In 1998, for example, he instructed HarperCollins to can Chris Patten's book on Hong Kong so as to protect business dealings in China. Yesterday, however, his channel Sky News "broke" the story of Wade's arrest, and pursued it throughout the day. Although Murdoch was not consulted before the news first appeared, I gather senior colleagues did formally sanction its broadcast.Later, Murdoch himself in London for today's BSkyB AGM, instructed the channel to "keep at the story" during the afternoon.On the surface, this looks like bad news for Wade, left. However, sources at News International reckon rumours of her impending demise are wide of the mark."Murdoch has given the impression that he's treating this story as a bit of a joke," I'm told. "We think he's of the view that Sky's coverage will take some of the sting out of tomorrow's papers."Wade returned to the office yesterday afternoon.* I never thought I would write these words, but Pandora is tempted to feel sorry for Kelly Hoppen.The frizzy interior designer, a fearsome litigant, is the subject of a press release from a law firm that has got one over on her.Davies Arnold Cooper, solicitors, recently rebutted an injunction by Hoppen against their client L Kelaty, a rug wholesaler. They're so delighted, they yesterday hired a PR company to trumpet the victory.A statement headlined "Davies Arnold Cooper pulls the rug from under Kelly Hoppen's Feet" boasts that they prevented her injuncting L Kelaty for an alleged breach of copyright."It has certainly proved to be a very costly exercise for Miss Hoppen," it reads.Hoppen, who had claimed that Kelaty had been selling rugs designed by her after a licensing agreement had ended, was ordered to pay costs.The judge found "no evidence" to support Hoppen's claim, pending a hearing at trial. She declined to comment yesterday.* The Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer - who quit the band during a 1970s' US tour to join a religious cult called the Children of God - has delivered an unceremonious snub to his own children.He's just cancelled plans to visit the UK for the launch of Jynxt, a band that four of them have formed, after being offended by a track on their debut album.Apparently, Spencer, pictured in his heydey, was highly upset by the lyrics to their track Don't Believe: "I don't believe in God/I don't believe in you/I don't believe in anything/That nobody wouldn't do."In a letter to his offspring, seen by Pandora, he explains: "If you have a song saying 'there is no God', I cannot and will not endorse the CD.

I don't know if I need to get into more details than that, except that the philosophy goes against my very grain."* There's yet another financial scandal surrounding David Blunkett's downfall. When the Work and Pensions Secretary resigned on Wednesday, BBC News 24 responded by chartering a helicopter to follow him for the day.This comes at a time when the cash-strapped Beeb is sacking 4,000 staff, many of them front-line journalists.Asked to explain the extravagance, a BBC spokesman insists that they got a decent rate for the hired chopper."Value for money is always at the forefront of our minds," I'm told. "There are often camera positions that can be hampered on the ground and it can really boost coverage."How many times were mid-air shots used in that day's main news bulletins? "They had a significant role."* There is a refreshingly lowbrow debate at Britain's poshest literary establishment, the London Library in St James's Square.The aristocratic novelist Victoria Glendenning is so upset by declining standards at the members-only institution that she has vented her spleen in the suggestion book."The women's cloakroom needs upgrading, both as regards plumbing and decoration," she writes, splendidly. "It's really quite bad."Beneath her entry, the boulevardier and man of letters Christopher Hart writes: "Couldn't agree more." However, he fails to elaborate on his apparently intimate knowledge of the ladies' conveniences.Meanwhile, a third correspondent complains that the Gents doesn't flush properly: "Consequently, much unpleasant time is taken up in inspecting and disposing of other members' faeces."pandora independent.co.uk. Astronomers have seen the beginning of time, using a space telescope that may have captured the primordial light from the first stars that formed after the Big Bang. The latest images from Nasa's Spitzer telescope are thought to be the murky light given off by the first objects to form in the universe more than 13 billion years ago. An infrared camera on the Spitzer took pictures of the constellation Draco and scientists masked out all stars and galaxies to reveal the background glow from the first stars.Researchers from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenland, Maryland, compared the observations to the glow of city lights at night from an aircraft; the light is too feeble and too distant to resolve individual features."We think we are seeing the collective light from millions of the first objects to form in the universe," said Alexander Kashlinsky, the leader of the Nasa study in the journal Nature. "The objects disappeared aeons ago, yet their light is still travelling across the universe."Cosmologists estimate that the Big Bang was 13.7 billion years ago.

Some 200 million years passed after this act of creation before the first stars began to form from cosmic particles and dust. Scientists believe these stars were likely to have been more than 100 times more massive than the Sun, and would have been hot, bright and relatively short-lived, each surviving a few million years compared to the billions of years of conventional stars.Theorists predicted that the light from these primordial stars would be "stretched" by the expansion of the universe, so would exist not on the ultraviolet region of the spectrum but in the lower energies of the infrared region.John Mather, a senior project scientist on the Spitzer telescope, said the aim was to capture all infrared light emanating from a region in the deep Draco constellation and process the data to remove light from more recent objects. "We were left with a picture of part of the sky with no stars or galaxies, but it sill had this infrared glow with giant blobs that we think could be the glow from the very first stars," Dr Mather said.The images could be the first pictures of so-called "population III" stars that were hypothesised as being formed soon after the Big Bang. Population I and II stars are known to exist.In the early 1990s, another satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (Cobe), found all-pervasive microwave radiation in space thought to be the "echo" of the Big Bang.Nasa said the latest findings from the Spitzer agree with the Cobe results, which had suggested that an infrared background would be found that could not be attributed to the known stars.. The future of Rebekah Wade, the editor of The Sun, remained uncertain last night after she spent eight hours in a London police station, arrested for allegedly assaulting her husband, the actor Ross Kemp.

She returned to work afterwards, and is said to have joked to colleagues: "Anything happening today?" Ms Wade, 37, was detained when police were called to the couple's home in south London at 4am yesterday after reports of an assault. Mr Kemp, 41, who has recently returned to his role as Grant Mitchell in BBC soap opera EastEnders, and specialises in "hard man" roles, is said to have refused hospital treatment for a cut lip He is understood to have been filming yesterday.. Andrew Gowers quit as editor of the Financial Times yesterday, citing "strategic differences" with the business newspaper's owners. The move followed a fall in the paper's UK circulation over the past five years, and what some commentators have suggested is a loss of authority in the City. However, Pearson, the owner, signalled its continuing commitment to internat-ional expansion by replacing him with Lionel Barber, who runs the paper's operation in the US.. Stuart Duncan, at Numis, said: "It clearly signals the LSE's intent to remain an independent business." The LSE also doubled its interim dividend to 4p a share.The latest offer period relates to the Australian investment bank Macquarie, which indicated an interest in the London market in August. The LSE, which entered the offer period in December when Deutsche B? launched a £1.35bn bid, said it was talking to all parties, including the UK Takeover Panel, to bring the period to a conclusion.