for-profit health care company. (Kibbe and Stephenson became close after Kibbe was treated at his centers.) One of biggest issues for FreedomWorks has been the repeal of Obamacare. That's not happening any time soon, but Stephenson, FreedomWorks, and the other Tea Party activists aren't giving up; they're just trying a different path.

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Russia: Syrian chemical weapons under control

 Russia's foreign minister says the Syrian government has consolidated its chemical weapons in one or two locations amid a rebel onslaught.
Sergey Lavrov says Russia, which has military advisers training Syria's military, has kept close watch over its chemical arsenal. He says the Syrian government has moved them from many arsenals to just "one or two centers" to properly safeguard them.
U.S. intelligence says the regime may be readying chemical weapons and could be desperate enough to use them. Both Israel and the U.S. have also expressed concerns they could fall into militant hands if the regime crumbles.
Lavrov also told reporters on a flight from an EU summit late Friday that countries in the region had asked Russia to convey an offer of safe passage to President Bashar Assad.

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Kate and William to spend Christmas Day with her parents

 Prince William and his pregnant wife Kate will spend Christmas Day with her parents, their office said on Saturday, in a break with the tradition of royals joining The Queen at her country estate at Sandringham.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will celebrate in private with Carole and Michael Middleton at their home in the village of Bucklebury, about 50 miles (80 km) west of London.
"The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will spend Christmas Day privately with the Middleton family," a St James's Palace spokesman said.
The couple's decision was taken with the approval of the Queen. They are expected to visit Sandringham, in eastern England, for part of the Christmas holiday.
Kate, 30, who married the second-in-line to the throne in April 2011, spent four days in hospital this month with an acute form of morning sickness.
Members of the British royal family usually spend Christmas at Sandringham and stay until February, following a custom set by Queen Elizabeth's father and grandfather. Kate and William spent Christmas there last year, meeting scores of well-wishers.
The Middletons are likely to join millions of Britons in watching Queen Elizabeth's annual Christmas broadcast, a tradition that her grandfather George V started in 1932.
For the first time, the monarch has recorded her television broadcast in 3D. It will be shown at 1500 GMT on December 25.

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UK prosecutors consider charges over royal hoax call

 British detectives investigating the death of a nurse found hanged after she took a prank phone call at a hospital treating Prince William's pregnant wife Kate have passed an evidence file to prosecutors, police said on Saturday.
Public prosecutors must decide whether the case is strong enough to bring charges over a stunt that was condemned around the world and fuelled concerns about media ethics.
Indian-born Jacintha Saldanha, 46, was found hanging in her hospital lodgings in London, days after she answered the hoax call from an Australian radio station, an inquest heard.
She put the call through to a colleague who disclosed details of the Duchess of Cambridge's condition during treatment for an extreme form of morning sickness in the early stages of pregnancy.
"Officers submitted a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for them to consider whether any potential offences may have been committed by making the hoax call," London's Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
A CPS spokesman confirmed it had received the file, but declined to comment on the timing or nature of possible charges.
"That is what we will be considering," he said.
Prime Minister David Cameron has described the case as a "complete tragedy" and has said many lessons will have to be learned from the nurse's death.
Australia's media regulator has launched an investigation into the phone call. Southern Cross Austereo, parent company of radio station 2Day FM, has apologised for the stunt.
Britain's own media is already under pressure to agree a new system of self-regulation and avoid state intervention following a damning inquiry into reporting practices.
The presenters who made the call, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, have apologised for their actions.

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Prince William to spend Christmas with the in-laws

 Prince William will spend Christmas with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury, royal officials said Saturday.
That means a family Christmas for the Duchess of Cambridge, who was recently hospitalized after suffering from severe morning sickness.
A statement from St. James' Palace, William's official residence, didn't go into much detail, saying only that the prince and Kate would spend their time in Bucklebury "privately." But a recent article penned by Kate's sister, Pippa Middleton, gave some insight into what a Bucklebury holiday might look like for the royal pair.
"The Middletons' Christmas should be blissfully calm. We're good at keeping each other's spirits up," Pippa wrote in the most recent edition of Britain's Spectator magazine. She added that her father, Michael, liked to surprise the family with bizarre costumes.
"He buys a new costume each year and typically gets a bit carried away — a couple of Christmases ago, he appeared in an inflatable sumo outfit," she wrote.
British royals traditionally spend the holidays at Sandringham, a vast estate in eastern England, and a spokesman for William said that royal couple would pay a visit at some point over the festive season. He noted that William's absence from Sandringham had been approved by his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and her husband, Prince Philip.
He spoke on condition of anonymity because palace rules forbid his identification in the press.

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Pope pardons ex-butler who stole, leaked documents

 Pope Benedict XVI granted his former butler a Christmas pardon Saturday, forgiving him in person during a jailhouse meeting for stealing and leaking his private papers in one of the gravest Vatican security breaches in recent times.
After the 15-minute meeting, Paolo Gabriele was freed and returned to his Vatican City apartment where he lives with his wife and three children. The Vatican said he couldn't continue living or working in the Vatican, but said it would find him housing and a job elsewhere soon.
"This is a paternal gesture toward someone with whom the pope for many years shared daily life," according to a statement from the Vatican secretariat of state.
The pardon closes a painful and embarrassing chapter for the Vatican, capping a sensational, Hollywood-like scandal that exposed power struggles, intrigue and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons in the highest levels of the Catholic Church.
Gabriele, 46, was arrested May 23 after Vatican police found what they called an "enormous" stash of papal documents in his Vatican City apartment. He was convicted of aggravated theft by a Vatican tribunal on Oct. 6 and has been serving his 18-month sentence in the Vatican police barracks.
He told Vatican investigators he gave the documents to Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi because he thought the 85-year-old pope wasn't being informed of the "evil and corruption" in the Vatican and thought that exposing it publicly would put the church back on the right track.
During the trial, Gabriele testified that he loved the pope "as a son loves his father" and said he never meant to hurt the pontiff or the church. A photograph taken during the meeting Saturday — the first between Benedict and his once trusted butler since his arrest — showed Gabriele dressed in his typical dark gray suit, smiling.
The publication of the leaked documents, first on Italian television then in Nuzzi's book "His Holiness: Pope Benedict XVI's Secret Papers" convulsed the Vatican all year, a devastating betrayal of the pope from within his papal family that exposed the unseemly side of the Catholic Church's governance.
The papal pardon had been widely expected before Christmas, and the jailhouse meeting Benedict used to personally deliver it recalled the image of Pope John Paul II visiting Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot him in 1981, while he served his sentence in an Italian prison.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the meeting was "intense" and "personal" and said that during it Benedict "communicated to him in person that he had accepted his request for pardon, commuting his sentence."
Lombardi said the Vatican hoped the Benedict's pardon and Gabriele's freedom would allow the Holy See to return to work "in an atmosphere of serenity."
None of the leaked documents threatened the papacy. Most were of interest only to Italians, as they concerned relations between Italy and the Vatican and a few local scandals and personalities. Their main aim appeared to be to discredit Benedict's trusted No. 2, the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Vatican officials have said the theft, though, shattered the confidentiality that typically governs correspondence with the pope. Cardinals, bishops and everyday laymen write to him about spiritual and practical matters assuming that their words will be treated with the discretion for which the Holy See is known.
As a result, the leaks prompted a remarkable reaction, with the pope naming a commission of three cardinals to investigate alongside Vatican prosecutors. Italian news reports have said new security measures and personnel checks have been put in place to prevent a repeat offense.
Gabriele insisted he acted alone, with no accomplices, but it remains an open question whether any other heads will roll. Technically the criminal investigation remains open, and few in the Vatican believe Gabriele could have construed such a plot without at least the endorsement if not the outright help of others. But Lombardi said he had no new information to release about any new investigative leads, saying the pardon "closed a sad and painful chapter" for the Holy See.
Nuzzi, who has supported Gabriele as a hero for having exposed corruption in the Vatican, tweeted Saturday that it appeared the butler was thrilled to speak with the pope and go home. "Unending joy for him, but the problems of the curia and power remain," he wrote, referring to the Vatican bureaucracy.
A Vatican computer expert, Claudio Sciarpelletti, was convicted Nov. 10 of aiding and abetting Gabriele by changing his testimony to Vatican investigators about the origins of an envelope with Gabriele's name on it that was found in his desk. His two-month sentence was suspended. Lombardi said a pardon was expected for him as well. He recently returned to work in the Vatican.
Benedict met this past week with the cardinals who investigated the origins of the leaks, but it wasn't known if they provided him with any further updates or were merely meeting ahead of the expected pardon for Gabriele.
As supreme executive, legislator and judge in Vatican City, the pope had the power to pardon Gabriele at any time. The only question was when.

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