UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from Africa News blog:
Must we see rape in Britain to understand rape in Congo?
I was left somewhat traumatised after going to see a screening of a controversial new Hollywood-backed short released this week, aimed at highlighting the link between minerals mined for British mobile phones and the use of rape and murder as weapons of war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The highly graphic campaign video - appropriately called Unwatchable - starts with a little English girl picking flowers in the garden of her family’s multi-million pound mansion in a picturesque Cotswolds village.
This tranquil scene is shattered in an instant when armed men descend on the house, gang-rape her sister on the kitchen table and then murder her parents. It ends five minutes later with the girl running for her life.
“We placed it in a sort of cliché idyllic countryside, and tracing it back to mobile phones would make it relevant to people on the street,” Marc Hawker of production company DarkFibre told AlertNet.
from Breakingviews:
BBC ersatz trader has serious markets message
By Christopher Swann
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Wall Street now has its equivalent of a reality TV star. A clip from the BBC of a self-described trader admitting to dreaming of financial doom as a money spinner has spread like wildfire. The Gordon Gekko wannabe doesn't work for a Wall Street firm but his vulgar amorality offers a description of trading that has struck a chord with a public still smoldering over bank bailouts.
Ersatz trader Alessio Rastani wasn't a big name in finance. He was nobody until this week. Still, he has some claim to represent the primitive Id of traders everywhere. His obvious indifference to the human suffering caused by financial collapses and economic downturns -- in this case the crisis facing European nations -- seemingly shocked the public, not to mention BBC presenters who let him rant ad nauseam.
from Reuters Soccer Blog:
United get rude awakening
The plain sailing Manchester United would have expected in the group stage of their Champions League campaign has turned into a rough ride after Tuesday’s 3-3 home draw with Swiss side Basel, who were unlucky not to have come away from Old Trafford with the three points.
Two draws in their last two games, away to Stoke City in the Premier League and the late escape against Basel, will have rooted out any complacency that might have crept into Alex Ferguson’s men after their flying start to the season which included an 8-2 drubbing of Arsenal.
from Reuters Investigates:
Behind the scenes at UBS
Emma Thomasson and Edward Taylor tell the inside story of UBS's turbulent week in today's second special report "How a rogue trader crashed UBS."
UBS chief Oswald Gruebel’s decision to resign after the bank said a rogue trader lost as much as $2.3 billion was not just a response to the immediate crisis. It was also an admission that the bank’s latest scandal has effectively undone all his efforts over the past two years to lobby against tougher bank regulations.
from MediaFile:
The future of journalism in the UK
By Mark Thompson
The opinions discussed are his own.
In the UK we are going through an unprecedented crisis in journalism, a crisis with the boundaries and techniques of investigative journalism at its heart.
We don’t yet know what will emerge from this crisis and from Lord Leveson’s Inquiry, but any recommendations about new laws or regulation will be studied with interest by Governments around the world.
from FaithWorld:
Irish Catholic Church may tap parishes to pay for sexual abuse claims
(Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin speaks at a news conference in Dublin, Ireland November 26, 2009/Cathal McNaughton)
The Catholic Church in Ireland's capital may have to tap parish funds to pay compensation to people sexually assaulted by priests as more victims come forward, the Archbishop of Dublin said on Thursday. The Archdiocese of Dublin has paid out 13.5 million euros ($18.2 mln) since the late 1990s in compensation and legal costs related to sexual abuse cases and it has asked parishes to contribute money to a fund partly used to meet those claims.
from Breakingviews:
Foster’s gets full measure from SABMiller
By Quentin Webb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Like two quarrelsome drunks who are suddenly best of friends, SABMiller and Foster’s Group have quickly patched things up after earlier hostilities. Foster’s has done well to secure a sweetened $10-billion-plus offer from its London-listed rival, with markets queasy and no rival bidders in sight. The deal is hardly cheap. But the sums just about work for SAB, and Foster’s was one of the few easily buyable brewers of size out there.
from Breakingviews:
Man U investors can always vote with their feet
By John Foley
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Shares without votes raise hackles. Consider the disquiet around Manchester United’s upcoming listing in Singapore, where new shareholders may be offered a package of vote-lite instruments that will entrench the Glazer family’s control. But while unorthodox, that’s not necessarily bad. Besides, investors are free to demand a discount, or boycott the IPO altogether.
from MediaFile:
Murdoch in good times and bad
By Sir Harold Evans
The views expressed are his own.
There is a clear connecting thread between the events I describe in "Good Times, Bad Times" and the dramas that led so many years later to Rupert Murdoch’s “most humble day of my life.” I was seated within a few feet of him in London on July 19, 2011, during his testimony to a select committee of MPs with his son James at his side. Not many more than a score of observers were allowed into the small room at Parliament’s Portcullis House, across the road from the House of Commons and Big Ben. A portcullis is a defensive latticed iron grating hung over the entrance to a fortified castle, the perfect metaphor for News International, which perpetually sees itself as beset by enemies.
Murdoch, as chairman and only begetter of the giant multi-media enterprise News International (NI), was called on to defend his castle and himself as best he could for the outrages of hacking and police bribery inflicted on the British public by his News of the World and the cover-up that he and his company conducted over nearly five years. The paper Murdoch most affects to despise, the Guardian, was the instrument of his undoing.
from Felix Salmon:
When investment banks hire risk-takers
Matt Taibbi is quite right about the $2 billion of rogue-trading losses at UBS. Basically, investment banks hire for risk-takers; they shouldn't be surprised when this kind of thing happens.
The brains of investment bankers by nature are not wired for "client-based" thinking. This is the reason why the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks and commercial banks separate, was originally passed back in 1933: it just defies common sense to have professional gamblers in charge of stewarding commercial bank accounts.
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The Wall
