Twitter Saves Berkeley Student

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RACHEL MARTIN, host:

Hey there, welcome back to the Bryant Park Project from NPR News. We're online all the time at npr.org/bryantpark. Hope you had a good weekend. I imagine, Saturday and Sunday, you like to take a little break from the big headlines, relax, chill out. Then Monday comes along. You re-engage. You read the news. You read the big stuff. But we want to ease you into the workweek, so we give you The Ramble.

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MARTIN: What've you got, Mike?

MIKE PESCA, host:

It's an amazing justification for this little thing, well done. Shooting on the set of the next "James Bond" was suspended last week, after a string of near-death experiences on the set in northern Italy. Things started to go awry on the set when a driver inexplicably lost control of the Aston-Martin he was delivering to the set and he ended up in Lake Garda.

MARTIN: What?

PESCA: We told you about that story last week.

MARTIN: Oh, we did?

PESCA: When trouble is awry on the "James Bond" set, the BPP is there to cover it. The driver did swim away from the wreck. He's OK. But then a few days later, a stuntman was injured during a car chase, and after that on Wednesday, two stuntmen were seriously injured during the filming of another car chase. It doesn't help morale that someone on the set died of a heart attack the week before.

MARTIN: Yikes. Bad news on the "James Bond" set. OK. Here is a really interesting story about the power of Twitter. A graduate student from Berkeley used a one-word post on his Twitter feed to get himself out of an Egyptian jail. James Karl Buck was over in Egypt reporting on an anti-government protest in Mahalla, Egypt, when he and his translator were arrested.

This was on April 10th, according to a CNN story. On his way to the police station, he got on his cell phone, which apparently was not taken away from him, and posted one word. All he wrote was "arrested" on the micro-blogging Twitter site. Friends in the U.S. and in Egypt knew of his plight within seconds. This is how the Internet works.

Buck was recovering - he was covering a series of protests about rising food prices, decreasing wages, and arrests were apparently on the rise, big crackdown, and Buck says protesters had started using Molotov cocktails and setting fires, things getting a little tense. He says he and his translator were leaving the scene when police picked them up.

After his one-word post appeared on Twitter, friends with U.S. connections got busy and found him a lawyer. And he was apparently Twittering throughout the experience. Like, every couple hours he'd like send out a new little update so people knew exactly where he was in the process.

Twenty-four hours later, he entered another one word post, "free." But Buck's translator, Egyptian Mohammed Maree, did not fare as well. He apparently did not have a Twitter account. He has not been heard from since the arrest, despite efforts to track him down.

PESCA: It looks like the daughter of West Virginia's governor was, quote, "improperly awarded" an executive MBA by West Virginia University, an investigative panel ruled this week, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. Heather Bresch is the daughter of Governor Joe Manchin, and the chief operating officer of a genetics manufacturer called Mylan.

Bresch says she earned the degree in 1998, in part based on credits she earned from work experience. But when first asked, the university could not confirm that she received the degree. The university officials retracted that statement. Thus began a very long running back and forth. It all dates back to last October, when a newspaper started asking questions, and the back and forth eventually led to the creation of an investigative panel on the question.

MARTIN: Wow.

PESCA: The panel found - oh, this takes twists and turns. The panel found that Bresch's transcript reflects her completion of some courses that she did not, in fact, compete, and reflects a number of grades that she did not, in fact, earn. Bresch says she wants to put the matter behind her and won't challenge the findings, and she says her employer does not require an MBA for any job she's held with the company, including her current position.

MARTIN: OK, then. And finally, Miley Cyrus, she's back in the news. Another picture-causing controversy. Just last week, remember, she was answering to her critics over these pictures that were circulating on the net, where she's doing this little thing, where she's showing a little peak at her bra.

It's, I guess, scandalous to some, benign to others. This week, it's a bigger deal. It's a major spread in Vanity Fair that's gotten her into a little bit of hot water. Now, as you know, as everyone knows, Miley Cyrus is the star of the show "Hannah Montana," and part of the success of that Disney franchise and that character has been her squeaky-clean image.

But in the Vanity Fair spread - I mean, she's only 15 - she appears to be - the photo has her kind of half-naked, although wrapped in a silk sheet, but a little bit provocative. The New York Times reports that the Vanity Fair story includes Cyrus saying that she thinks the pictures shot, which is shot by the - shot by a famed photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

PESCA: As they all are, right?

MARTIN: Exactly.

PESCA: Every controversial photo.

MARTIN: She likes those. We're cool and artsy.

PESCA: She's a great photographer. Artsy.

MARTIN: Yeah, artsy. But in a prepared statement released on Sunday, Cyrus said that she was embarrassed and apologized to her fans.

PESCA: Who apparently don't like artsy.

MARTIN: Yeah, or I don't know if Disney likes that sort of justification.

PESCA: We don't go for artsy. We're the mice-and-duck people.

MARTIN: Yeah. Hey, folks. That's your Ramble. These stories and more on our website, npr.org/bryantpark.

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