UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from Newsmaker:
Tick, tick, tickets – defusing an Olympic PR bomb
-Adrian Warner is BBC London's Olympics Correspondent. The opinions expressed are his own.-
The morning after his surprise 800 metres defeat by Steve Ovett at the 1980 Moscow Olympics,  Seb Coe was sitting in his bed in the Olympic village when former decathlete and close friend Daley Thompson stormed into the room. Thompson went straight to the curtains and opened them up.
"What's the weather like?" Coe asked.
"Oh, it all looks a bit silver to me," Thompson replied.
Coe smiled but the comment hurt a bit. He had been favourite to beat his British rival in the 800 and was waking up to the disappointment of having missed out on an Olympic title. But Thompson's comment helped him to bounce back and produce one of the most memorable comebacks in Olympic history when he won the 1,500 a few days later.
Today Coe is facing the most challenging days he has faced as chairman of London 2012's organising committee. He is going to need some of that determination again with just over a year to go to the opening ceremony.
from Felix Salmon:
A few Murdoch questions
After taking phone calls about Rupert Murdoch on Brian Lehrer's show this morning and then immediately doing an hour-long diavlog with Alex Massie on the subject, I'm beginning to get a little Murdoch-ed out. But there are three newish points that are worth raising.
Firstly, what was the mechanism by which it was agreed that Rupert and James Murdoch would appear in parliament together? Having James by his side was a godsend for Rupert, and James clearly took his role as a shield for his father very seriously. I'm sure the more aggressive MPs would have preferred to be able to grill Rupert on his own, as they did Rebekah Brooks. How did that not happen?
from Felix Salmon:
The Murdochs pass their parliamentary trial
The biggest surprise for me, at the Murdoch hearings today, was the lack of political theater and crocodile tears of remorse. I was expecting a ceremonial piling-on -- a group of politicians all jumping at a very rare opportunity to tell Rupert exactly what they thought of him, with the billionaire mogul just sitting there and taking the insults, reiterating over and over again just how very sorry he was about everything that has happened.
But that's not how it turned out at all. The politicians didn't grandstand nearly as much as their US counterparts are wont to do, and instead asked substantive questions. The Murdochs, for their part, spent more time blustering and denying knowledge of key events at key times than they did apologizing.
Constitution in crisis as tyrannical journalists devour cowed politicians
A sordid tale of excess and brutality, of a world dominated by journalists with their ears to the keyhole, of tyrannical newspapers wielding remarkable power and of a political class not only cowed, but consumed, by that power.
Sound familiar? With two of Britain’s most senior policemen out of a job, the prime minister under pressure for his serenading of News Corp and one of the world’s most powerful press barons, in the form of Rupert Murdoch, summoned to testify to parliament, it would be one way of describing the current state of affairs. 
from Felix Salmon:
Could News Corp end up in play?
The increasingly-fragile nature of Rupert Murdoch's hold on News Corp has refocused attention on its dual-class share structure. As John Gapper noted last week, such structures aren't particularly good for minority shareholders like you or me. And if you plug today's share price into the Breakingviews Murdoch discount calculator, you'll see that the company is trading at roughly 30% below its fair value. Or, to put it another way, if Murdoch and his voting control were to disappear tomorrow, the shares could jump a good 45%.
Murdoch has a seemingly inviolable 39.7% position in the Class B voting shares of News Corp. No one else comes close: the only other shareholder with more than 2% of the Class B stock is Prince Alwaleed, with his 7% stake. The Class B shares are exactly the same as Class A shares, with the single difference that Class B shares have voting rights at the annual meeting and Class A shares don't. Both classes of share trade on the Nasdaq; here's a chart of how they've behaved over the past few years. The blue line is the B shares, the red line is the A shares, and the yellow line is the difference between the two. It's currently about 45 cents per share, down from a high of $2.60 per share in April last year.
from Left field:
ICC name best test team of all time. Right or wrong?
The ICC has unveiled the best test team of all time as voted for by fans on the governing body's website. The ICC offered a shortlist to choose from.
Here it is:
Virender Sehwag
Sunil Gavaskar
Donald Bradman
Sachin Tendulkar
Brian Lara
Kapil Dev
Adam Gilchrist (wk)
Shane Warne
Wasim Akram
Curtly Ambrose
Glenn McGrath
Is it a bit 1980s focused? No Englishmen either but maybe that is not a big shock. Sehwag probably the biggest surprise.
from Felix Salmon:
News Corp’s future
The abrupt departure from News Corp today of Rebekah Brooks (early) and Les Hinton (late) is yet more proof that News Corp is flailing around and incapable of getting out in front of the phone-hacking story. It's a bit like the way in which the cost of bailing out Lehman Brothers would rise by a few billion dollars an hour at the height of the financial crisis in 2008: every day of bluster and delay just makes this crisis worse for News Corp and for Rupert Murdoch.
If the News of the World had been shut and Brooks and Hinton both defenestrated back in 2009 when the hacking allegations first surfaced, that would have been more than enough to signal that News Corp was taking them seriously, was saying that such behavior was unacceptable, and was drawing a firm line under an unfortunate and illegal episode. Now, however, such actions only serve to make News Corp look even more guilty -- especially since the time gap between the resignations served to draw the story out over two news cycles and makes the whole thing look ad hoc and teetering on the back foot. There's now a clear sense that the virus is moving up and across the News Corp org chart, from the News of the World to News International to Dow Jones, with no sign that its virulence is diminishing.
from Breakingviews:
Tip for the Murdochs: don’t be yourselves
By Chris Hughes
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Don’t be yourselves. That’s probably the best tip for Rupert and James Murdoch as they prepare to face UK lawmakers over the phone hacking scandal engulfing the UK newspaper arm of News Corporation.
from FaithWorld:
Ireland attacks confessional secrecy after Catholic sex abuse scandal
(A Roman Catholic Croat confesses to a priest during a pilgrimage in Krasno, some 150km (93 miles) south of Zagreb August 15, 2009/Nikola Solic )
Ireland's prime minister has said Catholic clerics would be prosecuted if they failed to tell the authorities about crimes disclosed during confession, the latest blow to the prestige of the once-dominant Church. A report this week found that the Church concealed from the authorities the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009, and that clerics appeared to follow Church law rather than Irish guidelines to protect minors.
from Breakingviews:
The Murdoch discount
By Jeffrey Goldfarb and Richard Beales
The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.
Rupert Murdoch's political influence may be surpassed by his impact on the value of News Corp. The stock routinely trades more cheaply than media rivals largely because the company is
run at Murdoch's whim. A Breakingviews calculator shows how big the Murdoch discount has become as a result of the scandal at the News of the World tabloid.
The phone-hacking affair not only forced News Corp to shutter its most widely read newspaper but also has finally forced the company to withdraw a $14 billion plan to buy the rest of the British pay-TV operator BSkyB. The damage could extend to the company's American and Australian businesses. U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller, for instance, has called on Congress to open an investigation that would accompany those under way in Britain.
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The Wall
