American babysitter hit for six by Ashes mania on Twitter
By Sam Jones
Rarely can a micro-blogging site have relayed anything as plaintive as the seven-word, three-exclamation-mark message that an exasperated American babysitter shared with the world yesterday.
Stumped and hit for six after technology and her nickname conspired to bowl her a celebrity googly, Ashley Kerekes decided to set the record straight. "I AM NOT A FREAKING CRICKET MATCH!!!" she howled into the Twittersphere.
The 22-year-old's existential crisis began last week when the Ashes started and Twitter users noticed her name: theashes. The ensuing bombardment was enthusiastic and relentless. In the space of a few days, as her cri de coeur echoed around cyberspace, the ranks of her followers swelled from 300 to 8,200. By today, Kerekes was a bona fide Twitter celebrity, with the offer of a free trip to Australia to watch her very own (freaking) test match. |
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Ecuador offers Assange residency, no questions asked
By (AFP)
Ecuador offered Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has enraged Washington by releasing masses of classified US documents, residency with no questions asked.
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The White House branded those who released the documents "criminals, first and foremost," but so far US authorities have publicly filed no charges against Assange.
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Ecuador's leftist government is one of several in the region that have often been at odds with Washington. |
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Pardon blocked in Pakistan blasphemy case
By (UPI)
A Pakistani judge Monday barred the president from pardoning a Christian woman sentenced to death for supposedly blaspheming Islam.
Khawaja Sharif, chief justice of the Lahore High Court, issued the interim order after a petitioner said Asia Bibi cannot be pardoned by President Asif Ali Zardari while her case is under appeal, the Pakistan Christian Post reported.
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Prosecutors say Bibi, an agricultural worker, got into an argument with Muslim co-workers when they refused to drink out of the same water bucket she had touched, CNN has reported.
A mob dragged Bibi to a police station, where she was charged with blasphemy and jailed. |
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Oh you naughty tweeters – you've upset the establishment
By John Naughton
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First, the bishop. Pete Broadbent is (or was?) the suffragan bishop of Willesden. A portrait of him on Facebook suggests that he is a cheery, slightly untidy chap. He is also a political leftie and a republican. Irritated by the sycophantic nonsense in the tabloids that accompanied the announcement of the Windsor-Middleton merger, he logged on to Facebook and gave vent to his feelings. "The Windsors and their predecessors," he wrote, "don't have a good track record on the permanence of marriage. But their marriage is their business. I don't know them and have no part in celebrating it. I just wish we weren't paying for it.
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Stirring stuff, eh? And, given what we subsequently discovered about Big Ears's extramarital activities, quite restrained. But Broadbent's boss, the bishop of London, was not amused and suspended him from his ministry. Which was a stupid and counter-productive thing to do, given that if the Church of England is to have a future, it takes the form of people in their 20s and 30s who use Facebook. And most of them will be a lot less upset about Bishop Broadbent's rant than the wrinklies currently running the C of E franchise.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Paul Chambers was arriving at Robin Hood airport, near Doncaster, expecting to catch a flight to see his girlfriend in Northern Ireland. Finding the place closed because of bad weather, he tweeted thus: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" What he didn't realise at the time was that Inspector Knacker of the war on terrorism department would not only see his tweet, but treat it as an indictable offence. Chambers was arrested, charged under our sweeping anti-terrorism laws, convicted and fined. When his employers discovered about these proceedings, he was also fired from his job.
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At which point you begin to wonder what's going on. One well-known blogger, Martin Weller, has a persuasive answer. What we have now, he argues, is "a conspiracy of sentiment". "All those involved at various stages: politicians, the police, CPS, judges, media are all acting from the same unspoken emotional base. This can be summarised as: they hate you. They hate that you undermine their carefully crafted messages and turn them into jokes. They hate that you are forming new methods of entertainment that they don't understand. They hate that you can organise yourselves without them knowing about it. They hate that power has been democratised. They hate that you get at content for free. They hate it, hate it, hate it. So when the opportunity arises to stamp on one of you snivelling social media types, they grasp it with both hands." |
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Red light fight: sex work in Taiwan
By Jonathan Adams
Massive debts pushed her into prostitution. Now, after several false starts, she's pocketing $3,000 in a good month, turning tricks as a self-employed Taipei street-walker.
The money's good, she says, but there's just one problem: the cops. Prostitution is illegal in Taiwan, and the cops have several times hauled her in for three days in jail, or a fine up to $1,000.
If sex work is legalized in a year's time as now planned, though, she says her working conditions will improve.
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Nadia is one of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 sex workers in Taiwan, including hostesses that offer services short of intercourse in clubs and karaoke halls. They're at the center of a debate over whether prostitution should be legalized as planned next year, and if so in what form. |
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Four horsemen of the information apocalypse: Cohen, Fanning, Johansen and Frankel
By Cory Doctorow
Time magazine's Lev Grossman's got a great profile of four authors of notorious software tools that formed the nexus of the last 12 years of copyright cold-wars: Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen, Justin Frankel (Gnutella) and Shawn Fanning ("Napster").
So what ever happened to the pirate apocalypse of yesteryear? In the U.S., piracy hasn't turned out to be quite as bad for content producers as everybody thought. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last April labored mightily to establish a strong link between piracy and lost sales, but the results were inconclusive.
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Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens debate religion
By (BBC)
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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended the role of religion in global affairs, in a Canadian TV debate with atheist columnist Christopher Hitchens
Mr Blair, a Catholic convert, said faith was a force for good and it was "futile" to attempt to drive it out.
But Mr Hitchens, who is terminally ill with cancer, argued religion forced people into doing terrible things.
In a vote after the debate, the audience voted two-to-one in Mr Hitchens' favour. |
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The new age of student protest
By Patrick Kingsley
Longhaired and big-booted, revolutionary socialist Luke stands up in front of a meeting at the Leeds university occupation, and prepares to speak.
"Comrades . . ." Luke begins – and, from the back of this lecture theatre filled with 200 undergraduates, school students, trade unionists and parents, comes an instant, shouted response.
"DON'T CALL ME COMRADE."
It's a familiar exchange. All afternoon at this meeting of the Leeds general assembly against education cuts, activists of all ages, backgrounds and political stripes have been needling each other. They've gathered here with one goal – to decide how they will escalate their protest against the rise in tuition fees and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (a campaign that continues with tomorrow's national day of action) – but sometimes they're sidetracked by ideological difference.
"We can't afford to alienate people with different theoretical backgrounds," says one speaker. . . |
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