BO Turns on the Charm: U.S. President Leaves Ireland Early for An Audience with British Monarch
Guess Crown counts for more than kin with some people. From Anissa Hadaddi at the International Business Times:
A dense cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano was being blown toward Scotland yesterday. While airlines started to cancel their flights, U.S. President Barack Obama was forced to cut short his visit to Ireland as fears of disruptions similar to those engendered by the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010 mounted.
Off With Their Heads!
Our ancestors once cowered before royalty they believed were divinity made corporeal. These days, the notion of the monarchy is so outdated that supporters are reduced to citing tourist revenue in defense of a barbaric relic.
Other rationales — the divine right of kings, a repository of tradition, moral paragons, manifestation of the state, a (barely) living national symbol — have long been eroded by the tides of the history. So the last excuse for hereditary rule is that of the bean counters’ ledger: the cost-benefit analysis.
Kate and William’s royal nuptials will reportedly generate more than $1 billion in economic activity, supposedly a boon for commoners who each proffer but a few pence for the $60 million annual subsidy to the fusty Queen and her adulterous horse-faced brood. (Never mind that this sum excludes the costs of security, policing and vast estates and manors off-limits to the Exchequer; though at least a few…
How Rupert Murdoch’s Sleazy Journalists Hacked British Royals’ Mobile Phones
The New York Times declares open season on a favorite liberal media pastime: bashing Rupert Murdoch and his “news” empire with this lengthy Magazine article on how the News of the World, an unabashedly lowbrow UK tabloid, hacked the mobile phones of Princes William and Harry and many other celebrities, possibly with some covert assistance from the police:
In November 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.
The stories were banal enough (Prince William pulled a tendon in his knee, one revealed). But the royal aides were puzzled as to how News of the World had gotten the information, which was known among only a small, discreet…
