I’ve previously written about the case of Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, St. Charles County in Missouri, U.S.A., who committed suicide after being spurned by a boy she was communicating with in the MySpace social networking site. She was chatting with a 16-year old boy named “Josh Evans” on a regular basis, and had come to believe that a certain romantic relationship had been established between them. But one day, without warning, Josh turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded online insults. Other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan. The online bullying finally drove Megan to hang herself with a belt in her bedroom closet. She was thirteen.

But Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, the 47-year old mother of Megan’s former best friend, who lived just four houses down the street from the Meiers. Mrs. Drew created the character “Josh Evans”, according to a neighbor, because she “going to mess with Megan” for apparently breaking up the once-close friendship with her daughter. Lori Drew did more than that. She drove Megan Meier to kill herself.

Despite the cruel and vicious nature of Mrs. Drew’s acts, Missouri officials could not charge her with a crime. There was nothing in the state’s laws that would cover the perpetrator’s conduct of creating an online “avatar” with the intent to deceive and harm another person.

Mrs. Drew herself expressed little remorse, callously blaming Megan for being suicide-prone. Read the rest of this entry »

Iloilo Vice-Governor Rolex Suplico says he has a new witness willing to testify on the ZTE national broadband network corruption scandal. The witness is an acquaintance of Suplico, whom he claims only recently sought his advice on coming clean about what he knows of presidential involvement in the crooked ZTE deal. And what he knows is this: President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo made an undisclosed trip to the headquarters of ZTE Corporation in Shenzhen, China, for a meeting with its officials on Nov. 2, 2006, five months before she witnessed the signing of the national broadband network (NBN) contract, which she knew by then to be flawed and possibly illegal. Read the rest of this entry »

Hillary, as expected, won by a big, double-digit margin in West Virginia, 67% to 27%, but it might not make much of a difference. Obama just keeps rolling along, picking up one superdelegate after another, including many former Clinton backers.

The overwhelmingly white, working-class state (only 15% of the population have college degrees) came out for Clinton, who needs a big boost to stay in the race. Race emerged as an unusually salient factor.The number of white Democratic voters who said race had influenced their choices on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes. More than 8 in 10 who said it factored in their votes backed Mrs. Clinton, according to exit polls.

With Barack solidly ahead of Clinton in the delegate fight, the West Virginia results are unlikely to hurt his chances of winning the nomination. Read the rest of this entry »

But probably not.

It’s eerie just the same. Manolo Quezon wrote about the Mandate of Heaven in his column yesterday and, as if to illustrate the point, a 7.9-magnitude magnitude earthquake, as measured by the U.S. Geological Survey , hits Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, the most populous part of China, bordering the Tibetan region. Striking in mid-afternoon, it was felt across the country in Beijing, and as far away as Vietnam and Cambodia. At least 10,000 people have been killed, up to 5,000 of them in one county alone, Beichuan , about 50 km. from the epicenter. Many more have been killed and injured in other parts of the country.

At least two large schools, each with nearly 1,000 students, were reduced to rubble, trapping the children inside.

Rescue and relief efforts are ongoing, and the actual magnitude of the destruction has yet to be known.

As explained by MLQ III:

The ancient Chinese believed that the “mandate of Heaven” was revealed by tangible signs, such as flood or famine. Such misfortunes were indications that the legitimacy of a ruler was waning.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’d think that living under a brutal dictatorship would be bad enough and that God would cut you some slack in other areas. No such luck. The universe doesn’t operate that way, as Myanmar found out nearly a week ago when Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma (the country’s name before the ruling military junta changed it).

The cyclone ripped across Burma’s agricultural heartland with violent winds that reached speeds of 193km/h, destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the vital rice-growing area of the Irrawaddy delta. Entire villages were swept away. Whole families have been wiped out.

Foreign aid agencies have reported scenes of devastation, with corpses still littering the rice fields and desperate survivors without food or clean drinking water. They are either without shelter or crammed into whatever structures remain standing.

Anders Ladekarl, head of the Danish Red Cross, said of the dead:

Many are not buried and lie in the water. They have started rotting and the stench is beyond words.

Early reports from aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, although the actual death toll could eventually exceed 100,000, and two to three million are homeless.

The official death count stood at just under half that two days ago, at around 22,500 people dead (and counting). Read the rest of this entry »