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News Corp. -- Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate -- ended its $12.5 billion bid to purchase all of British Sky Broadcasting, following days of intense pressure from the British public and politicians over the company's growing phone hacking scandal.
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"It's a major disappointment but events were unfolding so quickly that it became almost clear in the last 24 hours that the deal wasn't going to do through," said Tuna Amobi, analyst with Standard & Poor's.
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Politicians on both sides of the British ideological spectrum have been calling for Murdoch to drop the bid, but the pressure reached its apex earlier Wednesday when British Prime Minister David Cameron announced he was opposed to News Corp's purchase of BSkyB.

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The end of the deal is a major setback for Murdoch.

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The phone-hacking scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch's media empire intensified in the United States on Wednesday as three senators and a congressman urged federal authorities to investigate whether one of Murdoch's U.S.-based companies may have violated anti-bribery and other laws. fourth senator told CNN he was considering launching his own investigation into the scandal.

Were a U.S. case against News Corp. to arise, the potential implications for the Murdoch media empire would be numerous -- and none of them are good, Koehler said.

An investigation would most certainly attempt to answer the question of how widespread bribes were within News Corp. Were other employees -- all over the world, for that matter -- making similar payments?

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An investigation would most certainly attempt to answer the question of how widespread bribes were within News Corp. Were other employees -- all over the world, for that matter -- making similar payments?

The FCPA stipulates that U.S.-listed companies, their employees or agents may not make bribes to foreign officials. A second portion of the law applies to accounting requirements for public companies, said Don Zarin, author of "Doing Business Under The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" and a partner with the Washington-based law firm of Holland & Knight.

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So, if a bribe was made and not properly noted, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department could each have a case, Zarin said. telephone call or an e-mail from an editor in London to his or her boss in New York could prove key, he said. If you send an e-mail to the boss saying, 'I'm going to pay $10,000 to police officers for this information,' that would provide the jurisdictional basis or potential liability on the part of possibly the British employees," Zarin said.

If any employee of News Corp., which is listed in the United States, knew about and authorized such a payment, "they could have potential exposure," he said.

And if Murdoch -- the 80-year-old Australian-born head of News Corp. who became a U.S. citizen in 1985 -- knew what was going on and authorized it, even implicitly, "he could have some potential exposure," Zarin said.

The penalties can be severe, including jail time and fines.

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Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his son James will attend a hearing over the phone-hacking scandal before British lawmakers next Tuesday, their company, News International, told CNN Thursday.

The House of Commons had issued the pair a summons to appear after the Murdochs initially told the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee they could not attend the July 19 hearing.

News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch wrote to the committee earlier that he was "not available to attend," although he said he was "fully prepared to give evidence to the forthcoming judge-led public inquiry."

James Murdoch, who heads the News International newspaper group, a News Corp. subsidiary, had said he could not appear before lawmakers before August 10 or 11.

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a statement saying it wanted all three to appear "to account for the behaviour of News International and for previous statements made to the committee in Parliament, now acknowledged to be false."

Meanwhile, police announced they arrested a 60-year-old man Thursday morning in London in connection with the phone-hacking probe, the seventh person arrested in the investigation.

The suspect has not been formally named by police but the Press Association news agency reports that he is Neil Wallis, a former executive editor of the News of the World.

Wallis also served on the Press Complaints Commission, the British newspaper industry's self-regulating body, which has been broadly criticized in recent days for failing to act against press misconduct.

Britain's Home Secretary Theresa May wrote to London's top police officer, Sir Paul Stephenson, Thursday evening asking for the full picture about his links to Wallis.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose family's private records are alleged to have been obtained by News International newspapers, said it was vital to maintain the right to a free press.

But, he said, staff at News International, a subsidiary of News Corp., "cynically manipulated our support of that vital freedom as their justification and then callously used the defense of a free press as the banner under which they marched in step, I say, with members of the criminal underworld."

The criminality was "not the misconduct of a few rogues or a few freelancers," he said, but was carried out "often on an industrial scale -- at its worst dependent on links with the British criminal underworld."

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I don't mind an opposition press. In fact, I think an adversarial relationship between government and media is absolutely essential.

When media is simply making things up that are provably false, that's an issue.

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now there is a dialogue

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People debate whether armed predator drones are a good idea

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David Letterman jokes that the most dangerous job in the world is "the number 3 man in Al Queda." Why? "Because," as Dave says, "We keep killing him." How we do this, or claim as much, is no joke especially to the many innocent bystanders and civilians who die as uncounted and unaccountable "collateral damage." Letterman's joke makes us ask the unspoken question: How can a missile sent from an unmanned drone, controlled by a joystick ten thousand miles away, have any idea who is getting killed?

Is the United States' use of deadly drone attacks enough to make this nation - once praised as a beacon of liberty - an international outlaw? There are plenty of Americans who probably think that simply asking such a question is wrong, or worse. But are we? Have we become international outlaws?
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For the sake of discussion, let's assume the US is acting legally anywhere and everywhere in the world where we currently employ deadly force. Double 07 are no longer the numbers with a license to kill. Now its 9/11. Let's also assume that the Obama Doctrine - the concept that the US is allowed to kill anyone, anywhere in the world if the President declares those persons to be terrorists, even citizens of the United States - is also legal. If you accept that, how then do you answer this question: Does the same principle apply to other nations? Isn't self-defense a universal right?

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I am concerned about the use of drones in U.S. military operations overseas.
I do not support using drones as weapons. The drones are excellent as an intelligence-gathering tool; however, it is wrong to arm them with weapons and allow someone thousands of miles away to kill our enemies, as if they were playing a video game. Technology is a wonderful thing; it has saved thousands of lives through medicine and added comfort and convenience to the lives of millions. Yet it has added to the horrors of war. The detachment to reality that technology is causing is troubling. People are glued to their cellular telephones and computers while loud rock music blares in their ears and all real human communication goes by the wayside. Allowing this detachment into our military is detrimental to the way war is fought.

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Allowing computers and people thousands of miles away to literally hunt and kill a living being rather then engaging them in actual combat is not right.

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hey zach looks as if you been drinking the kool aid man but don't worry the nuirses will be by your room later to pas out your meds cause you have to be eiher mentaly insane or just plain stupid one and i haven't figured out which yet. have you ever served in the military especially at war time if not sit back keep your mouth shut or as one reader posted go join up the military and get a feel for yourself how things are. As a combat veteran myself to think i went to defend freedom so punks like you can sit back and arm chair quarter back and second guess militaru tatics if you haven't served then keep your mouth closed.

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n August 5th, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley, Virginia, watched a live video feed relaying closeup footage of one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house, in Zanghara, a hamlet in South Waziristan. It was a hot summer night, and he was joined outside by his wife and his uncle, a medic; at one point, the remarkably crisp images showed that Mehsud, who suffered from diabetes and a kidney ailment, was receiving an intravenous drip

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The image remained just as stable when the C.I.A. remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. Authorities watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant, and seven bodyguards

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The seeming unreality of the Predator enterprise is also felt by the pilots. Some of them reportedly wear flight suits when they operate a drone’s remote controls. When their shifts end, of course, these cubicle warriors can drive home to have dinner with their families. Critics have suggested that unmanned systems, by sparing these combatants from danger and sacrifice, are creating what Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air Chief Marshal in Iraq, has called “a virtueless war,” requiring neither courage nor heroism. According to Singer, some Predator pilots suffer from combat stress that equals, or exceeds, that of pilots in the battlefield. This suggests that virtual killing, for all its sterile trappings, is a discomfiting form of warfare. Meanwhile, some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy has a larger political cost. As she puts it, “Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on . . . endless war.”

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He was losing sponsors because they didn't want to be associated with the things that he was saying, though, not because his ratings were down, that's a cover story

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Former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks was arrested Sunday in connection with British police investigations into phone hacking and police bribery, her spokesman told CNN.

She is being quizzed by police in London after having come in by appointment, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said.

Brooks did not know she was going to be arrested when she arrived, her spokesman Dave Wilson said.

She resigned on Friday as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's News International, which published the News of the World.

The company also did not know she was about to be arrested when it accepted her resignation, a News International source told CNN Sunday, asking not to be named discussing internal corporate affairs.

Brooks had agreed to testify Tuesday at a House of Commons hearing on the scandal. It's not clear how her arrest will affect the hearing -- committee member Louise Mensch, a Conservative MP, said the committee chair was "taking legal advice" on the situation.

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Police in the United Kingdom have identified almost 4,000 potential targets of phone hacking in documents recovered from a private investigator working for the paper.

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The overall assault on FOX looks like a liberal attempt to silence dissent

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But we both agree on gay rights, the environment and a number of other things (the war, probably the whole military industrial complex etc.)

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Right now, you have clean drinkable water, the right to have children, or not to

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Murdoch appeared by turns vague, truculent, sharp and concise as he spoke alongside his son and deputy, James, calling the parliamentary inquisition "the most humble day of my career" but refusing to take personal blame for the crisis...

Murdoch said he was not responsible for the hacking scandal, and denied his company was guilty of willful blindness over hacking.

He laid blame on "the people I trusted but they blame maybe the people that they trusted."

He said he lost sight of News of the World because it is such a small part of his company and spoke to the editor of the paper only around once a month, talking more with the editor of the Sunday Times in Britain and the Wall Street Journal in the U.S.

Rupert Murdoch acknowledged, however, that he did not investigate after the Murdochs' former U.K. newspaper chief, Rebekah Brooks, told parliament years ago that the News of the World had paid police officers for information. Asked by lawmakers why there was no investigation, he said: "I didn't know of it."

Murdoch also said he was not informed that his company had paid out big sums — 700,000 pounds ($1.1 million) in one case — to settle lawsuits by phone hacking victims.

James Murdoch said his father became aware of the settlement "in 2009 after a newspaper report. It was a confidential settlement."

Rupert Murdoch is eager to stop the crisis from spreading to the United States, where many of his most lucrative assets — including the Fox TV network, 20th Century Fox film studio, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post — are based.

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