The phone-hacking scandal that is mushrooming in Britain, with arrests, skullduggery and influence peddling, would be a delicious story for The News of the World if it were not about the newspaper itself. Instead, the hunter became the hunted, and last Thursday Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation summarily slid the 168-year-old News of the World under a double-decker bus. Its final issue was Sunday — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Here is a challenge to News Limited CEO John Hartigan. Publish the News Limited Code of Professional Conduct. Not only internally, where it can be found buried on the staff intranet, but publicly, clearly linked from all News Limited’s mastheads and available in hard copy to anyone who asks.
And if you don’t publish it, Crikey will — via redwolf.newsvine.com
VISA last week closed a donation channel to WikiLeaks after a payment processor briefly accepted money transfers to the anti-secrecy site — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sacked News of the World staff appear to have fired a parting shot at their former editor Rebekah Brooks, disguising mocking messages in the crossword of the tabloid’s final edition.
Brooks, now the chief executive of News International, reportedly brought in two loyal proofreaders to sanitise Sunday’s final edition of any jibes directed at her following the newspaper’s spectacular demise during the phone hacking scandal.
But they failed to detect the not-so-cryptic clues that appear to savage her in the crosswords on page 47 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB appeared to be dead in the water last night after proof emerged that executives at his British newspaper empire mounted a cover-up of the full scale of alleged criminal wrongdoing at the News of the World.
In another extraordinary day in the phone-hacking scandal, Downing Street sources confirmed that Government lawyers were drawing up a strategy to halt the £9bn deal which looked a certainty only a week ago — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Electronics retailer Dick Smith has taken its New Zealand homepage offline after apparently being hit by a glitch that allowed customers to shop for free.
Twitter users wrote on Monday morning that purchasers using the retailer’s site, dicksmith.co.nz, were told to pay only the cost for the delivery with no charge for the goods ordered.
The Australian-based company sells electronics, including big plasma TVs, laptop computers and iPhones, worth thousands of dollars — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Police have been handed internal News International memos from 2007 that appear to acknowledge that the practice of phone hacking was more widespread than previously thought and that police were paid for helping with stories.
The memos – which were written in the wake of the jailing of the News of the World’s former royal editor Clive Goodman and the newspaper’s £100,000-a-year private investigator Glenn Mulcaire — allegedly show that the pair were not the only News International employees implicated in phone hacking. The memos have now been passed to police investigating the matter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sandra Rawline, 52, said she was told to come to work wearing younger, fancy suits
and lots of jewellery. And she had to dye that hair — her boss even offered to do the colouring.
When she refused, the Houston Chronicle reports, she was fired within a week and replaced by a woman 10 years her junior. She has sued for discrimination in the Houston courts — via The Guardian
Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he’s been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he’s never landed the top gig. It’s because he made the cars too well
, he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an éminence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off corporate message. That said, his new book, Car Guys vs Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, has a message worth hearing. To get the US economy growing again, Lutz says, we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Until last week, it seemed the rule of Rupert Murdoch would end only with his death. But now, I think, the end is in sight. He may live to a great age (Murdoch is 80), but his power will never recover.
One day, some time in the mid-1990s, I was editing London’s Daily Telegraph and Murdoch had just launched a new front in the price war designed to destroy us, by dropping the price of his paper, The Times, to 10 pence on Mondays. Conrad Black, our then owner, loves historical comparisons. I feel like Talleyrand,
he told me, when he realised that Napoleon’s only policy was one of conquest.
It was a just comparison, because it acknowledged Murdoch’s greatness and his destructiveness.
The greatness is in his courage and ingenuity, and in his understanding of the media. It was Murdoch who established Australia’s first national newspaper, Murdoch who saw that The Sun, an ailing, feeble, left-wing newspaper that he bought in 1969, could be turned into the most popular publication in Britain, and Murdoch, in the late 1980s, who realised satellite broadcasting would revolutionise television. He first grasped the importance of the Chinese media market, he made the British newspaper industry profitable by smashing print unions in the 1980s, and broke the stranglehold of the TV networks in the US — via redwolf.newsvine.com
One staff member who attended the tense meeting told the paper: We turned up for work with a lot of enthusiasm, determined to make the last News of the World a great success. But when we got here we found security guards to keep an eye on us and our internet access blocked. We can’t get on Facebook, personal email accounts have been totally blocked and lots of people are struggling to even get on the internet, which makes researching stories incredibly hard. We are being hung out to dry. The staff here now have done nothing wrong; we are innocent in all of this, as the people responsible for this mess no longer work here. It an absolute insult after they took our jobs away
Mobile payments outfit Zong is to be assimilated into the PayPal world, following the announcement that eBay is handing over US$240 million in cash to acquire the company.
Zong runs the kind of operation that looks like someone anybody could manage: buyers enter their mobile phone numbers when they want to buy something from a site, receive a transaction code, complete the purchase, and pay for the purchase on their phone bill. Proving that it’s not such a tough nut to crack, Zong claims 250 carriers worldwide, but developed its system on a fairly frugal $27.5 million in fundin– via redwolf.newsvine.com
Senior officials in Spain’s Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), the country’s leading collection society for songwriters and composers, face embezzlement charges in the wake of a Friday raid on the organization’s offices. (A collecting society collects licensing fees for public performances of music and distributes them to artists and record companies.)
According to Spanish newspaper El País, the investigation is focused on José Luis Rodríguez Neri, the head of an SGAE subsidiary called the Digital Society of Spanish Authors (SDAE). Neri faces charges of “fraud, misappropriation of funds and disloyal administration.” On Monday, a High Court judge grilled him for more than four hours over the charges — via redwolf.newsvine.com
News International has decided that this Sunday’s News of the World will be the last edition of the paper to be published.
It has clearly decided that the brand is too badly tainted to allow it to continue within News International.
But will cutting the News of the World out of the group be enough to allow News International to prosper in the future? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Only around 500 of Australia’s pollution-emitting companies will pay the carbon tax, despite repeated promises by the Government that the 1,000 biggest polluters
will pay — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The aviation safety regulator tonight announced it will will seek a court order to keep Tiger Airways Australia grounded until 1 August, due to ongoing safety concerns, dashing the airline’s hopes of a return to the skies this weekend — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The head of a major New Zealand employers’ group has been fired after he caused public outrage by linking women’s productivity to menstruation — via redwolf.newsvine.com
My coworkers were happy to give me a rundown of the different nationalities they’d encountered. Britishers get angry,
said Nidhi. Still, they are subtle — they’ll say something sarcastic under the breath.
Americans will just shout at you,
Sube said. Mittu agreed: I have only been cursed by Americans. They are sharp-witted and very articulated and yet very free with their anger.
Most customers are well-behaved, they assured me. Still, each agent had a stockpile of best- and worst-call anecdotes. I remember quite well this guy who just called me up and said out of nowhere, ‘You fucking Paki,’
Arnab told me during a break. We don’t take those things personally; it’s part of the job. So I just said, very calmly, ‘Yes sir, if I am a Paki, then this Paki would be helping you fix your computer.’ By the end of the call, he apologized and gave me a five-star feedback rating
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rebekah Brooks, the embattled chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, personally commissioned searches by one of the private investigators who was later used by the News of the World to trace the family of the murdered Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler, The Independent can reveal.
Ms Brooks, while editor of NOTW, used Steve Whittamore, a private detective who specialised in obtaining illegal information, to convert
a mobile phone number to find its registered owner. Mr Whittamore also provided the paper with the Dowlers’ ex-directory home phone number — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The phone-hacking crisis enveloping the News of the World intensified on Tuesday night after it emerged that Scotland Yard has started to contact the relatives of victims of the 7 July 2005 attacks to warn them they were targeted by the paper.
The revelation that bereaved family members may have had their mobile phone messages intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the paper, in the days following the 2005 London bombings will heap further pressure on the title’s owner, News International, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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