May 2012

In the world of the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal, “scathing” is the word of the day. It’s the word that has been widely used to describe the report released today by the UK Parliament’s select committee on culture, media and sport — though harsh, severe, berating, or critical would also serve. Even observers in the UK were surprised at the 100+ page report’s language. “Everyone was kind of astonished,” Steve Hewlett, a columnist at The Guardian and host of the BBC Radio 4 Media Show, told TPM. While the practical and political implications of the report are still being sorted out, its tone is unambiguous. We highlighted eight of the most, yes, “scathing” passages written by the UK lawmakers.

• Page 70 - “Not A Fit Person”
• Page 88 - “Willful Blindness”
• Page 22 - “Tried To Have It Both Ways”
• Page 68 - “Collective Amnesia”
• Page 59 - “Simply Astonishing”
• Page 69 - “Simply Not Credible”
• Page 68 - “Huge Failings”
• Page 14 - “Wished To Buy Silence”

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

Harvard’s involvement follows MIT’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project to be known as MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but will carry no credit. But Harvard and MIT are not the only elite universities planning to offer a wide array of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new for-profit company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

A newly unredacted report from federal investigators and fresh information about the engineer behind the data collecting software are casting doubt on Google's assurances that it did not realize that its street-mapping cars were snatching personal data from Wi-Fi networks used by millions of unsuspecting households. In addition to a potential congressional probe, a coalition of more than 40 state attorneys general, led by Connecticut and including California and New York, is pressing ahead with its inquiry. Consumers have also filed nearly a dozen civil lawsuits that they hope to combine into a class action in federal court while privacy watchdogs are hounding Google and accusing the Federal Communications Commission of botching its investigation into the search giant.

An independent group backing Republican Mitt Romney is spending nearly $4 million on ads in nine battleground states. An organization that tracks TV spending by political campaigns says the Romney-aligned Restore Our Future has bought television ad time in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and New Hampshire. The pro-Romney group was by far the biggest advertiser during the Republican presidential primary, spending more than $53 million on ads attacking Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich after each one emerged at different points as Romney's chief conservative rival.