UK drops the term "war on terror"

As an apparent afterthought at the bottom of an article about Afghanistan, the Daily Mail reports.

The words 'war on terror' will no longer be used by the Government to describe attacks on the public, the chief prosecutor said yesterday.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless 'death cult'.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the Government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language. London is not a battlefield.

'The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers. They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.'

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the 'war on terror' language has officially been ditched.

Officials were concerned it could act as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, which is determined to manufacture a battle between Islam and the West.

The term 'Islamic terrorist' will also no longer be used. Officials believe it is unhelpful because it appears to directly link the religion to terrorist atrocities.

What's interesting about this is that as far as I can tell it was reported only in this apparently tabloid-style newspaper. Other items on the page were of the order of this. Lindsay Lohan kisses THREE men in 24 hours... and one gets lucky.

In the mainstream world, Matthew Yglesias seems to have been the first to notice—not Lindsay Lohan.