CAN IT BE THAT RUPERT MURDOCH‘s support for the Republicans – once legendary in its rock-solidness – is starting to show cracks?

“SAY IT ISN’T SO,  Joe!” we all want to yell. But at Dan Rather (left).

That cry from a baseball fan to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, when the hero was exposed in the gigantic 1919 World Series fraud, seems about right just now for Rather, the tall-in-the-saddle truth-teller from Texas, and from CBS News as well of course.

NO-ONE EXPECTED it to end with killing. In 1972, I was a junior TV journalist assigned to watch events in Northern Ireland, which that weekend happened to include a protest march in Derry. At most, I figured there would be the customary low-level standoff between protesters and the army, some stone-throwing and tear gas. But once the shooting started, that day was destined to be known as Bloody Sunday.

LAST WEEK THREE anti-nuclear campaigners went to gaol in the small mid-California town of San Luis Obispo. They joined seven other colleagues already sentenced to periods of imprisonment ranging from 15 days to six months. All were gaoled for their self-confessed participation in a mass protest last month against the siting of a nuclear plant near an earthquake fault.  They are the first in a long line.

THE MASSIVE CABORA BASSA dam now being built in Portuguese Mozambique provokes some strong passions. For its many opponents across the world, it is a concrete symbol of white racialist determination to retain power in southern Africa.   South Africa has come north from her natural defence line to help build the dam, pay the lion’s share of its costs, and take most of the electricity it will produce, while Mozambique and Rhodesia will also gain much mutual benefit from the grandiose development scheme of which the dam is the vital core.