On the heels of President Obama‘s State of the Union address, where he called for the “Buffett Rule”: a requirement that millionaires pay at least 30% of their income in taxes, the richest man in America, Bill Gates, weighed in on solutions to the country’s economic problems. “The United States has a huge budget deficit, so taxes are going to have to go up,” Gates told the BBC. “And I certainly agree that they should go up more on the rich than everyone else. That’s just justice.”

Several weeks after his father, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, was captured and killed by rebel forces attempting to leave the nation he governed for more than forty years, his son and heir, Saif al-Islam, was found attempting to flee to Niger yesterday and taken to the northern town of Zintan. Today, video has surfaced of the younger Gaddafi being transported by the airplane, while the interim leader of the country promised a fair trial for crimes against humanity.

In his recent interview with the BBC, filmmaker and only moderately wealthy person, you guys, Michael Moore was very clear about his thoughts on how Barack Obama has been faring as president. He also added that Obama and his administration seem to be going on the offensive now in the last leg of his (First?) term. Interviewer Richard Bacon then asked Moore whether he feels Obama had initially approached his presidency with a sense of “naïveté.”

MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is not terribly impressed with the current state of television.

Or — as Scarborough recently shared during an Advertising Week panel with Arianna Huffington, HuffPost staff, and co-host Mika Brzezinski on moving beyond framing issues as simply “right vs. left” — he’s not terribly impressed with the current state of television outside his own “forward-leaning” network home.

Early this morning, we published a report on Alessio Rastani, a man interviewed by the BBC about the current economic state. Introduced as an independent trader, Rastani apparently made “jaws drop” at the station with his confession that he dreams of a recession and his statement that “Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

According to the Guardian, NATO has come forward in claiming responsibility for the death of BBC journalist Omaid Khpalwak. The 25-year-old Afghan stringer was one of 22 killed earlier this summer in an attack on the government buildings where he worked in Afghanistan’s southern Uruzgan province. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and subsequent [...]

For five days, the journalists staying at Tripoli’s five-star Rixos Hotel were not allowed to leave. It was in those five days that the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi received its final blows, but forces within the hotel refused to believe it– and kept the journalists hostage in the belief that Gaddafi was busy eliminating the rebel forces, and not the other way around. BBC’s Matthew Price reported today on what went on in the meantime– how the reporters ate, slept, lived, and hope to be freed soon.

Last night the Libyan civil war reached a critical juncture, when rebel forces captured two of Moammar Gaddafi‘s sons and advanced on the capital city of Tripoli. The situation in Libya for reporters has always been a tenuous one, but in a video report released earlier today, one BBC reporter was caught in the middle of an ambush during his report.

Now here’s an interesting experiment: Toronto-based developer and blogger Phillip Mendonça-Vieira was able to record timelapse videos of both the New York Times and the BBC’s respective homepages, showing the sites as they updated their content from September 2010 to May 2011.

He then observed the result and made a note of his observations.

As quickly as some of London’s neighborhoods collapsed into chaos, cleanup brigades have sprung to life–thousands of them being guided into action via Twitter and Facebook. “The footage last night of high streets and independent shops burning was terrifying to watch and I wanted to find a way to help that was quick, simple and practical,” Dan Thompson, an artist, told the BBC. Thompson created a Twitter campaign, @riotcleanup, that’s already amassed 70,000 followers and has inspired a host of similar efforts in other cities:

Oh, that fast-action karma. It’s so entertaining. One of the hooligans arrested in London? A schoolteacher. Yup. Delightful. It’s a wonder some of the kids are turning out the way they are with such fantastic role models, you know? Anyway, this teacher, Alexis Bailey, was brought before a judge and on his way out of court decided it’d be a great idea to hide his face behind a newspaper as cameras moved in–and got shots of Bailey as he walked right into a lamppost.

A reality series that aired in the U.K. on the BBC and in the U.S. on the Travel Channel faces charges producers faked scenes and deliberately mistranslated interviews in an attempt to portray members of an Amazonian tribe as “sex-obsessed, mean savages.” The charges, reported today in The Guardian, involve a six part series called Mark & Olly: Living with the Machigenga, which was shot in the Amazon rainforest. According to the Guardian, “the show has been called “staged, false, fabricated and distorted” by Dr Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who has worked with the tribe for 25 years and speaks their language fluently, and Ron Snell, who grew up with the tribe as the son of US missionaries and also speaks their language.”

One of the nice things about having a Bill of Rights is that it specifically lays out freedoms given to the people and the press. The U.S. Constitution declares that freedom of speech and freedom of the press can never be infringed upon. Unfortunately, if you live in a nation where this is not clearly stated, you can legally censor media outlets without fear or repercussion.

That “smoking gun” that was supposed to link CNN’s Piers Morgan directly to phone hacking and other outrageous practices of the U.K. tabloid press? Well, not so much. As we reported Tuesday, a British blogger claimed to have a recording of Morgan that–he said–”contracts” Morgans flat denials that he ever “hacked a phone, told anybody to hack a phone or published any story based on the hacking of a phone.” As it turns out, that recording’s a 2009 interview Morgan gave to the BBC, appearing on a radio show, Desert Island Discs.The host, Kirsty Young asked Morgan about “all that nasty down-in-the-gutter stuff” that Morgan was exposed to by being a tabloid newspaper editor. He never says that he personally was involved in any of it.

In a bizarre twist to the story, the mission to find evidence of CNN’s Piers Morgan engaging in dirty tabloid behavior has become something of a side quest to the current News Corp hacking scandal. Morgan has denied any hacking, and, with the exception of alleged audio confessions, nothing has surfaced. Tonight, the Daily Beast thought they had finally found the holy grail of the Murdoch scandal– an old BBC interview where he admits it went on, but notes that “not a lot of that went on,” and “the net of people doing it was very wide.”

One of the strangest twists in the ongoing saga of News of the World‘s phone hacking saga was the revelation a few months ago that actor Hugh Grant had not only been a victim, he’d bugged the hackers back. In case you don’t recall, Grant met Paul McMullen, a former NoW editor who’d spoken about the phone hacking before in the press, in a pub and secretly recorded the conversation for a piece he wrote in the New Statesman. Today, Grant got in quite a debate with McMullen on BBC News Channel that was as entertaining as any of his movies.

Earlier today, we featured a story on UK Labour Leader Ed Miliband, who seemed increasingly robotic and repetitive in an interview. Well, the video has been lighting up in the blogosphere (British comic Dave Gorman posted a YouTube video editing bits of his answers together a la The Daily Show), and some Twitterers found an old clip of yet another British politician repeating himself over and over and over again.

What does an overprogrammed politician look like? Ed Milliband. In a bizarre interview with the BBC, the leader of Britain’s Labor (or should I say Labour?) Party robotically resorts to the exact same lines to each and every question he’s asked–leading the Daily Mail to question whether Milliband might, in fact, be a cyborg of some sort. “With his bizarre nasal voice and geeky demeanor, commentators have often joked whether Ed Miliband really is human.” After the BBC interview, he’s got a new nickname: Robo-Ed. As the Mail describes the performance, Milliband displayed a “peculiar fixed stare as he parroted identical answers to questions about public sector strikes.”

NBC News doesn’t have a start date or a name for its new prime-time news show to be led by Nightly News Brian Williams, but it does have an executive producer, as of today. Rome Hartman, who helped create the BBC’s American flagship newscast, BBC World News America, has signed on with NBC in an announcement from the network today. ”

The BBC is reporting this morning that Bradley Manning, the soldier targeted in the WikiLeaks scandal who has been held in isolation at Fort Leavenworth, has been cleared to be held as a medium-security prisoner. According to Fort Leavenworth Commandant Lt. Col. Dawn Hilton, Manning will be treated like any other prisoner. “We’re firm but fair. We treat everybody – staff and inmates – with dignity and respect,” she was quoted by the Kansas City Star as saying.

As the BBC notes, Manning’s treatment has been the subject of criticism:

Sarah Palin‘s mother, Sally Heath, has told the BBC of her fears for her daughter’s safety, telling Newsnight “As a mother I do have concerns about her safety and that of the kids… she knows how I feel, that it’s risky.” Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, tells the newsmagazine a recent series of threats chilled the family, including a man who sent photocopies of receipts for a gun he’d bought, along with a copy of his one-way ticket on a flight to Alaska.

In the wake of Egypt’s uprising, covering moment-by-moment by international reporters positioned in Tahrir Square, the protests in Libya–and the government’s bloody efforts to squash them–have been reported furtively, by phone, YouTube and tweet. The BBC, having heard the criticism of Western news networks for failing to provide better coverage, explained its position on Libya in a letter to viewers posted to the BBC website Sunday night. “Reporting from Libya is tricky at the best of times – clearly, the situation there right now is anything but,” writes Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The BBC has announced changes in its American news efforts, including changes for the network’s flagship U.S. newscast, BBC World News America, expanded ties to PBS stations, and a promise of new investment in the U.S. version of the BBC website. “The BBC has a well deserved global reputation for the independence and quality of its journalism, as it its recent coverage of Egypt proves. With networks staking out ideological positions on the right and the left, or caught in a state of flux, there has never been a greater need for an impartial news offering for cable,” said Herb Scannell, president of New York-based BBC Worldwide America.

Sure, imagining a world without the Internet is pretty fascinating, but this footage is absolutely amazing. The BBC and Survival International have released footage from one of the last human tribes to be completely untouched by society. The tribe exists around the border of Peru and Brazil and the footage is absolutely breathtaking.

This is pretty incredible. Assad Sawey is a reporter for BBC Arabic. While covering the protests in Egypt, he was surrounded by police who he says “didn’t care about BBC or any other oganization.” They attempted to arrest him and, in the end, settled for “brutally” beating him. After he was helped by some other journalists, they got set to bring him to the hospital. However, he delayed his medical attention long enough to tell his story to the camera, while covered in his own blood.