As Renault extends its News of the World ad boycott to other News International titles, News Corp.'s very bad week gets the Taiwanese animation treatment (now with tattooed hipster intro).

Below, Star Wars chic, Apple politicking and more.Continue reading...

Apple sees PC cannibalization by iPad drop.

AutoNation car dealer network gets thrown for a spin by Japanese car-supply problems.

Barnes & Noble hits one million Nook app downloads.

BP tries to salvage Russian deal.

Dish Network taps former Sirius head Joseph Clayton to replace founder Charlie Ergen as CEO.

Fox puts faith in Simon Cowell's The X Factor for fall prime-time schedule.

IMF head arrest in sexual-assault case roils worlds from French politics to euro zone debt.Continue reading...

As Google aims its bow at Apple and reveals a slate of new services for Android, consider the latest research report from IHS iSuppli, on the state of the mobile marketplace.

iSuppli projects that revenue from the four top app stores - Apple's iTunes store, Google's Android market, Nokia's Ovi app store and RIM's BlackBerry App World — will reach $3.8 billion in 2011, up 77% from last year. The total number of downloaded applications this year is projected at 18.1 billion, and by 2014, to almost double to an estimated 33 billion.Continue reading...

The news that Nokia had hired its first non-Finnish CEO in Microsoft executive Stephen Elop, who starts next week, continues to reverberate. Yesterday saw the resignation of Anssi Vanjoki, the head of its smartphone business.

Today its chairman, Jorma Ollila ("the executive credited with turning the Finnish company into the world's largest handset maker," notes the Wall Street Journal) revealed that he will step down too, although not until 2012. The Journal added that today's "surprise announcement, coming just days after Nokia said that it had hired Elop to replace its chief executive (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo) signals that a deeper transformation could be in store at the company than many had anticipated."

Elop's challenges include restoring its former dominance in markets where it's slipping in the face of competitors (notably, Apple and Google) steadily whittling away at its share of the European market, where the Nokia brand still dominates.

The company is reporting record attendance at Nokia World — its annual meeting with developers, partners, analysts, investors and press — in London. Nokia unveiled new phones (such as the biz-friendly E7) and announced there it's bringing, with Orange, a new integrated Ovi service "that widens the developer ecosystem and gives Orange customers using Nokia handsets easier access to more content" to customers in the UK and France.

Burberry introduces lower-priced items to US department stores, including a $600 trench coat and $150 boots. [Bloomberg]

HSBC will move its chief executive to Hong Kong. [Times of London]

Bill Clinton praises Wal-Mart, "hardly a left-wing corporation," for green conversion that increased profits. [NPR]

Chinese automaker Geely's $2.5 billion bid to acquire Volvo from Ford moves ahead. [WSJ]

Barclays in talks to purchase retail banking assets in Portugal from Citigroup. [WSJ]

(More headlines: John Lewis sales up, Twitter marketing, Nokia's Brazil woes.) Continue reading...