SXSW: Deaths, arrests and Gaga vomit

After being overshadowed by a fatal car accident outside the Mohawk Club on Thursday morning, which killed two people and injured 23, the annual multimedia conference South by Southwest drew to a close last night in Austin, Texas. The all-out celebration of music, film and, in its interactive component, “innovation, creativity and inspiration”, this year’s SXSW, as it is commonly known, will always be remembered for that tragedy.

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Witch song second in UK charts

A campaign by opponents of late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to get the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead to the top of the British pop charts to celebrate her death failed on Sunday (local time) although it did manage to reach second place. Thatcher, who died aged 87 last Monday, deeply divided Britons and while some have paid warm tributes to the achievements of her right-wing Conservative governments, others said her privatization of swathes of industry had destroyed communities.

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Mikhail Gorbachev

In 1985, when the first rumblings of Gorbachev’s thunder disturbed the moldy Soviet silence, the holy fools on the street–the people who always gather at flea markets and around churches–predicted that the new Czar would rule seven years. They assured anyone interested in listening that Gorbachev was “foretold in the Bible,” that he was an apocalyptic figure: he had a mark on his forehead

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