This has been a crazy 24 hours, and I don’t think it’s about to stop now. In case you have been on holiday, in which case it would be inconceivable that you would know anything about this, Britain’s biggest newspaper, News of the World, has been shut after it emerged that not only had journalists there been involved in hacking the phones of celebrities and the Royal Family, they had also allegedly been hacking the voicemails of murder victims.

Yep, you read that right – murder victims. High profile child murders, no less, as well as the victims of the London July 7th bombings. Oh and dead soldiers.

I might make a ‘stay classy’ comment at this point, were it not for the fact that News of the World won’t be staying anything, since it was dramatically shut last night, with 500 people losing their jobs.

At this point you may be thinking “well cry me a river, you allegedly phone hacking bastards!” However, it’s not that clear-cut. The phone hacking that occurred and is suspected to have occurred at NOTW at least appears to have been historical, meaning that at the very least the majority of the staff working there at the moment would not have been involved. Secondly, this is no contrite move by News International, the UK branch of News Corp, which owns (owned?) News of the World, the Sun and the Times. No, this is a very strategic move to try and stop the rising waters of scandal, filth, public outcry and other Sun headlines from reaching the higher echelons of News International.

Last night, one of the senior journalists at News of the World was quoted as saying that “For the sake of one person, 500 people at the News Of The World have been sacrificed.” The one person he/she was referring to is Rebekah Brooks, former editor of News of the World and now CEO of…. News International! She was indeed the editor at the time much of the alleged hacking took place, although according to her is inconceivable that she knew of any illegal activity and anyway she was on holiday at the time.

But I am not convinced that it is just one person that all those people were dropped for. No, you see, James Murdoch, Rupert’s son, is the CEO of News Corporation Europe and Asia. So really it now becomes a question of how far up does the rot go and how many people will be thrown to the wolves as everyone scrabbles to save themselves.

Things are moving very fast with this, so I will be Tweeting as much as possible, rather than doing loads of full updates (@anti_s_media). For now I leave you with the news that Rebekah Brooks is reportedly going to be giving a speech to a waiting lynch mob the News of the World staff at 4.00pm BST and with this news video from Taiwan (I think)