Mexico's lax regulation has encouraged the unabashed growth of monopolies in the last few decades, ranging from telecommunications to beer empires. Cable television is no stranger to conflict as Televisa, the world's biggest producer of Spanish-language content, sets its eyes on triple play amid cries from smaller rivals struggling to keep afloat.
   Eduardo Perez Motta, the head of Mexico's Federal Competition Commission, sat down with Reuters during the Third Latin America Investment Summit to talk about a much-expected decision on a Televisa acquisition that would give the broadcaster a key push in the triple play market, where companies can offer cable TV, Internet and phone services using a single broadband link.
    Perez Motta set a series of requirements that Televisa should meet, including sharing its content with rivals, if it wants to buy a 49 percent stake in Cablemas, one of the biggest cable companies in Mexico.

We at Reuters have tried our best to cover the collapse of Bear Stearns in a clear, informative and, yes, even entertaining fashion. But apparently we and our competitors in the financial press are falling short. From The Onion:

JPMorgan Chase Acquires Bear Stearns In Tedious-To-Read News Article

NEW YORK-As a volatile market reacts to news of the Bear Stearns fire-sale deal with a surge in stock prices but reduced bond yield, officers from JPMorgan Chase announced Monday that they were close to finalizing plans to purchase the securities giant in an incredibly complex series of financial maneuvers and obscure legal jargon that can only be described in the most mind-numbingly dense and unreadable way.

Click here to read the full story, which contains some profanity.

Here in America, we have a saying, "pulling a fast one." Let me try to give an example.

Okay. Say some French dudes gather 100 people together to set a record for a human chain of French kissing, and then start going at it.

A record? A hundred lousy people? Have they never been to a semi-rowdy junior high party?

"The French kiss has to be the new symbol of happiness and freedom," explains one of the guys on our video report. Well, maybe English just isn't his native tongue, pardon the pun, but I believe that just translates to "We don't have enough money to go on a date, but we've heard people will do anything if they believe it's for a world record."

Related post: Honey, let's just skip right to second base

More stuff from Oddly Enough

Rupert Murdoch made his name dominating global entertainment and media by paying big for what he calls the battering ram -- exclusive rights to air sports programming in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Asia.

He's now executing from the same playbook in Germany, Europe's biggest television market, whose viewers are quite happy not paying for television unless it's soccer.

Confirming a report in Der Spiegel, a source close the company tells us Murdoch's News Corp aims to buy up to 23 percent of Germany's biggest pay television provider Premiere AG to control a majority at the June 12 Premiere annual meeting. He previously held a 19.9 percent interest as of February and had stoked buyout speculation in January after an initial purchase of more than 14 percent in January.

The reason? Premiere stands a chance to land the rights to air Germany's Bundesliga soccer games, up for auction this year. Murdoch's deep pockets will come in handy to trounce rival bidders, experts say.

So critical are the rights to air the games to Premiere, the company scrapped its 2008 financial outlook after the auction, originally scheduled for late 2007, was delayed until early 2008.

American farmers are chilling on planting corn, or at least Monday's USDA data points to a backlash against the overplanting of corn in 2007. So does this mean the ethanol promise is beginning to fade?

Soybean futures dropped their exchange-set maximum at the Chicago Board of Trade on Monday after the Department of Agriculture released its widely anticipated report on prospective plantings by U.S. farmers.

Corn and soybeans are planted in the same areas of the Midwest and Upper Midwest and farmers systematically rotate between the two crops. Corn is planted first but requires more fertilizer and energy intensive field work. Now soybeans appear to be the flavor of the year.

Farmers want to plant almost 75 million acres of soybeans, used in mainly animal feed, cooking oil and the renewable fuel biodiesel, up from 64 million last year. They are shifting land out of corn. After blanketing the Midwest with 94 million acres of corn in 2007 -- the most since 1944 -- 2008 will see a slightly-less-smothering 86 million acres. The plans should lift corn prices, a CME panel predicted.

On reuters.com, track corn futures prices here
Track soybean futures prices here

Animal rights group PETA has come up with a novel way of encouraging a major music star to give up fur. In a letter written last week, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk offered to pay Aretha Franklin's back taxes and fees on her Detroit mansion in return for going fur-free. The soul legend owes $19,192 on the property and could face foreclosure proceedings, a county official said earlier this month.

Newkirk's letter says animals trapped in the wild can suffer for days, and die in a number of grisly ways on their way to becoming coats and other fashion acccesories.

"Our offer is a win-win situation: You get to keep your home and animals get to keep their lives," it says. "We are rooting for you to please give animals the R-E-S-P-E-C-T that they deserve by giving up fur."

Newkirk said she had yet to hear back from Franklin. "But I think it's food for thought for her," she told Reuters.

Jose Luis Machinea, head of the U.N. Latin American Economic Comission (ECLAC), is confident the US won't suffer a profund economic crisis from the credit crunch. 

Recent measures taken by the U.S. Federal Reserve to ensure bank liquidity and lower interest rates show the government has learned from a previous comparable crisis, the Great Depression, Machinea says.

Machinea  is one of the speakers  at the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit.

"The enormous difference with the 30s, is that everybody knows what we have to do and what not to do. I agree with those people who say this crisis is structurally the deepest since the Great Depression. But what you have to keep in mind is the reaction from the monetary authorities, which have implemented the biggest monetary and fiscal policies in history".

The Live Nation touring and merchandising agreement with supergroup U2 could be worth $100 million estimates one Wall Street analyst.

Live Nation, a tour promoter that is evolving rapidly into an all-round music company, has prepped a 12-year deal with supergroup U2 which includes its merchandising, digital, image licensing in addition to its touring but hasn't revealed how much money will change hands (not to us anyway).

However David Joyce, media analyst at Miller Tabak, ventures that the deal will be in the $100 million range. Joyce, who likes Live Nation's prospects, has based his guesstimate on the $120 million figure that Live Nation is widely believed to have agreed with Madonna in cash and stock last year.

The Madonna deal was a much more far-reaching partnership that included three albums over 10 years. While the U2 pact doesn't include recording, it's a longer term deal with a bigger live act says Joyce.

What does $100 million get you these days? Well for 12 years Live Nation can print as many 'U2 waz 'ere 2018 World Tour' t-shirts as they can sell, and they might be able to convince a few more big pop names to come on board the touring/merchandise all-you-can-eat fiesta now that they have Madonna and U2 on their calling card. But will they make their money back? That's the big question.

Joyce cautions that the record labels want a piece of the action as well:

"Will the music label companies, facing continued secular decline in their traditional album-selling business, get into the concert promotion, artist merchandising, and fan website business with their currently signed artists, thereby fending off Live Nation's expansion attempts?"

That appears likely, especially as Live Nation works quickly to formalize deeper relationships with the biggest names in pop and may be willing to pay more than the labels at present. It's shaping up to be an arms race that could end up getting very expensive.

(Photo: Reuters)

The Magdi Allam baptism and debate about Catholic-Muslim relations in its aftermath continue to make waves. Here are a few interesting points that have come up in recent days:

• At www.chiesa, a well-informed multi-lingual blog on the Roman Catholic Church, vaticanista Sandro Magister says the Vatican is more interested in an inter-faith dialogue proposed by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah than the one it has just begun with the Common Word group of 138 (plus) Muslim scholars. Magister notes that L'Osservatore Romano published stories on "two instances of dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam, demonstrating how this dialogue is showing promising developments precisely during the days of the controversy over the baptism of Allam, administered by the pope." He adds: "He who has ears to hear, let him hear. In the judgment of the Church of Rome, the dialogue with Islam is not limited to the follow-up to the letter of the 138 – one of whose leading exponents, Aref Ali Nayed, has directed extremely harsh criticism against the pope for having baptized Allam – but is developed in multiple areas, some of which it believes are more promising than others."

• Our Riyadh bureau chief Andrew Hammond, looking at Abdullah's call, wrote in an analysis,"the king is seen in Saudi Arabia as a well-intended reformer whose plans for change have largely been foiled by hardline clerics and their allies within the Saudi royal family." One glaring example of this disconnect came recently in the Shura Council, a quasi-parliamentary body that has refused to support efforts by many Islamic countries to have the United Nations draw up a global pact on respecting religions and their symbols. This pact is one of the top diplomatic goals for many Muslim countries these days, including Saudi Arabia. One of the main supporters of this pact is the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which is based in and heavily financed by ... Saudi Arabia!

• That same www.chiesa post cited above included a long analysis by Pietro De Marco, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy. In it, he rejects in detail the criticism expressed by the leading Common Word signatory Aref Ali Nayed and offers an interpretation of the baptism as Pope Benedict offering to help Islam to "seize the opportunity to exit critically from itself, to open itself to the dimension of the universal and to come back to itself as a reflectively renewed Islam." This sounds like the invitation to dialogue that Pope Benedict offered in the Regensburg speech better known for his controversial use of a Byzantine emperor's quote criticising Islam.

• Magister's point about Catholic-Muslim dialogue proceeding on several fronts is interesting, even if we're not so sure Abdullah's proposals will get anywhere. The fact the Vatican is still pursuing the Common Word option was made clear in the reply that Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi gave to Nayed's criticism. Check out the full text to see an excellent example of how to reject criticism yet keep all doors open to further dialogue.

• Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, the Egyptian Jesuit who is one of the Catholic Church's leading experts on Islam, has a long analysis on Asianews.it of Allam's conversion. In it, he notes that both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions and adds: "The pope’s baptism of Magdi Allam is not an act of aggression, but an exigency of reciprocity. It is a calm provocation that serves to make us sit up and think. Each one of us must live as a missionary, attempting to offer to the other the best of what one has encountered and understood."

• The National Catholic Reporter's John Allen interpreted Pope Benedict's message as follows: (1) For a pope committed to reawakening a strong missionary spirit in Catholicism, receiving a high-profile convert during the Easter Vigil is a symbolic way of making the point, (2) Allam's baptism can also be read as a statement of solidarity with Muslim converts to Christianity around the world and (3) the episode illustrates an important wrinkle to Benedict's personality -- stubborn indifference to the canons of political correctness. Read more here.

• Allam has defended his conversion and baptism by the pope in another long article in his newspaper Corriere della Sera.

• There have been comments on various Catholic blogs criticising the media coverage (by us and others) of the Allam baptism. The Catholic Church can baptise anyone it wants, they say, so stop making such a fuss about it. We haven't had much of that in our comments sections but here's an example of that argument from another blog. Anyone writing this is either wilfully playing naive or is actually naive. We never said Allam should not be baptised -- we have no dispute with the Church's right to do so. What we did was quote others, Catholics as well as Muslims, who questioned whether it had to be done with such publicity. Saying this event didn't deserve the headlines it got shows a basic misunderstanding of both how the news media work and how the Vatican works.

U.S Democratic race over? Clinton doesn't think so

WASHINGTON, March 27 (Reuters) - Somebody forgot to tell Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential race is over and Barack Obama won.

Clearly you need to correct the opening of your article. When last I checked, there were ten states that haven't yet voted for a candidate. A presidential race is "over" when either a candidate has dropped out of the race, a candidate has earned the required delegates to claim the nomination and halt the race, or all  states have voted, and the candidate with the most delegates has won. Thank you for your commitment to the facts.

Tara O. From everything I've heard Reuters is supposed to be a news organization and not a tabloid. Journalists, who work for news organizations are supposed to report on facts. Yet this article seems to be tabloid material or propaganda. R.W.

Several readers wrote to object to the lead of this story: GBU Editor

REUTERS photo by Jason Cohn