But will she be the last to fall on the sword? The knives are still out for Murdoch and his business empire. And focus has shifted to two important people in Rupert's inner sanctum. He might find the need to sacrifice one of them. But who will it be: the son and heir apparent, or one of his closest confidantes who has been with him for 50 years?  

James Murdoch

Given her proximity to the scandal, Brooks sucked up a lot of the media oxygen when it came to blame these past few weeks. But with her gone, that attention could shift to Rupert's heir apparent, James, Brook's boss at News International. British MPs have attacked the 38-year-old executive recently -- saying he has a lot of questions to answer. Chief among them: Why did he authorize payments to hacking victims in exchange for their silence? Critics are saying it smells an awful lot like a cover-up.  

The younger Murdoch has become something of a liability thanks to his response to the scandal -- which many say he was too slow to grasp the severity of.  And by transferring money to victims -- no matter what the reason -- he's only made things worse.

It might seem hard to believe Rupert would dump his own son in order to save his business, but he has had fall-outs with his children in the past that have led to them exiting the company.  And now that Murdoch's empire is under FBI investigation -- in addition to investigations in Britain and possibly soon Australia -- if Rupert believes it's his company or his son, you can bet he'll decide pretty quickly the kid has got to go.

Les Hinton

Few in Murdoch's world are closer to him than Les Hinton, the British news executive who Murdoch put in charge of Dow Jones after he purchased it in 2007. Before that, Hinton headed News International from 1995-2007, when the many dirty tricks were playing out under his watch. Back in 2006, Hinton told Parliament the hacking was limited to a single reporter. Of course, we know now that not only was it not just one reporter, it wasn't even one newspaper. Many of the media properties under his control were engaging in illegal practices. Critics say he either knew about it or he allowed the dirty culture to breed underneath him. He also didn't help himself by publicly backing the former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, who last week was arrested for his involvement in the hacking scandal.

Most problematic for Hinton -- he is the strongest connection between the British scandal and Murdoch's American empire. There are indications Murdoch may sell off his damaged British media properties altogether, but abandoning his stateside operations will never happen. And that means Minton might have to go.  

Update: Hinton resigned from News Corp. late today. A memo from Murdoch after the jump:

Read on

It's reaching all the way to 10 Downing Street, where Prime Minister David Cameron is facing a crisis of leadership like none he's experienced so far.

After all, Cameron has ties to some of the most vilified people in the scandal. He courted Rupert Murdoch in the run-up to last year's election (which helped to ensure his victory). He's friends with Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the tabloid and current News International chief executive who has become a focal point of criticism for the mess. And he hired Andy Coulson, another former editor of the paper, as his communications director at 10 Downing. This morning, Coulson (who stepped down from his job in January) was arrested for his involvement with the paper's illegal activities.

Those are bad associations to have these days, as the public's anger grows and demands for penance mount.

So how badly damaged is the Cameron brand after this week?

"Permanently and irrevocably," writes political analyst Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph.

"Until now it has been easy to argue that Mr. Cameron was properly grounded with a decent set of values," he writes. "Unfortunately, it is impossible to make that assertion any longer. He has made not one, but a long succession of chronic personal misjudgments."

In other words, he's forever tarred with turning a blind eye to some of the press's shadier tactics, while cozying up to media executives in order to win political backing.

Read on

We're a long way from Streep's inevitable Oscar nomination for her performance as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -- the film doesn't even open until early next year -- but it's never too early to start grading her performance. Always the professional, Streep prepared for the role with a ton of research -- she attended a session of parliament to get a sense of how the prime minister question time works and found "every bit of footage" on YouTube she could, according to the film's producer.

Yesterday, a slip of a teaser trailer was released online.

So how does she do? Granted, there's only one line to judge, but Foreign Policy wanted to get an early jump on critiquing her. We contacted someone who knows Thatcher and has covered her for years -- Peter Riddell, a former political commentator for the Times of London and the author of two books on Thatcher's government.

Overall, Riddell says Streep is 85 percent there.

"If anything, she underplays Thatcher who was far more assertive and argumentative," he told FP by email. "Also the girlish half-giggle after her comments is wrong. That is not Thatcher. Physically the resemblance is good."

In terms of style, Riddell gives Streep a score of 80 percent.

All in all, not bad. Perhaps even more telling, Riddell says he can't wait to see the film.

Late today, the DailyTelegraph reported Scotland Yard detectives were contacting the families of victims of the July 7 bombings in London back in 2005, who might also have been victims of journalists' phone hacking attempts. "It is thought that journalists were seeking to access voice messages left on family members' phones as they desperately waited for information about their loved ones in the aftermath of the bombings," The Telegraph reported.

Labor party leader Ed Miliband summed it up, calling the episode a "stain on the character of British journalism" and parliament will hold public hearings tomorrow on the matter.

What happened? After 13-year-old Milly Dowler went missing, a private investigator hired by the News of the World allegedly hacked into her phone in an effort to get some scoops on the case. He listened to her messages, but then -- in order hear more incoming calls without the voicemail filling up -- he deleted some of the messages. Dowler's family concluded it was Milly who deleted the messages and so she must be alive. The police investigation was stymied by the confusion, and it's still not known if any vital evidence was lost.

For background into the case against the paper and its hacking attempts against Princes William and Harry -- as well as other celebrities -- check out this riveting account in the New York Times Magazine from 2010.

It described the News of the World as "a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors...one former reporter called it a ‘do whatever it takes' mentality."

[The] News of the World was hardly alone in accessing messages to obtain salacious gossip. ‘It was an industrywide thing,' said Sharon Marshall, who witnessed hacking while working at News of the World and other tabloids. ‘Talk to any tabloid journalist in the United Kingdom, and they can tell you each phone company's four-digit codes. Every hack on every newspaper knew this was done.'

BBC political editor Nick Robinson points out that in some ways the story is a political and media tsunami, touching on multiple fronts:

For a long time the hacking story united those who'd always been hostile to the Murdoch empire with those angered by its switch from backing New Labour to supporting the Tories, and those who saw it as a way to damage David Cameron (who hired the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his spin doctor).

Now Murdoch ... and Cameron will be aware that for the first time the hacking story may be engaging and horrifying readers, viewers and voters.

In Afghanistan today, David Cameron called the charges "really appalling" if true. But he might be in an awkward position, according to the Daily Telegraph. He is a friend of Rebekah Brooks, the News Corp executive who was editor at the time the hacking occurred (she's denied knowing about it).

For David Cameron, the News of the World scandal is tremendously difficult. His close friendship with Rebekah Brooks...[is] bound to be mentioned in tomorrow's emergency debate in the Commons on the subject. For Ed Miliband, it has provided a rare triumph -- even the most spectical have praised his well-balanced attack on News International. For once, Miliband was not just delivering a line -- he was expressing a deeply held Left-wing skepticism of the tabloid press, and this resonated with the public.

The Telegraph said that one consequence of the case could be increased attempts at regulating the press in the country.

Many commentators give at least partial credit for India's economic success to the political institutions left in place by British colonialism. Fareed Zakaria, for instance, believes India "got very lucky" in that its first generation of post-independence leaders "nurture the best traditions of the British" including "courts, universities [and] administrative agencies."

But a new study by Lakshmi Iyer of the Harvard Business School casts some doubt on whether British governing institutions really has a postivie economic impact in the long run. Here's the abstract:

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period has a significant and persistent effect on postcolonial outcomes.

The finding is particularly interesting given that Iyer also shows that the areas directly annexed by the British tended be those with higher agricultural productivity. Despite their potential, these areas "did not invest as much as native states in physical and human capital."

Iyer's paper provides an interesting companion to another recent study by Alexander Lee and Kenneth Schultz of Stanford, which compared economic outcomes of formerly British and formerly French districts of Cameroon:

[W]e focus on the West African nation of Cameroon, which includes regions colonized by both Britain and France. Taking advantage of the artificial nature of the former colonial boundary, we use it as a discontinuity within a national demographic survey. We show that rural areas on the British side of the discontinuity have higher levels of wealth and local public provision of improved water sources. Results for urban areas and centrally-provided public goods show no such effect, suggesting that post-independence policies also play a role in shaping outcomes. 

Taken together, the moral of these studies could be that colonalism isn't great for a country's future political and economic wellbeing, but if a country is going to be colonized, they're better off with the British than the French. It's also very possible that the legacy of colonialism -- whether positive or negative -- manifests differently in national rather than local governance. Although on a purely anecdotal level, the French vs. British distinction seems to hold there as well. 

Hat tip: Chris Blattman

The inevitable international pushback against the United States' snowballing airport security regime seems to have begun, with British Airways Chairman Martin Broughton leading the charge:

In remarks at the annual conference of the UK Airport Operators Association in London on Tuesday, he said the practice of forcing people to take off their shoes and have their laptops checked separately in security lines should be ditched.

Mr. Broughton said there was no need to "kowtow to the Americans every time they wanted something done" to beef up security on U.S.-bound flights, especially when this involved checks the U.S. did not impose on its domestic routes.

"America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do," he said. "We shouldn't stand for that. We should say, 'We'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential'." [...]

Mr. Broughton said no one wanted weak security, but added: "We all know there's quite a number of elements in the security programme which are completely redundant and they should be sorted out."

In the wake of 9/11, the shoe bomber, the transatlantic plot, and the underwear bomber, the TSA responded by adding procedures that might have prevented the last attack -- removing shoes, banning liquids, full-body imaging scanners. Once these new measures are in place, they are almost never removed. Broughton is acting in his own airline's interests of course, but if he can help start a public discussion on which of these measures are actually useful or worth the delays and indignities associated with them, he will have done U.S. travelers a service. 

Britain's deep cuts in defense spending mean it's far less likely that Her Majesty's armed forces will participate in future military interventions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it will also reduce Britain's footprint in another part of the world, Germany:

Britain is to pull the last of its troops out of Germany 15 years ahead of schedule as part of a wide-ranging program of defense cuts.

Some 20,000 British service personnel are set to leave Germany in the next decade. The troops, originally stationed in the aftermath of the Second World War, had previously been set to remain until 2035.

Between this and Germany settling up its World War I debt, it does appear that Europe's 20th century wars may actually be over now. 

Sept. 11 protests over an Islamic community center a few blocks away from the World Trade Center site drew an unlikely ally: British soccer hooligans.

This isn't particularly shocking, given that many hooligans have long been tied into European right-wing political organizations. The most infamous among them were militant followers of Red Star Belgrade in the early 1990s. Headed by future-Serbian war criminal Arkan, the Delije were notoriously violent fanatics, and later became a backbone of Serbian paramilitary units in the Balkan Wars.

The small protest contingent were members of the English Defense League, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim organization. (They style themselves as a "Counter Jihad" movement.) The make-up of the group itself is actually quite amazing. The New York Times quotes a piece on the EDL's website referring to a London Al-Quds Day rally:

More and more lads started to arrive at the pub, Pompey, Southampton, West Ham, Arsenal, Tottenham, Millwall, Chelsea, Brentford, QPR all drinking together, a bit of banter, but no hassle whatsoever. Top lads all there for their country.

For the record, these are some of English football's fiercest rivalries: (Pompey) Portsmouth-Southampton, West Ham-Millwall, Arsenal-Tottenham, Queens Park Rangers (QPR)/Brentford (and to a lesser extent, Chelsea.)

The Times piece also provides a number of videos of EDL rallies, which are well worth a look to get a taste of what the group is like. Matthew Taylor of the Guardian secretly investigated the group for months, and produced this video in May. A choice bit as quoted by the Times:

As we moved outside for the E.D.L. protest -- during which supporters became involved in violent clashes with the police -- a woman asked me for a donation to support the "heroes coming back injured from Afghanistan." I put a pound in the bucket.

"Thanks love," she said."They go over there and fight for this country and then come back to be faced with these Pakis everywhere." The woman also used another racial slur, using language we cannot repeat here.

Charming.

Some right-wing U.S. protesters have gone to great lengths to prove they aren't bigots; I wonder if they'll denounce this British group showing up at their rallies …

In an inspired bit of YouTube surfing, Gawker has assembled a compilation of military recruitment commercials from around the world. There are a few clunkers -- three minutes is an awful long time to watch a Russian paratrooper sort of rapping in front of an obstacle course -- and I have my doubts that this Japanese ad is not an elaborate sophomoric hoax, but on the whole they make for pretty fascinating viewing.

Watching these as an American, the most immediately noticeable thing is how little time most of the ads spend overtly appealing to patriotism. There's Estonia, which does it cheekily, and Lebanon, which does it with a slow-motion sentimentality that would be cloying under other circumstances but is actually quite poignant in the context of a country that is eternally trying to keep things together. France and India, meanwhile, both hearken back to the U.S. military ads of the pre-9/11 era, in which we mostly see the life-advancing stuff that enlistment is supposed to get you, with a minimum of actual warfighting. (A career in the Indian army evidently prepares you for a lifetime of golfing and competitive diving.)

The Ukrainian army opts for an admirably straightforward "you'll get girls" approach. Singapore features a naval vessel transforming into a giant robot, presumably developed to contain the same giant lava monsters that have long plagued the U.S. Marines. Britain's jarring entry -- which a student of post-colonialism would have a field day with -- looks like it was directed by Fernando Meirelles. (This kind of "I dare you" approach to recruiting must work in the U.K. -- back in the '90s, when the U.S. Army was mostly promoting itself as a way to pay for college, the Brits ran magazine ads showing a Royal Marine eating worms as part of a survival training course.)

But the real winner here, I think, is Sweden, which is promoting military service to young women as a means of avoiding working as an au pair for awful Americans:

The amazingly named MP from Kent, Mark Reckless, has apologized to his contituents for missing a vote on the country's budget because he had gotten, like, totally wasted with his colleagues at Westminster: 

Mr Reckless denied claims that he fell asleep on the terrace or got a taxi back to his constituency.

He added: "I remember someone asking me to vote and not thinking it was appropriate, given how I was at the time. If I was in the sort of situation generally where I thought I was drunk I tend to go home. Westminster is a very special situation and all I can say... is given this very embarrassing experience I don't intend to drink at Westminster again."

Mr Reckless was having drinks on the night of the second reading of the Finance Bill, which lasted until 0230 BST on Wednesday.

I don't mean to endorse voting while intoxicated, but presumably Reckless already knew how he was voting on his own party's finance bill so he must been pretty rough shape if he didn't even think he could raise his hand at the right time. 

I'm guessing turning Westminster into a frat house wasn't quite what Prime Minister Cameron had in mind for his "responsibility agenda."

While stoppages and barricades stymie the "Freedom Flotillas" en route to Gaza, the "Speed Sisters" -- an eight-woman speed-racing troupe breaking onto the driving scene in the West Bank -- are revving up to shatter barriers at high speeds.

These unfearing females -- comprised of Christians and Muslims from ages 18 to 39 -- competed last Friday in the "Speed Test," a car race in the West Bank city of Ramallah that makes the typical NASCAR loop look like child's play. Thousands of fans attended the event to cheer on the seventy helmet-clad contestants as they navigated through treacherous obstacles, spinning loops, and serpentine pathways. And these eight women, gripping the wheels with fingerless gloves that accentuate their brightly painted fingernails, may have particularly piqued the crowd's interest: they are the first female team to enter the Speed Test. The Speed Sisters follow in the footsteps of the one female contestant -- now the group's coach -- who raced in the first competition five years ago.

While racing, many of the Speed Sisters wear t-shirts emblazoned with the British flag to pay homage to their sponsor, the British consulate in East Jerusalem. It is the consulate's personnel that facilitated the creation of the women's team, and its budget that subsidized about $8000 worth of training, coaches, and car refurbishing -- all part of a campaign to foster development in the West Bank and other communities of Palestinian refugees. But even with a financier, the women's road to the finish line is a bumpy one: they share a donated hatch-back that pales in comparison to the other high-powered BMWs and Mercedes on the track, and they face doubt and skepticism from their male counterparts.

Regardless, this strong female showing in a male-dominated arena is inspiring in such a conservative Muslim society -- especially one in which mounting political strife can often preclude a focus on social equity.

In the much-discussed cover story of this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Lynn Hirschberg profiles M.I.A., née Maya Arulpragasam, the British-by-way-of-Sri-Lanka musician whose third album comes out later this summer. It's an interesting piece (even if its subject doesn't think so), not least because it's the first celebrity profile I've read that begins with a thorough parsing of Sri Lankan dissident politics. The subject comes up because a frequent touchstone in M.I.A.'s music is her father's resume: He was as a founder of the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), a militant group with ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization that helped lay the groundwork for the modern Tamil statehood movement before being superseded by the more violent Tamil Tigers.

Although her father never actually had anything to do with the Tigers, M.I.A. championed the organization's cause (albeit sort of vaguely) throughout its guerrilla war with government forces in northern Sri Lanka, a war with few good guys. (By happenstance, M.I.A.'s own ascent to popularity over the course of her first two records happened mostly between the breakdown of peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers in 2006 and the rebels' defeat in 2009.) Her support is a matter of considerable annoyance to activists concerned with bringing about some sort of lasting peace on the island. "It's very unfair when you condemn one side of this conflict," Ahilan Kadirgamar of the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum tells Hirschberg. "The Tigers were killing people, and the government was killing people. It was a brutal war, and M.I.A. had a role in putting the Tigers on the map. She doesn't seem to know the complexity of what these groups do."

Hirschberg mines this vein unsparingly -- you know the knives are out when a writer pulls the old take-a-radical-artist-to-a-fancy-restaurant trick:

Unity holds no allure for Maya - she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. "I kind of want to be an outsider," she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. "I don't want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I'm a terrorist."

A whole genre of art is, by association, coming in for a drubbing here: the venerable agitprop tradition in which M.I.A. has positioned herself. In music, the legacy runs back through Public Enemy, who championed Louis Farrakhan, and the Clash, who called their classic 1980 album Sandinista!; elsewhere, you've got Warhol's Mao paintings, of course, and pretty much everything Jean Luc Godard has ever said. It's different from the standard political peregrinations of artists and celebrities in that the art is inextricable from the politics, and from their audaciousness -- the Clash record would have sold somewhat worse if it had been called Social Democrat!

This is the line in the sand between the postmodern chilliness of M.I.A.'s radical politics and, say, the heartfelt socialism of Woody Guthrie -- the aesthetic of conflict, rather than any particular policy ambition, is the point. To Hirschberg, it suggests an unflattering comparison:

Like a trained politician, [M.I.A.] stays on message. It's hard to know if she believes everything she says or if she knows that a loud noise will always attract a crowd.

I think this is a more damning indictment of politics than it is of M.I.A. -- whose music is, all things considered, pretty great, if not quite up to the precedents of London Calling or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Stitching an aesthetic out of politics is at the end of the day pretty harmless; assembling a politics out of aesthetics, not so much.

In the wake of "Bigotgate," British candidates are apparently not taking any chances with political correctness. Nick Clegg has apologized to mental health groups for use of the word "nutters" to describe people who are, well, nuts:

The remark was made in the second debate, broadcast on Sky News on April 15. Mr Clegg said that the Tory leader had aligned himself in Europe with ''nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists and homophobes''.

Responding to a complaint from the charity Stand to Reason he wrote to director Jonathan Naess: ''You have raised concern about my use of the term 'nutters' in the debate and I am sorry for any offence caused.

''I am acutely aware that the stigma of mental health causes great distress to many people and my use of language that could be considered derogatory was entirely unintentional.''

Granted I've mostly heard the word used in BBC comedies rather than real life, but "nutters," unlike, say, "retarded," seems like it's more often used to describe irrational behavior than those who have mental conditions. I suspect Clegg could probably have gotten away with this one.