Sun News Trolls Feminist Campaigners, Brings Back 'Page 3'

Hey, this is great!

On Twitter.

And at Telegraph UK, "The Sun brings back page 3":

The tabloid prints a picture of a topless model on page three under the headline 'clarifications and corrections'.

The Sun has printed a topless model on Page 3, ending days of speculation that the feature was dead.

The newspaper has tweeted out a picture of Thursday’s Page 3 which features a topless woman, with a notice underneath saying: “Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth.

“We would like to apologise on behalf of the print and broadcast journalists who have spent the last two days talking and writing about us.”

The campaign group No More Page 3, which began in 2012 and attracted 217,000 signatures to a petition calling for a ban, acknowledged that "the fight might be back on".

Topless women have been a fixture on Page 3 of the Sun for more than four decades.

However it was understood that executives at the tabloid had decided to quietly shelve the tradition after a growing army of critics branded it sexist.

Rather than bare breasts, it was thought that the pictures would now show scantily-clad women wearing bras and pants.

Over the past three days, there have been no topless models on Page 3, fuelling speculation the feature was on its way out. This appeared to be confirmed by a report in The Times, a fellow News UK paper, on Tusday.

In Monday's issue of The Sun, the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was shown wearing Marks & Spencer underwear.

Tuesday’s first edition had a photograph of two bikini-wearing actresses running on a beach, which was later replaced by four pages on Anne Kirkbride, the Coronation Street actress who had died the previous evening.

Pages 2 and 3 of Wednesday's paper were taken up by a Sainsbury’s advert, but Page 5 ran a comparison of cosmetic surgery undertaken by two Celebrity Big Brother contestants, featuring Katie Price and Alicia Douvall wearing garments which left little to the imagination.

Topless models were first introduced by the Sun in 1970, less than a year after Rupert Murdoch bought the title.

In recent years, the paper has faced growing criticism from campaigners who said the feature was out of date in the modern world.

Note that it's not just topless women.

The "no on page 3" campaign wants to ban all women from appearing in the paper. They're freakin' totalitarians!

UPDATE: Linked at Instapundit! Thanks!