Clive Irving

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/National ArchivesMoissy is no more than a hamlet on a road to nowhere in Normandy. At a barely visible turn-off, easily overlooked, there’s a small hand-painted sign, dark blue lettering on the ground the color of dried blood, that reads: Août 1944, Couloir de la Mort.Corridor of Death?It’s only natural that this week, on the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, the vast operation that led to the liberation of Western Europe in 1944, attention is focused on the ceremonies, as it usually is, on the first precarious days of the landings on the beaches of Normandy.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe final phase in the game of chicken being played by lawyers acting for Prince Harry and those acting for Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloids is now underway, although its details are obscured by rival versions of what has now actually happened.On Tuesday the judge overseeing the long drawn-out cases in which the Duke of Sussex and some forty other claimants are suing News Group Newspapers, NGN, as victims of prolonged hacking by the tabloids seemed to hand a significant victory to Murdoch. He ruled out an attempt to include Murdoch himself in a new raft of claims.In his ruling, Mr Justice Fancourt said, “There is a desire on the part of some of those running the litigation on the claimants’ side to shoot at ‘trophy’ targets, whether those are political issues or high-profile individuals.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis finds himself caught in a legal endgame centered on a scandal that seems never to go away, the industrial-scale hacking practiced in the newsrooms of Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids from the mid-1990s until it was exposed in 2011.Lewis was never involved in the hacking. The legal action involves his alleged role in the frantic efforts of Murdoch and his top executives to purge all the records of the crime. He has so far refused to make any comment to counter the allegations.But the pressure on him to respond is growing because the lawyers representing victims of the hacking have asked the presiding judge in London to admit into their lawsuit new witnesses’ testimonies gathered during the last year of discovery. The judge is expected to rule on this soon.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesActions taken in 2011 by senior executives of Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloids, following revelations about industrial-scale hacking in their newsrooms, have come back to bite them.New reporting in the British magazine Prospect, by Nick Davies, who first revealed the criminal activity in The Guardian, gives a detailed account of what he alleges was a giant cover-up, a sustained and rigorous operation to destroy evidence of wrongdoing.One of the executives at the center of that operation, according to Davies, was Will Lewis, who took over as CEO and publisher of The Washington Post this year.Read more at The Daily Beast.