Word: britain
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...right now sterling's losing its shine. In the past year, the U.K. currency has lost about a fifth of its value against the euro, the currency used in much of the rest of Europe, and 30% against the dollar. Causes aren't hard to come by. Worries over Britain's fast-shrinking economy, plunging interest rates, a wobbly banking sector and creaking government finances have driven traders to dump the pound. "I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have," Jim Rogers, once a business partner of George Soros and now chairman of a Singapore investment company...
...there's one thing guaranteed to make news organizations queasy, it's becoming news rather than reporting it. No wonder the BBC, Britain's venerable public-service broadcaster, is looking green around the gills. In the past couple of years, "Auntie Beeb" has rarely been out of the spotlight, amid speculation on the future of the broadcaster's public funding, scandals over mismanaged phone-in competitions and red faces after footage of the Queen was wrongly edited to suggest she had stormed out of a photo shoot. Yet all of these controversies pale in comparison to the storms of anger...
Douglas Alexander, Britain's International Development Secretary, is dismayed. "While this decision is ultimately - and rightly - one for the broadcasters, it is the essence of humanitarian-aid agencies that they never take sides in a conflict. That is the long-standing position of the DEC and organizations such as the British Red Cross," he says. "The British public can distinguish between support for humanitarian aid and perceived partiality in a conflict. All I have asked the BBC and Sky to do is to publicize the means by which people can make donations to those organizations which are in a position...
What can you get for a single unit of Britain's poor, battered currency? Not much - apart from power, influence and an entrée into the highest echelons of the British establishment. These are the potential byproducts of an agreement reached on Jan. 21 by Russian oligarch and politician Alexander Lebedev to buy London's largest newspaper, the Evening Standard, from its current owners Associated Newspapers for the nominal fee of one pound sterling...
...arguably the least startling aspect of a transaction that if confirmed next month following a staff consultation process - and barring any intervention by the British government - will open a new and bizarre chapter in Anglo-Russian relations. Lebedev, after all, is a former KGB operative, who spied on Britain under diplomatic cover during the Cold War, by his own account scouring news sources such as the Standard for tidbits to feed to his handlers back home. His exotic pedigree has caused a few splutters. Richard Ottway, a Conservative MP, said he felt that "the fact that [Lebedev] has been...