News of the World scandal: Did Scotland Yard turn a blind eye?

After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.
New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. • Discussing the News of the World phone-hacking case in a piece that suggests that Scotland Yard had played a role in keeping evidence of hacking under wraps. “At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects,” the article continues. “At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.” Maaaan, this is getting messy. source

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worse After weeks of scandal tainted News Corp to its core, a woman at the center of the ongoing News of the World phone-hacking scandal — News International leader Rebekah Brooks — resigned Friday.
worser Hours after Brooks left her job, Les Hinton — a Rupert Murdoch’s longtime confidante who headed the Wall Street Journal and was Brooks’ predecessor during the time of the alleged hacking — also resigned.
worsest Now various claims are floating around that the scandal has damaged relationships between some of Murdoch’s children. Murdoch, meanwhile, apologized profusely in a series of newspaper ads. source

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$92.1 million the size of the opening day take for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” on Friday
$43.5 million the amount of that take that came from midnight showings ALONE; both numbers are records source

» To put this in perspective: The previous opening-day record was set by 2009’s “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” which scored a comparatively modest $72 million first-day opening. Oh yeah, of the 137 movies Box Office Mojo ranks on this list, only seven were released in the ’90s — meaning nearly all of the other movies on the list were released in the past decade. The oldest movie in the top ten of the list is from 2006. By the way, the final film in the “Harry Potter” saga is within $70 million of topping the $158.4 million single-weekend record, set by “The Dark Knight” in 2008 — which means there’s a good chance that it will.

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Well, as long as he doesn’t drink it. You use Clorox, right? You use it to spray stuff? To disinfect surfaces? To bleach your clothes? Well, Carl Icahn, who doesn’t exactly carry the best reputation for company turnarounds but was a real-life influence for Gordon Gekko (seriously — read up on Trans World Airlines and consider how much it compares to the plot of the original “Wall Street“), recently put up an insane, unsolicited buyout offer for the cleaning-supply country, which (think about this next time you eat a salad) also makes Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing. Slowly but surely, Icahn became the company’s largest shareholder, and now he’s gunning for a whitewash. We could keep going with these bleach jokes all day, so don’t tempt us. source

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16 Jul 2011 15:35