The eyes of the world this week have been on Rupert Murdoch’s often incredible testimony at the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking in the UK.
The scandal has already toppled newspaper bosses, key political advisors and top policemen in the UK, prompting a re-think of the country’s media landscape with profound implications which are still reverberating.
Murdoch himself was not finished either. He told the inquiry this week that the News of the World (the paper, now closed, at the center of the hacking scandal) had “covered up” its actions and accused former British PM Gordon Brown of saying he would “wage war” on Murdoch. Meanwhile his son James got UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt into some serious hot water, specifically regarding his conduct during the BSkyB takeover bid.
Here’s a fun round-up of the web reaction via The Guardian and Storyful but you can find the meat of the story here. And if you’ve forgotten what the whole thing is all about anyway, Channel 4 News has this helpful infographic.
In more UK news, the country slipped back into recession this week - according to The Daily Mail, the first double-dip for 37 years.
Across the globe
There’s concern in Ukraine, just six weeks ahead of its joint hosting with Poland of the Euro 2012 football championships, after four blasts in the city of Dnipropetrovsk injured 27 people.
In the Hague this week, judges found former Liberian president Charles Taylor guilty of all the charges against him: 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law.
In China, one of the country’s most famous dissidents has escaped house arrest and released a video for Premier Wen Jiabao.
And finally – in news which is actually out of this world, rather than around the globe – a group of billionaires including Google’s Larry Page, as well as film director James Cameron, are looking into asteroid mining, hoping they can get a depot within a decade. Scientists are less convinced…read more from the BBC here.
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