Global Headlines Express | Özil Answers the Football Association in Three Posts and Quits the National Team; Vanity Fair on the Media Giants' Urgent Merger Rush

Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018, dedicated to helping you know more.

What the Agenda-Setters Are Saying

Vanity Fair: Behind the Media Giants' Summer of Merger Mania

Comcast has dropped out of the chase for Fox. A new era is arriving with it, one in which the aging old guard will face the newly risen giants.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spent 50 years working his way from the edge of the media universe to its center — first through telecom, then through a run of acquisitions. The most important was NBCUniversal, which handed Comcast a film studio, one of the big four broadcast networks, a credible television business and its news operation, plus the distribution channels to control all of it. That put Comcast on a level with Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox, Jeff Bewkes's Time Warner and Bob Iger's Disney.

But Roberts had reason to think his $150 billion company was in danger. Every giant that grew up in the 1990s felt small next to the new powers on the West Coast. Facebook and Amazon now stood alongside Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft; Netflix became the world's most valuable media company this spring. The establishment players were nervous about the new landscape. "Ten years ago, Viacom, Fox and Time Warner were considered giants of the entertainment industry, and giants of American culture too. Now they're just being consumed by other industries that are bigger and harder to crack — entertainment is seen as one basic cog."

While a judge was weighing AT&T's purchase of Time Warner, Roberts was getting ready to move. He planned to go after Fox — and beat Disney to it — the moment the Justice Department cleared the AT&T deal. If the bid failed, Roberts would not only watch a rival double in size overnight; the acquisition targets left to him would look like small potatoes. The morning after the Justice Department gave its green light, they caught a train to New York and bid for the Fox studio, National Geographic, FX and Fox's 30% stake in Hulu: $65 billion, in cash. (Disney beat them with $71.5 billion.)

This year the media industry has been one long, chaotic collision of famous people and companies. The old order is dying — the era when a consumer depended on a single cable provider. A new one is being born — everything handled on a phone, which forces the legacy players to join up if they want to survive the challengers. Alongside the Roberts–Iger showdown and the AT&T–Time Warner serial, Les Moonves (CBS's CEO) and Shari Redstone (daughter of media mogul Sumner Redstone) are fighting over control of Viacom and the fate of its CEO; a billionaire "rescued" the Los Angeles Times for $500 million; Meredith Corporation bought Time. On the other side, Netflix and Amazon are pouring billions into original content — and in a few short years their influence has outstripped 50 years of work by the Roberts family.

Traditional media businesses are all family operations, so they run on much the same logic. For Comcast, taking on debt to buy these assets isn't the trouble; the trouble is that it has no second plan. What is left on the table: Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, Viacom, CBS, Discovery and AMC — "nothing to get excited about."

Of course, if you want things to get truly crazy, consider a Disney–Comcast merger.

The new giants feel no threat at all. As one media veteran put it: "The joke is entirely on that bunch of old white men. They're quibbling over the fortunes they've built for these old white men while tech stands aside and laughs. It's as if they're fighting over leftovers. Those assets aren't exactly forgotten, but they're definitely not the future."

24-Hour Newsmakers

Cuba Amends Its Constitution, Drops "Building a Communist Society," Recognizes Same-Sex Marriage and Private Property

This is the first National Assembly session since power passed out of the Castro family's hands, and the first time the constitution has been touched since 1976.

This week Cuba's National Assembly of People's Power drafted a new document to replace the Soviet-era constitution. The drafting commission, led by former president Raúl Castro after his retirement, finalized the text, reflecting changes in politics, society and the economy so that socialism can be sustained. Once lawmakers pass the draft it goes to the public consultation bodies, and the final version still has to survive a national referendum.

The most striking change is the removal of the 1976 clause stating that the "ultimate goal is to build a communist society," with the emphasis shifted onto socialism. "This doesn't mean we are giving up our ideas," Assembly president Esteban Lazo told state media. "We believe in a socialist, sovereign, independent, prosperous and sustainable country."

The new draft also recognizes private property — the current constitution recognizes only state, cooperative, farmer, personal and joint-venture property — which amounts to granting legal standing to small companies. As the state-run economy stalled, small businesses entered a period of fast growth. The change is meant to supply them further and to draw in foreign investment.

Other changes: the draft defines marriage as a bond between two "individuals" rather than a man and a woman; the president will no longer head both the Council of State and the Council of Ministers — a prime minister's office will be created, a prime minister appointed, and the prime minister will run the government's daily work; the Communist Party chief remains Cuba's supreme leader and holds the presidency, but the term is now limited — presidents must be under 60 when elected and may not serve more than two consecutive five-year terms.

A public referendum will be held at the end of the year, voting only on the market-economy and privatization provisions.

Cuba has been mired in economic trouble lately. Besides Caribbean storm damage, the economic crisis in its ally Venezuela has hit the country hard. Cuba depends heavily on imports, so swings in international trade prices hurt as well. The authorities hope that promoting private ownership and the founding of small and medium-sized enterprises will ease the pressure. Officials insist, however, that while this revision confirms a market economy, it is in no way a road to capitalism.

What Else Happened in the World

The FBI released 412 pages of classified documents to The New York Times and other news outlets on Saturday, revealing that the FBI believed Carter Page, then a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, was in contact with Russia, and that this cooperation shaped the outcome of the election. Trump replied on Twitter that the documents had been redacted to an outrageous degree, and that the Justice Department and the FBI had misled the court.

Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Jerusalem, protesting a bill passed last Thursday that opens surrogacy to single women while shutting out single men and gay people. State-funded surrogacy is available to heterosexual couples but not to gay couples; lesbian women can use it, because they count as "single women."

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani warned Trump that if hostile policies were imposed on Iran, "the mother of all wars" was possible. "America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars."

Britain is enduring its worst heat wave in 42 years, with only 47mm of rain between June 1 and July 16. On satellite images the country has turned from green to yellow.

Danish archaeologists found 14,000-year-old bread in Jordan, pushing the history of agriculture back by 4,000 years.

Someone Said

"Whatever the result of that election, or the one before it, I would still have chosen to take that photo... When we win, I am German. When we lose, I am an immigrant. Even though I pay taxes, fund schools and won a World Cup, I am still not accepted by their society."

— Mesut Özil announces his retirement from the German national team.

After Germany went out at the bottom of its World Cup group, Özil — the Turkish-German international who created seven chances in the final match and earned the highest post-match rating — was criticized by the German Football Association and by German football greats. His May photograph with Turkish president Erdoğan was dug up again. Association president Reinhard Grindel demanded that Özil explain himself to fans: "He is a decorated international who made a mistake, but we should give him a chance," adding that Özil's future with the national team was for head coach Joachim Löw to decide.

Özil's silence about the photo annoyed some fans in Germany, while others thought the association was deflecting attention from the World Cup failure and hunting for a scapegoat. He stayed quiet until July 22, when he posted three statements in a row as his formal answer.

In the first, he said he has two hearts, one German and one Turkish: "My mother taught me to always be respectful of others and never forget where I came from. Those are values I still think about to this day." He met Erdoğan in 2010, when Angela Merkel and Erdoğan watched a Germany–Turkey match together in Berlin. The May photograph, taken at a charity event, carried no political intent: he is a footballer, not a politician, and meeting someone does not mean endorsing that person's policies. "The photo wasn't about politics or elections — it was about my respect for the highest office of the country." To him it does not matter who the president is; what matters is "the office of the presidency." "I believe the Queen of England and the British prime minister, Theresa May, were thinking the same thing when they received Erdoğan in London."

In the second, Özil attacked the double standard of the German media. He could accept criticism, he said, but not the media's repeated attacks on his ancestry — one photograph made him carry the blame for the national team's failure and tried to turn all of Germany against him, especially since former national team captain Lothar Matthäus met another head of state, Vladimir Putin, and was never asked to explain anything. "Does my Turkish heritage make me a more worthy target?" Over those two months he was also dropped by charity partners and by the schools he funded, "because they were afraid of the noise from the media," and dropped by national team sponsors, barred from any marketing work. The media paid no attention to his charity projects, only to that photograph.

The third came three hours later. Özil said he had earlier met German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who respected his explanation, and that Grindel hated being unable to insert himself. The president had meant for the two of them to issue a joint statement and put the matter to rest, but Grindel was unhappy that his own side could not speak first. "Grindel tried to make me responsible for the team's poor World Cup performance, even though he had told me in Berlin that the matter was over... I am not speaking out for Grindel's sake now, I am speaking out for my own. I don't want to keep being the scapegoat for a job he can't do." Whenever Germany loses, he pointed out, his Turkish immigrant background is raised; although he grew up in Germany, he has never been seen as truly German. And it is not only Grindel — public figures across Germany have attacked him over his Turkish blood.

"The treatment I have received from the football association, and much else besides, means I no longer want to wear the German national team shirt... I used to be proud of it, but I am not anymore."

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The wide-gapped Swiss Toblerone bar is getting its old shape back.

You may remember that on the day the U.S. election results came out, another group of people was going mad over Toblerone's wider gaps. Facing rising raw-material costs, Mondelez had chosen not to raise the price or change the triangular shape, and cut the weight instead: the 400g and 170g bars became 360g and 150g, leaving gaps between the peaks wide enough to take a slice of bread.

A Mondelez spokesperson told The Guardian last Friday that the 150g bar is being discontinued and replaced by a 200g bar, which returns to the normal shape it had before the shrinkage. The decision has nothing to do with the 150g bar's sales, since the company insists it sold well and Toblerone had a "wonderful" 2017 — but Mondelez decided that the smaller size "wasn't a perfect strategy for consumers" after all. The 200g bar is expected in stores this year at £3.09.

Guinness World Records has updated a series of records broken at this year's World Cup.

Cristiano Ronaldo, 33, scored a hat trick in the Iberian derby, making him the oldest player to score a World Cup hat trick; Iceland is the smallest country ever to reach a World Cup, with 330,000 people, who could fit into all of Russia's host stadiums with 250,000 seats to spare; 12 own goals were scored this tournament, a record, and Croatia's Mario Mandžukić became the first player in history to score an own goal in a final; Panama's Felipe Baloy, 37 years and 120 days old, scored against England and became the oldest goal-scorer in World Cup history; the oldest player was Egypt's 45-year-old goalkeeper Essam El-Hadary, who also saved a penalty.

On This Day

July 23, 1888: Hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler was born.

July 23, 1903: Ford Motor Company sold its first car.

July 23, 2001: Megawati Sukarnoputri became Indonesia's first female president.

July 23, 2005: A series of bomb attacks hit Sharm el-Sheikh on Egypt's Red Sea coast, killing and injuring hundreds.

Cover image from Wikicommons