An exasperated tweet by an air traveler grounded by January’s snow cost him £1,000 (US$1,480) on Monday when a court failed to see the joke in his spoof threat to “blow an airport sky high.”
Trainee accountant Paul Chambers is the first Briton to be convicted of a criminal offence on the microblogging site Twitter.
News of his conviction at Doncaster magistrates court was, appropriately, broken by disappointed and angry tweets from friends and supporters.
He was told by a district judge that his message was “of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live.”
Chambers, 26, tapped out on his mobile: “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!” The tweet was sent on Jan. 6 to his 600 followers.
The court was told that Chambers had simply suffered “a moment of frustration” because his plans to fly to Ireland for a blind date with one of his Twitter contacts looked ruined.
He was arrested by anti-terror police at his office a week later, after a manager at the airport, near Doncaster, found the message while doing an unrelated computer search.
The airport categorized the message as “not credible” in threat terms, but was obliged to tell South Yorkshire police, who took action.
Officers later deleted the tweet and impounded his iPhone and two computers.
He was fined £385 by district judge Jonathan Bennett and ordered to pay £600 costs and a £15 victims’ surcharge.
Chambers lost his job as a financial supervisor at a car distribution firm in Doncaster after his arrest.
Also See: Twitter followers get zapped by bug
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS