The anger of the widow of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane remains undimmed two weeks after she ended a meeting with David Cameron in which he declined to hold a public inquiry into her husband's death.

The directors of Britain's largest companies were last night condemned as "elite greedy pigs" for pocketing a 49 per cent pay rise in the past year, while average workers failed even to keep up with inflation.

Europe's leaders are claiming a victory in the eurozone crisis after agreeing new deals that halve Greek debt and increase the firepower of the main bailout fund to around €1trn.

Athens will be handed a new €100bn bailout early in the new year. The accord was reached in the early hours of Thursday after hours of fractious debate.

At one stage talks broke down with holders of Greek debt but they ended up accepting a loss or "haircut" of 50% in converting their existing bonds into new loans.

Two entities are more powerful than any individual government in the West. They are the financial markets and the media. We could argue about the latter, but surely nobody would deny the supreme and often malevolent power of the former.

Yesterday in Brussels a room full of 27 European presidents, chancellors and prime ministers was intent on a single task, trying to do what financial power demands.

Specialist detectives from the Metropolitan Police have discovered the existence of a secret mobile phone within News International's east London headquarters that was used in more than 1,000 incidents of illegal hacking.

The Independent has established that the phone, nicknamed "the hub", was registered to News International and located on the News of the World's news desk. Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police's hacking inquiry, has evidence that it was used illegally to access 1,150 numbers between 2004 and 2006.

Mr Abbott said he was not making any promises, just a prediction that his party is likely to kill off any mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines that Labor introduces.

But Mr Wilkie says he is not convinced Mr Abbott would rescind the legislation if he was able to.

"He's actually been somewhat ambiguous. It's not written in blood like other promises are. He's talked about a prediction," Mr Wilkie told Lateline.

"And I think, in fact, that when these reforms are realised, he will find it very, very difficult to overturn them because, for a start, they have majority public support.

There's an old rule in journalism that ''man bites dog'' makes a far better story than ''dog bites man''. Dogs bite men every day, making it a less newsworthy event. But when men bite dogs, something unusual is going on - something people might like or need to know about.

Don your newspaper editor thinking hats and answer this: which type of story is it when Business A comes out warning of dire consequences if it is slapped with a new tax?

Is that what you'd expect them to say? Well, yes, it is. Dog biting man. If Business A came out complaining it didn't pay enough tax, that would be man biting dog.

They raised their heads again last week - the good old ''senior sources''.

Their junior counterparts were nowhere to be heard, leaving it to the anonymous sources of superior rank to spell out the latest nuances in the saga - or should that be tragedy? - that the prime ministership has become.

Trying to write this in one sentence is tiring enough. So don't hold your breath, please, while reading it.

mischief by Gus...