BBC director general resigns over 'shoddy journalism'

Reuters/Reuters - BBC director general George Entwistle speaks to the members of the media after appearing before a Culture and Media Committee hearing at Parliament in London October 23, 2012. REUTERS/Andrew Winning

By Michael Holden | Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - BBC Director General George Entwistle resigned on Saturday, just two months into the job, after the state-funded broadcaster put out a programme denounced by the corporation's chairman as shoddy journalism.

The BBC, reeling from revelations that one of its former stars was a pedophile, brought further problems on its head when a flagship news programme aired a mistaken allegation that a former senior politician
sexually abused children.

The BBC had already issued a full apology on Friday, but on Saturday its director general had to admit under questioning from his own journalists that he had not known in advance about the Newsnight report, weeks after being accused of being too hands-off over the previous scandal on the same programme.
Accepting Entwistle's resignation, BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten said: "This is undoubtedly one of the saddest evenings of my public life.

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The nicer phantom is the white one, in my opinion

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Israel 'prepared for 30-day war with Iran'

Jonathan Marcus
BBC Diplomatic Correspondent

Iran has the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East

Israel's outgoing home front defence minister says an attack on Iran would likely trigger a month-long conflict that would leave 500 Israelis dead.

Matan Vilnai told the Maariv newspaper that the fighting would be "on several fronts", with hundreds of missiles fired at Israeli towns and cities.

Israel was prepared, he said, though strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities had to be co-ordinated with the US.

Meanwhile, a US blogger has published what he says are Israel's attack plans.

Richard Silverstein told the BBC he had been given an internal briefing memo for Israel's eight-member security cabinet, which outlined what the Israeli military would do to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons.

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RON PAUL CAMPAIGN TO GOP: ADAPT OR DIE

I don’t agree with everything said in this story, but it does a pretty good job of putting the long term revolutionary aspects of Ron Paul’s campaign into proper context. As I’ve said before, when the 2012 elections are over, candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum will be nothing more than asterisks in the history books, while Ron Paul will remain the most important political figure of our era. Reports CBS News:

As Paul’s team will openly admit, his presidential run has doubled as an effort to advance the Libertarian movement. And on that measure, there are reasons to already view it as a success.

Start with the vote totals… Paul has consistently won more votes in the 2012 cycle than he did in his presidential run four years ago. In Ohio, he went from 49,027 votes in 2008 to 111,238 votes in 2012; in Michigan, he went from 54,434 votes four years ago to 115,712 votes in this cycle. He more than quadrupled his vote total South Carolina, tripled it in New Hampshire and doubled it in Georgia.

Throughout the campaign, Paul has attracted the sort of crowds that also-ran candidates rarely see, including the 4,600 people that turned out to see him in Champaign, Illinois, on Wednesday. Meanwhile, his passionate supporters have continued to pour money into his campaign, even as Paul’s odds of winning the nomination have gotten ever longer.

“It does seem like this is a real step forward within the Republican Party,” said John Samples, who directs the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank. Noting that Paul’s supporters tend to be younger and previously disengaged from the GOP, he added: “He’s reaching a new constituency, and he’s doing it in the context of a party that has concerns about the future…”

Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign chairman, said he does see evidence that Paul’s ideas are making a difference.

“There is a big debate right now inside the Republican Party on getting out of Afghanistan,” said Benton. “Look at the monetary issue. You’ve got candidates across the country campaigning on sound money, the gold standard, auditing the Federal Reserve. You’ve got internet freedom – Republicans came together and they opposed SOPA.” Benton also pointed to GOP efforts to cut spending, though he said such efforts have not gone nearly far enough…

Benton stresses that the Paul campaign is not giving up on winning the nomination, though he concedes that Paul is not going to get the 1,144 delegates necessary to secure it before the GOP convention in August. He argues that if no candidate secures the nomination before August, Paul will ultimately triumph at the convention.

“A brokered convention is now our stated goal, and winning the nomination for Dr. Paul at said convention will require extensive politicking,” he said. “We plan to head to a Tampa with every political bullet we have loaded in our gun, ready for the convention fight…”

No matter what happens, Libertarians seem committed to moving the Republican Party toward their beliefs over the long term… Samples, of the Cato Institute, says Paul may ultimately be remembered as the man who moved the Republican party away from the George W. Bush model and into the future.

“There’s generational change going on here, and perhaps as time moves on you’ll see a different kind of Republican who’s closer to him,” he said. “And as you look back, you might say he kind of foreshadowed what happened.”

Benton’s message to the party, meanwhile, is simple: Adapt or die.

“The party’s at a crossroads,” he said. “They’re either going to start to embrace real limited constitutional government – and I think a lot of people are – or they’re really going to struggle nationally.”

“If they want to shrink this down into a little teeny tiny minority party,” he added. “They can keep catering to the neoconservatives.”

Devlin-Blind Faith BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge

All Rights Reserved 2011.

"Blind Faith"
(with Ed Sheeran, originally by Chase & Status)

I am a man with a heavy heart,
And I dare not tear the pages
Fighting with automatic self destruction
I...

It's a blind faith
A cruel waste
One bitter taste
So I know why I
can't fight this sweet
sen-sa-tion.

Listen, music that we play somehow gets glued to your brain
I'm the future when I'm in the booth done like I'm living in 3008
This music gave me a lane to ride in, but there ain't cars in the sky yet, so hold tight
Because I'm in flight like a plane with a lift of a light
You know why? Because I got cold bars hard like crowbars
You can't gamble with no cards
What d'you wanna call it then you get stung like a phone charge
Music mentally uses me like a sailor might use sonar
To find where the flows are, upon an ocean floor that's so dark

Sweet sensation
The music that we play
Will ease your mind
Sweet sensation
Listen, listen, the music that we play
Will ease your mind

My heart falls heavy, like a bankers belly
But when I'm writing songs, I'm happy like chunk when you got away from the Portellies
And there's a musical vibe that usually moves inside of my mind
Therefore I've got a fortune already, and I ain't even talking in pennies
So ride on, my faith is blind like a man who requires a guide dog
And life's wrong, but I stride on regardless of anything I am strong
I got all that I need in a mic and a beat to see how alive I can be
And I got sweet sensation inside of me, because my mind's at ease

I am a man with a heavy heart,
And I dare not tear the pages
Fighting with automatic self destruction
I...
It's a blind faith
A cruel waste
One bitter taste
So I know why I can't fight this sweet sensation

Listen, I wanna say rest in peace, for children murdered on U.K. streets
While the country wages a war, there's a war going on in our very own streets
And I say that life's too short to end up in a morgue or a court
So why not give music a thought and use it to glide like a hawk
Listen, we all get down in the dumps
But when they hear the melody and base line pump
I feel my heart rate jump through the roof and then I run loose on my tongue
Confer with Morpheus if you need proof I'm the one
Or I'll put my heart on the scales to prove that my cardiac muscle weighs more than a ton

Sweet sensation
The music that we play
Will ease your mind
Sweet sensation
Listen, listen, the music that we play
Will ease your mind

I am a man with a heavy heart,
And I dare not tear the pages
Fighting with automatic self destruction
It's a blind faith
A cruel waste
One bitter taste
So I know why I can't fight this sweet sensation.