Week 7 news writing

Natalia Schack

Comm 200

Prof. Peter Lindmark

Week 7 News writting 

1) One sexy skirt women fights to be at one mans beck and call

Tokyo, Japan (CNN) -- Nene Anegasaki is a witty, doe-eyed beauty. She looks perfectly perky in sexy skirts, doesn't pick fights and is always at one Tokyo man's beck and call -- that is why the 27-year-old decided to marry her.

The only complication: She is a videogame character in the Nintendo DS game called "Love Plus."

Still, that didn't stop Sal 9000 -- the only name the groom would give -- from marrying Nene in a ceremony witnessed live by thousands on the Web.

When asked if Nene is his dream woman, Sal replied, "Yes, she is. Her character changes to my liking as we talk and travel to different places."

Japan's Internet community has witnessed relationships and marriages to avatars, though it's typically been within the confines of the virtual world. Last month, Sal decided to be the first human-to-avatar union. Clad in a white tux, Sal married Nene in front of some friends and Web users watching the ceremony live online.

The wedding, while not legally binding, was Sal's way of expressing his devotion to his avatar girlfriend.

"I love this character, not a machine," said Sal, when asked about whether he can love an electronic device. "I understand 100 percent that this is a game. I understand very well that I cannot marry her physically or legally."

The courtship began in September when he started playing the game, in which players nurture a deeper relationship through game play. Sal started carrying Nene around the streets of Tokyo and taking her to Disneyland and to a beach resort in Guam.

Sal says Nene is better than a human girlfriend. "She doesn't get angry if I'm late in replying to her. Well, she gets angry, but she forgives me quickly."

Asked if he's courtesy addicted to the game, he says, "If addiction is playing this every single day, then you might call me addicted." With Nene, Sal doesn't feel the need to find a human girlfriend, he added.

Hiroshi Ashizaki, an author who writes about Internet and game addiction, doesn't think Sal 9000 is an extreme case. What is healthy about Sal is that he can communicate with people enough to do an interview on CNN and webcast a half-serious wedding, Ashizaki said.

"There are many others who can't express themselves like Sal can, and those are the cases we worry about," says Ashizaki. What's important to note, Ashizaki says, is that Sal is a representative of many of Japan's young gamers.

"Today's Japanese youth can't express their true feelings in reality. They can only do it in the virtual world," Ashizaki said. "It's the reverse of reality that they can only talk about what they feel to a friend in the virtual world."

2) Vigilantes turn Goat in as a suspect in a robbery

LAGOS (Reuters) - Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery. Vigilantes took the black and white beast to the police saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323. “The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them. However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat,” Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed told Reuters by telephone.

“We cannot confirm the story, but the goat is in our custody. We cannot base our information on something mystical. It is something that has to be proved scientifically, that a human being turned into a goat,” he said.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in parts of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Residents came to the police station to see the goat, photographed in one national newspaper on its knees next to a pile of straw.

3) A child from 1942 wrote dirty jokes while they hid from Nazis

The young Jewish teen's diary, written in hiding from the Nazis, became world-famous when published after her death and at the end of the war.

The hidden pages had been covered with gummed brown paper - apparently to hide her risqué writing from her family.

New imaging techniques have finally allowed researchers to read them.

The entries were written on 28 September 1942, not long after the 13-year-old Anne went into hiding.

"I'll use this spoiled page to write down 'dirty' jokes", she wrote on a page with a handful of crossed-out phrases - and jotted down four dirty jokes she knew.

She added a few dozen lines about sex education, imagining she has to give "the talk" to someone else, and mentioning prostitutes - who she wrote elsewhere that her father had told her about.

"Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way," said Ronald Leopold of the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. "Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject."

The sentiment was echoed by Frank van Vree, director of the Niod institute, which helped decipher the pages from new photographs taken in 2016.

"Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile," he said.

"The 'dirty' jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl."

One of the jokes reads: "Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in the Netherlands? As mattresses for the soldiers."

The Anne Frank Museum said this was not the only time the teenage girl wrote about sex - mentioning other jokes she had heard the people in her hidden home tell, or the passages about her periods and sexuality.

Writing about the decision to publish pages that Anne clearly wanted to keep hidden, the museum said that her diary - a Unesco-registered world heritage document - held significant academic interest.

But it also said that the pages "do not alter our image of Anne".

"Over the decades Anne has grown to become the worldwide symbol of the Holocaust, and Anne the girl has increasingly faded into the background," it said in a statement.

"These - literally - uncovered texts bring the inquisitive and in many respects precocious teenager back into the foreground."

Anne Frank went into hiding in a secret annexe of her father's business on 5 July 1942 - about a month after she received a diary for her 13th birthday.

She lived there with her family and their friends, the Van Pels, until their discovery two years later. How they were found after so long in successful hiding remains a mystery.

Anne Frank died of disease in a Nazi death camp in 1945, the year the war ended. Her father, the only family member to survive, published her diary in 1947.

4) Girl with balloon was sold for $1.4 million and it hid art

Artist Banksy pulled a million-dollar prank after his famous “Girl with Balloon” sold at Sotheby’s auction house in London on Friday.

Right after the piece was sold for an impressive $1.4 million, a hidden shredder built into the frame activated and began shredding the work of art, stunning auctioneers.

Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s Senior Director and Head of Contemporary Art, Europe London, said, “It appears we just got Banksy-ed.”

According to the Associated Press, there is still some question of what this means for the purchase of the artwork.

“We have not experienced this situation in the past . where a painting spontaneously shredded, upon achieving a record for the artist,” Branczik told the AP. “We are busily figuring out what this means in an auction context.”

According to Sotheby’s, the surprise incident marks the first time in auction history that a work of art automatically destroyed itself after coming under the hammer.

Banksy himself, a Bristol-born artist who remains officially unidentified, chimed in on Instagram with the cheeky caption “Going, going, gone…”

The framed art piece, depicting a girl reaching out for a bright red balloon, is one of Banksy’s most recognizable art pieces. On Saturday, Banksy posted a video on his Instagram account, partially showing how the prank was pulled.

5) Falcon heavy rocket has cruise control and is flying away from Earth

The Roadster, which launched on the maiden flight of SpaceX's huge Falcon Heavy rocket on Feb. 6, surely has a window full of speeding tickets by now. And it's apparently tumbling, but in cruise control, outward bound from Earth.

Thanks to a website set up by Ben Pearson, founder of Old Ham Media, you can keep up with the speeding Tesla in space. 

"I came to realize that people really were interested in the tracking of these objects," Pearson wrote on the site, whereisroadster.com. "I started thinking about how I could manage to get this information, and then I came to realize that I could provide the tracking for it myself!"

Tracking a space car

Pearson registered the domain whereisroadster.com and began assembling the best tracking data available. The information he's currently using comes from the Horizons website run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which allows him to track the Tesla Roadster "to the best of human understanding, for some time to come."

This information will eventually expire, however, Pearson pointed out. 

"I'm not sure exactly when that will be, but I suspect in a few years," he wrote. "Certainly, it will be difficult to see when it next comes close to the Earth, which won't be for a long time."

And, by the way, Pearson said he doesn't own a Tesla — "but I am in the reservation queue for a Tesla Model 3."

Where is the Roadster now?

The Tesla travelogue has the car's location, as of Wednesday afternoon (Feb. 21), at about 2.8 million miles (4.5 million kilometers, or 0.030 astronomical units) from Earth, moving away from Earth at 7,532 mph (12,122 km/h). (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)

At present, the Roadster is about 134.3 million miles (216.1 million km, or 1.445 AU) from Mars, moving toward the planet at 43,053 mph (69,287 km/h).