LONDON (AP) – News International announced Thursday it is shutting down the News of the World, the best-selling tabloid at the center of Britain’s phone hacking scandal.

James Murdoch, who heads European operations for the paper’s parent company, said the 168-year-old weekly newspaper would publish its last edition on Sunday, without ads.

The abrupt decision to shut the newspaper follows an extraordinary three days in which multiple revelations about intrusive phone hacking cost the paper its advertising base and reader support. The tabloid was found to have hacked into the phone message of a teenage murder victim and was suspected of possibly targeting the relatives of slain soldiers in its quest to produce attention-grabbing headlines.

Britons of all stripes said they were disgusted and revolted by the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s tactics and British lawmakers held an emergency debate on Parliament on Wednesday in which many condemned the paper.

The tabloid’s executives had already admitted the widespread hacking of cell phones used by celebrities, film stars, royal aides and politicians and reached cash settlements with prominent victims. But the intrusion into—and possible interference with—an ongoing murder investigation of a child proved to be the final straw in losing the public’s trust. (more…)

General Franco is still dead and after a year of legal wrangling popular radio-host Michael Savage is still banned (in Britain.) The new Conservative British government of Prime Minister David Cameron is sticking by former Labor Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s decision from May of last year. “Coming to the U.K. is a privilege,” explained the Home Secretary at the time, “and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values and who foster extremist views as I want them to know that they are not welcome here. Mr. Savage engages in unacceptable behavior by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred.”

The new British government informed Mr. Savage his exclusion stands because of “the absence of clear, convincing and public evidence that he has repudiated his previous statements.”

Instead of the false contrition, groveling and confessions that Stalin, Mao and Che Guevara demanded from the subjects they accused of “thought crimes,” (before murdering them) Michael Savage sought to repudiate his listing alongside terrorists and Nazis by resorting to the tenets of Western jurisprudence and presenting evidence to the contrary.

“His bad” some might quip regarding the strategy. In today’s Britain what’s left of the Magna Carta only work s in favor of actual Islamic terrorists. (more…)

The Washington Times reports the supposedly conservative U.K. government is going to continue Britain’s war on free speech (and Dr. Savage):

He’s still on Britain’s least-wanted list.

Talk radio host Michael Savage has waged a vigorous fight against the British government, hoping to have his name removed from a list of 16 “undesirables” banned from the country on May 5, 2009, by then British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

The list included Islamist terrorists, neo-Nazis and Russian gang members — and Mr. Savage says he’s still on the new version, despite his efforts to persuade British officials that his inclusion is unwarranted and unfair.

All governments are essentially amoral,” he told The Washington Times on Monday. “I had hopes but did not expect this ‘new’ UK government to restore sanity to Britain. They are still pandering to the Muslim masses. To continue to martyr me by including me on a list of known murderers and terrorists is bad enough but for the U.S. and Western media which considers itself ‘progressive’ to continue to ignore this outrage against freedom of speech is indicative that the media and governments are one and the same. This includes so-called conservatives. Has freedom of the press become greed-om of the press?” he concluded. (more…)

Judging by the exceptions he recently proposed for altering the Miranda warnings, even Attorney General Eric Holder believes that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” a truth first stated in 1949 by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and made new again in our time.

Meanwhile over in Britain, this week they have a new Prime Minister.  They also have a Queen.  They have Big Ben.  The have, in Chelsea, a world-class soccer club owned by a Russian oligarch.  They have an honorable tradition of tolerance, free speech and fair play.  But they do not have a constitution.

Recently, though, a British judge, John Mitting, signed a suicide pact between his nation and violent Islamic extremists when he ruled that two Pakistani men, one a known al-Qaeda operative, could not be deported due to the possibility of their being harmed if they were sent home.

The private reaction of many British citizens has been fury and dismay.  From the right-wing newspapers, the same. Let us for this story turn instead to the left-wing, “insurgent”-accommodating Guardian newspaper, just to assure readers new to Big Journalism that this is not a “stretcher”: (more…)

Last summer the British government banned U.S. radio commentator Michael Savage from setting foot in the UK.  “Fostering extremism and hatred ” was his crime, as explained by Britain’s Home Secretary of the time, Jacqui Smith. “Coming to the U.K. is a privilege,” she elaborated, “and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values to undermine our way of life. Therefore, I will not hesitate to name and shame those who foster extremist views as I want them to know that they are not welcome here.”

The following month, for a hoopla titled “Cuba 50,” Britain rolled out the red carpet for Che Guevara’s daughter, Aleida. The celebration was billed as “the biggest European celebration in this 50th anniversary year (of Castro’s Stalinist regime).”

This British celebration for a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered political prisoners at a higher rate than pre-war Hitler’s, created refugees at a higher rate than the Waffen SS and Gestapo created while conquering and subjugating France, and came closest of anyone to plunging the world into nuclear war—the festival for this regime was held in London’s luxurious Barbican Centre.

( All figures for the above murder, oppression, and war-mongering by the T-shirt idol of  “human-rights” and “peace” demonstrators are provided with full documentation in Exposing the Real Che Guevara, and Fidel Hollywood’s Tyrant.) (more…)

TIME magazine’s Eric Heinrich offers his readers a Hobson’s Choice concerning the mounting federal debt. You accept hyperinflation, or, you pay a lot more taxes. Your choice, but either way you pay. And that’s just one more piece of evidence that proves that today’s legacy media is replete with economic illiterates.

Heinrich’s article entitled “How High Could the U.S. Tax Rate Go?” appears in the magazine’s March 3, 2010, issue.  Here’s a summary of its 633 words offered in 25: The Obama Administration’s “monster deficit” will either result in hyperinflation – by printing money – or higher taxes. The amount and means of levying higher taxes is the question.

Hiking taxes is the less traumatic course, though it will only be accepted as the cost of inaction rises. “Congress only responds to financial crisis or some other external shock,” says Bill Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “Nothing will be done in Obama’s first term to substantially increase tax revenue.”

He doesn’t mention the inevitable event of both happening, since they would. When money is worth less the government has to tax more to just keep even. Duh.

In closing, Eric glances toward Britain: (more…)

There’s a question oft-posed by the proponents of global warming… or of “climate change,” as the new term of art has it, thus allowing warmists to claim both the snowstorm now blanketing America’s East Coast, as well as the melting of that snow, as evidence for their theory.

“To what end?” the warmists ask the skeptics.  Or, in the lingua franca of conspiracy theorists everywhere: “Cui bono, my friend, cui bono?”

Well, lots of people are benefiting from the practical implications of this theory. There’s Nobel Laureate Al Gore for one, who is on track to become the first green billionaire:

(more…)

Return with us now to those glorious days of yesteryear, when honest reporters were just starting to turn into “journalists,” and CBS’s 60 Minutes was the top-rated program in the nation for a reason: it played fair.

Exhibit A is this remarkable piece that Morley Safer did in the mid-late 1980s about “The Loony Left” in Britain — a chilling and prescient look at how the hard left was busily injecting political divisiveness into the minds of young children all over the country, hollowing out British culture and institutions in the name of “anti-racism,” and turning Britain into the sad, dilapidated, disunited and likely doomed Orwellian society it has become today.  Perhaps there won’t, after all, “always be an England.”

It’s a classic example of leftist tactics, and in retrospect turned out to be a last warning of the fate that was soon about to overtake a country that had been waging a low-level civil war between Fabian Socialists and free-market capitalists since the days of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw — a losing battle only briefly won by Margaret Thatcher, and now likely lost for at least another generation as Shaw’s famous “Fabian Window” is at last out and proud: (more…)