A legal net is closing around media mogul Rupert Murdoch. On Monday a top investigator in London reported that senior News Corp. employees authorized hundreds of bribes to police officers and other government officials. And just this morning his disgraced son James stepped down from his role as executive chairman of News International.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: The wireless industry is a big racket.

Here’s one reason why: AT&T and Verizon are slowing down — or throttling — Internet access on smartphones, supposedly to manage congestion on their networks. Yet a new study supports what many of us have been saying all along: These companies aren’t throttling to save bandwidth.

They’re doing it to rip us off.

February has been a heartbreaker of a month for people in Philadelphia who care about quality news, journalistic integrity and the future of our city’s daily papers.

To start, the newsrooms of the two jointly owned dailies — the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News — will lose another 37 staff by the end of March to buyouts or layoffs, as announced last week. That will leave the Inquirer’s newsroom with 60 percent fewer staff members than it had in the late 1990s. And it shows. As a daily reader of the paper, I see how it's become a shell of its former self.

Should communities have a right to decide how residents get online? It sounds like a simple question. It isn’t.

The notion of self-determination is fundamental to our self-identify, our politics and the way we construct our communities. And while we all have different interpretations of what “the right to self-determination” means, most of us can agree that it’s a bad thing when governments try to take it away.