An Australian restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social network website Facebook to track them down – and they got their just desserts.

Peter Leary from seafood restaurant Seagrass on Melbourne’s Southbank was fuming when the diners ate their way through the menu, pairing oysters, trout and red emperor with some expensive wines, slipped out for a cigarette – and never returned.

But Leary, left with an unpaid bill of $A520, remembered one of the diners asking about a former waitress, whom he then contacted and she suggested they check through some contacts on Facebook.

“We searched a few names and there in front of us his face came up,” Leary told Reuters, referring to one of the diners.

“He was pictured with his girlfriend who was the only girl in the group. We also knew where he worked, at a nearby restaurant, which was handy. It’d been clear they were in the trade.”

Leary contacted the manager of the other restaurant, where both the man and his girlfriend worked, and explained the situation.

Within hours the diner returned to apologise and paid the bill – and left a generous tip for the staff.

Leary said the fellow restaurateur called him later to inform him that both the man and his girlfriend had been sacked.

“On this occasion I guess you could say that being on Facebook backfired for them,” said Leary, who has no intention of taking the matter any further or contacting the police.

Facebook, which began in 2004 as a socialising site for students at Harvard University, has seen its growth zoom to 90 million members from 24 million a little over a year ago, overtaking rival MySpace to become the world’s largest online social network.

Reuters

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A group of pranksters handed out more than 1.2 million fake New York Times newspapers mainly in New York City and Los Angeles on Wednesday with a front page story declaring “Iraq War Ends”.

The elaborate 14-page edition, dated July 4, 2009, is said to be the work of a group called the Yes Men, whose previous hoaxes include masquerading as World Trade Organisation officials announcing they were disbanding the body.

“It is fake and we are looking into it,” said New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis.

A statement sent from a website set up for the fake edition, www.nytimes-se.com, said creating the newspaper took six months and that it was printed at six different presses and then given to thousands of volunteers to distribute.

“We’ve got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do,” Bertha Suttner, identified as one of the newspaper’s writers, said in the statement. “After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven.”

President-elect Barack Obama takes office on January 20 after eight years of the Bush administration and 28 years after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

The newspaper includes a front page story saying that “Ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reassured soldiers that the Bush administration had known well before the invasion that Saddam Hussein lacked weapons of mass destruction”.

The Bush administration has said it believed at the time of the March 2003 invasion that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to develop a nuclear bomb.

There is also a full-page fake advertisement on page three from the world’s largest publicly traded oil company Exxon Mobil saying the company applauded the end of the Iraq war and that peace is “an idea the world can profit from.”

In a pamphlet handed out to volunteers when they picked up copies of the newspaper to distribute there was a “Frequently Asked Questions” section. In response to “who made this?” it said: “Who knows? Rumours are it’s a group of writers from several mainstream dailies — including The New York Times.”

The Yes Men, who were the subject of a book and documentary in 2004, have pulled off pranks including posing as Exxon Mobil and National Petroleum Council representatives to deliver a speech at a Canadian oil conference.

They have also posed as federal housing officials at a New Orleans event with the city’s mayor and the governor of Louisiana and promised to throw open closed public housing to thousands of poor former city residents.

But they are not the first to fake The New York Times.

According to the paper’s “City Room” blog, the best-known spoof was during the 1978 newspaper strike and the prank included journalist Carl Bernstein, author Christopher Cerf, humorist Tony Hendra and Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

Reuters

Technorati Tags: end of Iraq war, New York Times, prank

Actor David Duchovny, who recently sought treatment for sex addiction, has separated from Tea Leoni, his wife of 11 years and mother of their two children, People magazine reported on Wednesday.

The former X-Files star and Leoni, an actress, separated some time ago.

“In light of continuous speculation over the lives and marriage of Tea Leoni and David Duchovny, the couple has confirmed that they have in fact been separated for several months,” said a statement released by their publicists.

“The couple had hoped to keep this separation private for the sake of their children.”

Duchovny, who plays a womanizing novelist on the US television series Californication, has left a rehabilitation centre for sex addiction after successfully completing a program, his attorney said last week.

Duchovny and Leoni, currently starring in the comedy Ghost Town, married in May 1997 and have a 9-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son.

It was a second marriage for Leoni and a first for Duchovny.

In January, Duchovny won a Golden Globe Award as best actor in a comedy for his role as Hank Moody, an oversexed single dad and novelist struggling with writer’s block in Californication.

He is expected to start work soon on a new movie called The Joneses.

Reuters

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BEIJING (Reuters) – Beach volleyball’s popularity has created something of a love-hate relationship with television. The highly-photogenic sport has been a winner for broadcasters at the Olympics, where according to the International Olympic Committee it accumulated 3.5 billion television viewer hours during the Athens Games.

In turn that has raised the profile of beach volleyball, inspired more countries to build up teams, and lured in sponsors.

The downside is that broadcasters start to demand games be played to fit their schedules and in a style that makes better television.

In Beijing, the semi-finals and finals will be played in the morning to catch the all-important evening prime time viewing in the United States and Brazil, where beach volleyball has a wide following.

“It’s a very dynamic sport and the international rules have been changed for television,” said Australia’s Natalie Cook, who has competed in every Olympics since beach volleyball joined the Games in 1996 and won the gold medal in Sydney.

Quicker turnarounds make for faster-paced television but are not easy on the players, particularly in Beijing.

“The more time you have between points, the more you can recover from the last point and get some water. It’ll be tough on the players in such hot and humid conditions,” said Brazil’s Renata Ribeiro.

For all the time pressure television piles on, players also hope that their moment in the media sun will help bring in more cash for courts, training and prizes as well as educate people about the sport.

“There’s still an element of people thinking it’s all about bikinis,” said Cook. “But once they actually watch a match, they realize how dynamic and athletic it is so they stay and stop talking about sex.”

So in honor of this amazingly fun to watch (and play) sport we have decided to put together a little slide show of sorts to highlight some of beach volleyballs biggest stars:

[slideshow=1]

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