Gergo Saling, the editor-in-chief of Origo.hu, a popular Hungarian news site, was fired Monday shortly after the site published a series of critical reports about the Hungarian government, the last of which was about State Secretary Janos Lazar and his multimillion travel expenses. Critics are accusing the Hungarian government of taking advantage of its cushy relationship with Deutsche Telekom—the huge telecommunications corporation that owns, through a chain of subsidiaries, Origo.hu—to silence news organizations that criticize the government.

Deutsche Telekom, the dominant telephone and communications provider in Germany, has been caught using private phone records in a scandal reminiscent of Hewlett-Packard's industrial espionage. During a spell of layoffs in 2005 and 2006, the company hired a data-mining firm to scan the records of supervisory board members in the hopes of matching the numbers to those of journalists as it looked for the source of leaks about the company's downsizing. New CEO René: Obermann wasn't there at the time, but is stuck cleaning up the mess. [NY Times] (Photo by AP/Frank Augstein)