The food fight at Wikipedia over whether there were four rejections of the Soon and Baliunas paper or none appears to have died down, and a decision - a wise one in my view - has been taken to drop the allegation that de Freitas accepted the Soon paper over the objections of all four peer reviewers.
Here's a wrinkle in the story though. Email 1719 is from Jim Salinger, the New Zealander who was possibly the most militant member of the Hockey Team at the time, promoting the disgraceful idea of complaining to the head of de Freitas's university. The email is addressed to many of the usual suspects: Mann, Jones, Hulme and so on.
I have just heard from a member of the department that the Editor who handled the Soon and Baliunas paper that Otto Kinne asked for an explanation of the criticisms. The Editor has given these. Apparently Otto Kinne has accepted these and plans to take no further action.
It is interesting to note that my informant also received the Soon and Baliunas manuscript for review, and strongly recommended rejection.
I may be in position to learn more this evening.
The identity of the informant in Salinger's department at NIWA is not clear. The reviewers of the Soon and Baliunas paper were apparently selected by a paleoclimatologist on de Freitas's behalf. Phil Jones believed that this was a New Zealander named Anthony Fowler (see #3265).