Now comes the next chapter in the ongoing Internet slug-out between Craig Murray, the blogging ex-Uzbekistan ambassador from Britain, and Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbekistan born billionaire who is raising his high-profile stake in the English soccer team, Arsenal.

Murray’s blog re-surfaced today on a new hosting site in the Netherlands after his Internet Service Provider, Fasthosts, essentially “disappeared” his Web site two weeks ago with pressure from the billionaire’s London lawyers. The law firm sent letters to Fasthosts insisting that Murray’s caustic comments about Usmanov’s prison history were misleading and damaging.

But Fasthosts was quickly replaced by Safehost, a Dutch company that recruited Murray because it styles itself as a virtual haven free from the constraints of “The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the NSA or any other invasive federal legislationn in the USA,” and the “draconian ‘Secrecy Act’ and ridiculous libel laws in the UK.”

Richard Kastelein, one of the founders of Safehost, said that his company invited Craig Murray to shift his blog to their site, although taking on radioactive bloggers may have its perils. As the company was preparing to relaunch Murray’s blog a week ago, a mysterious hacker struck the day before the orginal start date.

“We can’t tell where it came from because all of the files were corrupted on the hard drives,” Kastelein said. “My technical guy that he had never seen anything like this.”

With Murray’s first post on his return, he remained true to form: “I have a plan for dealing with Usmanov and getting this matter into court, but am holding fire for a couple of days.”

But then he took aim anyway, publishing the entire post that got him into trouble with the bilionaire in the first place.

International media organizations — yes, that includes the International Herald Tribune — have a problem when it comes to advertising. Their audiences may be wealthy and demographically attractive to advertisers. But media buying agencies typically allocate only small budgets to the category known in the trade as “pan-regional” newspapers, broadcasters and other media outlets. If all politics is local, then at least a substantial portion of advertising is, too.

BBC World, the BBC’s 24-hour international news channel, is trying to tackle this problem, starting a new marketing campaign called “The Internationalists.” It includes advertising in media trade publications, a web site and direct marketing — aimed not at consumers but at advertising and media professionals.

The campaign profiles BBC World viewers like Joe Daguerre, a “half-Basque, seven-sixteenths Celt Iberian, one-sixteenth Amerindian” who “speaks 10 languages.” Wow! I can’t imagine there are all that many other people in that niche market.

And that is one of the problems for pan-regional media when it comes to advertising. Perhaps there are plenty of citizens of the world with equally diverse backgrounds who regularly tune in to the likes of BBC World. Advertisers, however, typically like to see lots of common threads among the audiences they try to reach. Is watching the same television channel enough?

Can the media circus around the Madeleine McCann case get any more ridiculous? On Wednesday morning, most of the British tabloids, as well as more serious papers like The Times and The Daily Telegraph, put a picture on their front pages of an alleged sighting of the girl, who disappeared from her family’s vacation apartment in Portugal last spring.

The grainy photo, taken by a Spanish tourist in Morocco, showed a blonde girl being carried by a woman in a sling. “Maddy in Morocco?” the Daily Mirror asked? Experts on tracing missing children were reportedly using facial recognition software and other techniques to find out whether the photo did, indeed, show Madeleine McCann.

But journalists at The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, which are under the same ownership, had a better, if lower-tech, idea. They hopped on a plane and traveled to the village where the picture was taken, showed it around and discovered, by afternoon, that this was the latest in a series of sensational scoops to go bust. The girl, it turned out, is actually the daughter of a Moroccan olive farmer.

With the start of school, I blithely purchased a mobile telephone for my 11-year-old daughter and then started evaluating wireless networks to install in our country home in a village 30 kilometers northwest of Paris. Unlike most of the regions of France, our village is still stuck in a rural gulag of dial up.

Paris hot spot

I didn’t think about the health impact of a mobile telephone pressed to a child’s ear, which would absorb electromagnetic energy. Nor did I think about wireless networks, which emit less electromagnetic energy than telephones and seem to be spreading everywhere I walk in what has become Cyber Paris.

Then I heard about the French health ministry’s demand for a study on this issue, pressed by envirnomental groups. There is not much scientific research in the United States on the impact of exposure to mobile telephones, but Europe is moving ahead with a number of on-going scientific studies. There is one glaring gap: research on children, whose brains are developing and may react differently than adults.

With that great unknown, some public officials and teacher associations are promoting the “precautionary principle.” That means that if there are suggestions of risk, use cautiously. A British study was published earlier this month that urged further testing on children to evaluate the impact of mobile telephones. They are about to start new studies of children with brain cancer to determine if there are links.

As a parent, I have a choice of waiting years for results or following the “precautionary principle” with my child who will be exposed to electromagnetic energy over a much longer period of her life than mine. Should I use “dial up” or WiFi? I know what we can live with.

White shark

The Sun, Britain’s best-selling newspaper, has continued its campaign to persuade readers that there may be great white sharks lurking off the coast of Cornwall (a possibility discounted by experts quoted in most other newspapers). But sharks must be a big seller: the theme has spilled over into other media, with ITV, the British broadcaster, scheduling the entire “Jaws” suite of films.

Now, along comes someone to pour some cold water on the story. A man whose photo of a shark was published in the Sun admits that the picture was taken in South Africa, not off the Cornish coast, according to the Guardian newspaper, which quotes a local paper in Cornwall, the Newquay Voice.

Meanwhile David Sims, a marine biologist, told the Guardian: “The Sun seems to run this story every summer. Just because Parliament has gone into recess does not make this a great white shark.”

British newspaper readers, do not despair: just because the shark story has been discounted doesn’t mean the end of the nautical-themed summer. There’s still “Jaws 3″ and “Jaws 4″ to look forward to on ITV. And another newspaper, the Independent, on Wednesday featured a decidedly more cuddly kind of marine life on the front page. The photo, of a Yangtze river dolphin, accompanied a story about how the animal has been declared extinct.

Doreen responds: British newspaper editors keep huffing about how they intend to expand on line to reach American readers hungry for original, quality journalism. Perhaps British readers ought to take a virtual stroll across the Atlantic to read the news from America about the real “Shark Capital of the World” in Volusia County, Florida where local officials are celebrating a downturn this year in shark bites (Only five attacks so far this year…) Some locals speculate that the sharks have moved on to more inviting territory. Perhaps Chez Cornwall?

Why bother paying for an old-fashioned tour guide when you can just call up one on your mobile telephone, which will steer you around major landmarks. Allovisit has versions in English and French for all major tourist destinations in France.

Some people may not want to spend their vacation with their telephone, but the advice is clear and thoughtful and some of the information is surprising. (I didn’t know for instance that the Place du tertre in Monmartre is inhabited by artists who invest in 165 time shares, rotating in two shifts.)

The idea was dreamed up by company founder, Dominique Soler, on a tour of a cathedral in Prague. While his friend was reading aloud a historical description, he experienced a eureka moment: “I immediately thought to myself how ideal it was to be able to hear about the site and cultivate oneself simply, without having to read one’s guidebook.”

There are snippets on line to sample, but all you have to do is simply dial up on the phone numbers provided.

Anyone who thinks Rupert Murdoch exerts too much control over the editorial direction of journalism organizations in the News Corp. empire has clearly not been following the great British shark scare of 2007. The differing, even contradictory takes on this story from the Sun and the Times of London, both of which are owned by News Corp., prove definitively that there is no Wizard of Oz-like figure at the company, dictating an editorial line to his editors.

OK, the Times did feature the shark story prominently on its front page Tuesday, several days after the Sun’s “exclusive” report that a great white was lurking off the coast of Cornwall, even as non-News Corp. papers mostly ignored it. Proving that the summer silly season has truly arrived, the Sun followed up its scoop on Tuesday by disclosing an expert’s view that the supposed shark was an adult female “maneater” — probably with a male admirer nearby.

But what was this? The Times’s report Tuesday generally poo-pooed the Sun’s reporting, contending that the beast spotted off the Cornish coast was probably a harmless basking shark. Seagulls were probably a greater threat to beach-goers than whatever was waiting in the water, the Times concluded.

Something to think about as Murdoch circles the Wall Street Journal?

Public scorn for the Tour de France is now errupting into a media revolt. German public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, pulled the plug on coverage. The Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger announced that it would no longer report on the Tour stages, limiting stories to results and doping revelations.

Now some of the French newspapers are refusing to public results, among them France Soir and the left-leaning daily Liberation.

“The death of the Tour,” Liberation screamed in a front page headline, adding: “Stop this circus!”

The France Soir daily devoted its front page into a fake death notice for the Tour, declaring the tour’s founder Henri Desgrange, was in mourning.

Strange that these newspapers are killing off the Tour de France when both are struggling to survive themselves with declining circulation and spiraling debts.

Perhaps the only way to cope with the wreckage of the Tour de France and the latest news about blood doping, testosterone boosts, and AWOL star cyclists is to watch this spoof from La Plage records. Television viewership is down in the United States for the second year post Lance Armstrong and also weak in Germany.

But French viewers are still tuning in with television ratings rising from last year. And they’re also seeking other alternatives to indulge in a little black humor. This video was produced before the latest headlines, but today it seems like the defining tune of the Tour de France- EPO I love you.

Sebastien Lipszyc, who is singing on the left next to his brother, told me that they were inspired to create the video one day as they sat at a restaurant. “We were talking about EPO and doping and my brother said, “EPO Te Quiero - that sounds like a song.”

“We’ve had a lot of very good reactions,” he added, noting that the bouncy music in Spanish and French spiked this week in sales for ringtone downloads. “It’s such different music that you’re not allowed to do now because it’s not radio format. And that makes people laugh even more.”

At the local bookstore near my office in London, you could still find plenty of copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” as of Monday afternoon. The cover price had been marked down by 6 pounds, though that is not unusual for best-sellers.

Nonetheless, the book’s publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, said that in the first 24 hours after the book went on sale over the weekend, 2.65 million copies were sold in Britain, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan. That was a 32 percent increase from the first-day sales of the previous “Harry Potter” book. Bloomsbury also said it had received 9.5 million hits on its web site on Friday, as the Potter hype was cresting.

Clearly the well-orchestrated marketing of the Potter phenomenon paid off again. Even the leak of a bootlegged copy of the book on the Internet last week doesn’t seem of have hurt.

DOREEN RESPONDS I’ve watched this phenomenon since the first book was published in the United States and J.K. Rowling still had to flog copies like an ordinary mortal instead of a billionaire. What amazes me now is that Harry Potter has become a force for globalization by promoting a common English language. Many readers just won’t wait anymore for the translated versions in their native language.

In France, Fnac was advertising the arrival of the English version on local radio stations. In the first ninety minutes of selling, the bustling Fnac at the Forum des Halles sold 452 copies on Saturday morning. The story was much the same in China and Korea were eager fans bought more than 3,000 English copies on the first day while the online retailer Yes24 logged 8,000 pre-sales.

The demand was so high there that publishers worried that the book was denting sales of homegrown literature.