World Aids Day: Elton Edits Indie

I'll get a copy of this special edition of The Independent when I brave the cold and snow.
I just hope there's something in it by David Furnish.
The biggest World Aids Day con I've spotted thus far is that Starbucks are donating 5p - five sodding p! - from each coffee sold to something called "the Global Fund".
"So why not get all your friends and work colleagues to choose Starbucks next Wednesday and together we can all make a difference."
And they wonder why anarchists smash their windows.

EDIT: The Independent does have this in an Elton John-themed diary column; "Elton made an appearance in the Wikileaks dump of American diplomatic cables, one of which mentions his trip to Kazakhstan to perform at a birthday party for President Nazarbayev's son-in-law. But he's confident that's the last he'll read of himself in the documents. "I haven't fucked anyone in the American government," he reassured me. "No blow jobs in the Oval Office for me."
The cable reads; "In 2007, President Nazarbayev's son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, celebrated his 41st birthday in grand style. At a small venue in Almaty, he hosted a private concert with some of Russia's biggest pop-stars. The headliner, however, was Elton John, to whom he reportedly paid one million pounds for this one-time appearance."
In June, John was reportedly paid $1 million to play at the wedding of right-wing US shock jock, Rush Limbaugh.
Good to think Sir Elton sticks to these nice, round figures - and politically dodgy figures.

Wikileaks 2: Alan Duncan & William Hague - Oops!

"The leaked US diplomatic cables reveal a particular intelligence interest in Alan Duncan, at the time shadow minister for prisons. Duncan, a former oil trader who is now international development minister, is gay. He once shared a London flat with William Hague, who has felt obliged to deny public speculation about his own sexuality.
"A 22 January 2010 cable was signed off by Elizabeth Pitterle, head of intelligence operations. She thanked the London embassy for its intelligence on Duncan's "friendship with ... William Hague", saying it was "particularly insightful and exceptionally well timed, as analysts are preparing finished products on the Conservative leadership for senior policymakers".
"The cable called for further intelligence on "Duncan's relationship with Conservative party leader David Cameron and William Hague", and asked:"What role would Duncan play if the Conservatives form a government? What are Duncan's political ambitions?"
Oops!

From The Guardian's The US Embassy Cables
I've posted the cable in full in the comments section below - intriguingly it's dated January 2010.
Amusingly as Foreign Secretary, Mr Hague has to try and clean up after the wonderful shitstorm unleashed by the latest Wikileaks leaks.
Mr Duncan has been demoted to Minister for Paperclips after a few gaffes unbecoming a multi-millionaire - though did step back into the limelight to defend his friend hague over those terrible gay rumours about him and Chris Myers.
There is a retrospectively interesting - and amusing - profile of Duncan from The Independent in 1997 when he was gaff-prone press agent to Hague here. "One member of the Shadow Cabinet described Duncan's latest political standing in lavatorial language: "Margaret Thatcher said `every Tory leader should have a Willie'; our leader has a prick."
"...He was President of the Oxford Union in the Thatcherites' annus mirabilis of 1979, and he got to know William Hague on return visits to Oxford. The two hit it off instantly, and Hague became a kind of camp-follower. He shared a flat in Battersea with Duncan, and, like his mentor, became a graduate trainee at Shell Oil. Their paths diverged, but they remained close. When Duncan bought a house close to Parliament in Gayfere Street, Hague moved in. His monthly rent was a case of champagne..."
A kind of camp-follower, eh...

Update: In a blog for The Daily Telegraph, Cristina Odone argues the American intelligence services are mainly interested in Alan Duncan just because he's gay, "a Cold War relic [they] seem incapable of ditching."

Wikileaks: Manning Of The Year

Great to see Bradley Manning was behind many of today's leaked documents on Wikileaks.
Full coverage on The Guardian's The US Embassy Cables.
There's no point going on Wikileaks website right now - it's been disabled by a hacking attack.
Interesting...
Bradley Manning is Fagburn's Man of the Year.
Here's how he did it;
"I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history."
Coverage of this queer hero in the UK gay press thus far - zero.
These new leaks will almost certainly see more attempts at character assassination of Manning, as an out, proud and angry gay man it's not too hard to predict what many of these will zoom in on.
Witness what's happened to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Fagburn say "Free Bradley Manning!"

• The Bradley Manning Support Network “It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know” Noam Chomsky

The Daily Telegraph ran a profile of Manning on Monday; "Manning was alleged to have told Lamo that he had found "incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC". He was also said to have boasted that he had used blank CDs to download classified information while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga..."