The buck has stopped – or on this case, the pound — as the first criminal charges have been filed in the phone hacking inquiry that has been rocking UK (and global) media circles. Rebekah Brooks, former CEO of Rupert Murdoch's News International, will face criminal charges over the phone hacking scandal.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charges that Brooks, who was arrested in March and revealed last week she's so close to British Prime Minister David Cameron that they text each other, "conspired with her husband, Charles Brooks, and others to pervert the course of justice," by alleged attempts to conceal or remove evidence relevant to police investigation into the hacking and corruption scandals known as Operation Weeting launched in January 2011 at the News of the World and the Sun tabloids.

It’s a stunning reversal for one of Britain’s most powerful woman, a Murdoch confidante, and additional oversight of all his newspapers in the U.S. as well — not to mention the latest black eye for News Corp.'s corporate reputation.Continue reading...

The Village Voice is under fire over Backpage — not the classified-jammed back page of its iconic free city newspaper, but Backpage.com, the subsidiary of Villlage Voice Media which expands its lucrative classifieds biz, warts and all, to the web. And by warts, we mean venereal warts, because Backpage.com makes a big portion of its income from adult classifieds, which have been accused of enabling human trafficking.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been on Backpage's back over the issue, which is near and dear to his heart. And now brands are protesting too.Continue reading...

Popchips "culture czar" Ashton Kutcher, who owns a minority stake in the company, gets in makeup for a new ad campaign for the snack brand, creating four characters for a mock dating website ("World Wide Lovers") introductory video (watch below). The online, outdoor and social campaign is costing about $1.5 million, according to the New York Times.

It's a different kind of "minority" stake for Kutcher that's causing a stir: Donning "brownface" makeup to portray "Raj," a 39-year-old Bollywood producer, landed the actor and his partners at the brand in hot water today, with accusations of racism (including by an offended Anil Dash) roiling the social web — but the company is defending the move.Continue reading...

Wal-Mart has been accused of bribing Mexican officials so that it could open stores South of the Border, but don’t think it is alone on this one. From the looks of it, business schools might want to add Bribery 101 as an elective.

Fortune reports that Deere, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcom, Las Vegas Sands, Koch Industries, and plenty of others “are also under investigation for violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” Just this week, two big companies got caught when the SEC charged a former Morgan Stanley exec “with bribing an official of a state-owned Chinese company in order to win business for the investment firm.” Plus, News Corp. gave the word that it’s being investigated for bribery as part of its whole phone-hacking fiasco.

Indeed, according to Fortune, “at least 81 public companies under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Justice for running afoul of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes bribery in foreign countries punishable in the U.S.”Continue reading...

In the wake of Brian Dunn's scandal-ridden resignation last week, Best Buy's interim CEO, Mike Mikan, addresses the company's 270,000 employees in a video, above, that reiterates its strategic repositioning announced in late March, in addition to emphasizing his "passion and commitment (to) defining the next generation of Best Buy."

Recognizing the outsized role that use of social media by his critics has played in peeling advertisers away from his radio show, Rush Limbaugh has gone on the offensive. And not in the usual way, through his monologues. He finally decided to take Twitter seriously by launching and authoriing a @RushLimbaugh account.

"I'm activating my account and using it for strategic purposes," he declared on Thursday before letting loose a series of tweets that has included, for example, calling out a "good story" on the Daily Caller website about the contretemps and another one on the site LegalInsurrection.com about the role that the liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, has played in inflaming marketers' passions against the Rush Limbaugh Program.

"Thare are a [few] things I want to get out there and not waste valuable broadcast time to do it," Limbaugh stated by way of partially explaining his newfound fondness for Twitter. "And you [listeners] can re-tweet it, so it ends up saturating the Twitterverse."Continue reading...

Burning up Wall Street and the virtual Wall Street that is Twitter and Facebook, not to mention inspiring wags such as the UK's Daily Mash (above) and US humorist Andy Borowitz — you've no doubt already read Goldman Sachs' exec Greg Smith’s excoriating resignation letter published as a take-no-prisoners op-ed column in The New York Times today. Goldman, no surprising, rejected Smith's accusations in the 'other' paper of record, the Wall Street Journal.Continue reading...

As a fast-fashion retailer that relies on highly visual looks to hook fickle youths, Urban Outfitters seems to step on a lot of toes as it rolls out new items at a rapid clip. Having already offended the Irish with its "Irish yoga" trucker hat and St. Patrick's Day t-shirts, the retailer is proving to be an equal opportunity offender.

Now you can add the Navajo Nation to the list of aggrieved parties finding UO's designs to be culturally insensitive.

The Philadelphia-based retailer has shown an affinity for the Navajo in recent years, identifying a number of its products as being Navajo or Navaho. And that has irked the actual Navajo that they are taking Urban Outfitters to court.Continue reading...