Along with the prestigious and lucrative Dodgers franchise, Murdoch is also promised prime real estate at bargain prices. But it also used the broadcast rights of Sunday afternoon football games, acquired for a vast sum, to draw viewers, just as BSkyB used exclusive sports rights to build its pay-TV business in Britain Fox also broadcasts major league baseball games. The Atlanta Braves baseball team is the pride and joy of CNN boss Ted Turner, who last year compared Murdoch to Hitler in a very public personal rivalry. It is now part of Time-Warner, into which Mr Turner folded his television interests in a merger. The news broke just as Murdoch’s Fox broadcasting network celebrated its first ten years, in which the upstart fourth US network has shoved its way into the ranks of old-time heavyweights NBC, ABC and CBS.Fox fared well with such series as The X-Files and Beverly Hills 90210. Walt Disney Co, one of News International’s major commercial competitors, owns the Anaheim Angels.The Chicago Tribune newspaper group has the Chicago Cubs.

But in the last ten years, international media conglomerates have been snapping up the few remaining family-run baseball teams. It would fit into an elaborate strategy, masterminded by Azerbaijan’s 73-year-old president, Haidar Aliyev, of balancing conflicting international interests – notably the US, Turkey, Iran and Russia – by cutting them into the looming oil bonanza.A swap would increases Iran’s share of the spoils from the Caspian, whose total reserves are reckoned to be 50-70 billion barrels – at least twice those of the North Sea. It would be by far the highest price ever paid for a baseball team. Beyond confirming that negotiations are under way, News International spokesmen have declined to comment.Peter O’Malley’s father moved the Dodgers to their current home from Brooklyn, New York, almost 40 years ago He ran it in a family style, keeping seat prices low. The deal is likely to be finalised next month, when it will be presented at a meeting of baseball owners, who under league rules must vote to approve it by a 75 per cent majority. He told the Los Angeles Times that Murdoch had been “a very loyal resident of Los Angeles for a number of years now”, and was “a very quality human being.”The sale underlines the role that sports programming has played in the build-up of Mr Murdoch’s global media empire. In the US, as in Britain, the Australian-born Mr Murdoch has bought up the most prestigious sporting events and used them to trumpet his television stations.

Mayor Richard Riordan waxed enthusiastic about the deal, helped perhaps by the $1m that Murdoch has donated to the coffers of the California Republican Party. Los Angeles – Rupert Murdoch is poised to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, in a move that adds a signature name in US sports to his global portfolio and promises to tweak the nose of his public enemy number one, US television mogul Ted Turner. The Dodgers’ owner, Peter O’Malley, confirmed yesterday that he was in the fifth of an expected six months of negotiations to sell the team to Murdoch’s News Corporation for a reported $350-$400m (pounds 213-pounds 243m).
The O’Malley family has owned the team since the 1950s, and commentators called the sale the end of an era in baseball. Basque politicians, always ready to accuse Madrid of turning a deaf ear to the region’s demands, are bound to be furious.
Guernica commemorates the Nazis’ bombing in 1937 of the Basques’ spiritual home, when hundreds of civilians died in Europe’s first blitz. Picasso, an opponent of Franco’s forces in the Civil War, said the painting should not be shown in Spain until democracy was restored. It wandered through Europe and the US for decades before being brought to Spain in 1981.. Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum yesterday refused permission for the jewel of its collection, Guernica, Picasso’s masterpiece on the horrors of war, to travel to the Basque city of Bilbao, saying it was “too fragile to move either by air or by road”.

Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, which opens on 3 October, had hoped to put the work at the heart of its inaugural exhibition. The request to borrow the painting was political, backed by the Basque regional government, eager to have the work exhibited on Basque soil for the first time. But Mr Cook’s comments were taken by the Dutch, Germans and others as a welcome first British step towards a clearer definition of a European defence identity.It might provide the basis for a compromise on security and defence issues in Amsterdam which would allow progress on other treaty changes.Britain set torejoin Unescoplaceagain in UnescoRobin Cook announced in Paris yesterday that Britain would rejoin the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organisation “in the near future”.The Thatcher government pulled Britain out of Unesco in 1985, lending weight to US complaints that it had become financially out of control and was devoted to a leftish and Third World agenda.. The implications are difficult to define, since all 10 WEU states are also EU members.It would allow EU countries, as part of their common foreign-policy discussions, to consider and decide on humanitarian and peace-keeping tasks which would be carried out be the same countries in their guise as WEU members.Constitutionally, it amounts to only a small shift.Decisions would still have to be taken by consensus, not by majority vote. He could accept the writing into the new EU treaty, due to emerge from the Amsterdam summit, of the humanitarian, rescue, peace-making and peace-keeping tasks allotted to the WEU at Petersberg, near Bonn, in 1992.This is further than the previous government was prepared to go but is a logical extension of policy pursued by Britain and other governments of making the WEU a kind of informal EU-Nato hybrid.