How much better would it have been if instead of being allowed to ask long, rambling questions of the Murdochs, the politicians of the select committee had been forced to keep them as brief as tweets? AFP
How much better would it have been if instead of being allowed to ask long, rambling questions of the Murdochs, the politicians of the select committee had been forced to keep them as brief as tweets?Show more

Let's cut to the chase. Top tweeters can't hang around



This may sound a bit rich from somebody charged with filling a whole newspaper page on a Friday, but I am beginning to think there are few things that can't be said in 140 characters, or however many it takes to fill a Twitter comment.

Out goes all the extraneous, verbose, pretentious twaddle, leaving people to come to the point, fast.

Winston Churchill, Britain's Second World War prime minister, was famous for demanding memos of no more than a page in length. If I were prime minister I would insist that all communication should take place via Twitter, leaving long-winded morons tongue-tied and speechless. I could sit in Number 10 with my TweetDeck, keeping up with events almost quicker than they would happen. Plus there would be a real-time trace of all my work in office, so nobody could accuse me of a lack of transparency.

I am still amazed that there are some journalists not on Twitter. We have been helped by a series of spectacular events, ranging from the Arab Spring to "Hackgate". How much better, for example, would it have been if instead of being allowed to ask long, rambling questions of the Murdochs, the politicians of the select committee had been forced to keep them brief?

Twitter has been actually much more fun than the appearances of the Murdochs, Ms Brooks and the policemen on television, enlivened as it is by fictional characters such as RupertMurdochPR or Rebekah_thehack and ExNOTWjourno2, who may not be fictional, but is certainly anonymous.

I know I speak with the passion of a convert, for it is only in the past few weeks that I have started following Twitter, and tweeting.

I joined a couple of years ago, but really could not get excited about it. It was the purchase of an iPhone 4, plus the invention of TweetDeck, that made it suddenly fun and usable.

I may be a novice but I'm keen, so imagine my delight when I was sent a nifty tool called TweetLevel that is designed to discover how effective you are at using Twitter.

You put in your Twitter ID, wait 30 seconds, then you get the verdict. Mine was 43.3, suspiciously close to the answer to life, the universe and everything when proposed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which as any fool knows, was 42.

It turns out that 43.3 is my influence, which is apparently not too bad. "You may not be CNN but you understand the importance of Twitter and use it well," TweetLevel says. Thank heavens for that. I always found CNN irritating enough, but now it has hired Piers Morgan it has become unwatchable because at any moment his smug face like a slapped rump appears on three screens.

But what I need to do is get more people to retweet my tweets. Sounds painful.

Next up is my popularity. "Your popularity score is OK - but can easily get better," I'm told. Gee, thanks. I need to post more comments at peak times, then I'll soon have thousands of followers.

Then engagement. I'm not sure what this is, which is probably why I score so badly. Must I show more empathy? I've got about as much empathy as Rupert Murdoch, and I don't think that's going to change.

Finally my trust score. "Your trust score is low because the content that you tweet is either not credible, interesting or newsworthy," says TweetLevel. I must say, it was kind of them to break it to me so gently.

What makes matters worse is that I was also sent a list of some of the most influential tweeters in the Middle East. Al Jazeera leads the pack, which seems fair, but at number nine is Tom Gara, a man who used to sit opposite me in The National office, and who declared more than a year ago: "Twitter is dead." Not only is Twitter alive and kicking, but he is soaring too. It's enough to make one livid.

Still, there are compensations. I checked my wife's rating. By a bizarre coincidence we got into it at about the same time. Her score was worse than mine, just 40.9, although there were similarities with my result. "You may not be CNN but you understand the importance of Twitter and use it well," TweetLevel told her. Couldn't they have come up with something different?

Then I checked my daughters and outranked them. Fortunately my 8-year-old son has not signed up for Twitter, he's too busy playing football, tennis and rugby. So, there it is, as official as one could hope for: at Villa 5, in the new Al Muhairy compound in Al Bateen, I am the most influential tweeter. My influence will only grow, and they will decline. As Gore Vidal could have tweeted: "It is not enough to succeed, others must fail."

Soon I'll be the most influential tweeter in my compound of 10 houses, and one day maybe, the length of Khaleej Al Arabi.

Key facilities
  • Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
  • Premier League-standard football pitch
  • 400m Olympic running track
  • NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
  • 600-seat auditorium
  • Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
  • An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
  • Specialist robotics and science laboratories
  • AR and VR-enabled learning centres
  • Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
The smuggler

Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple. 
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.

Khouli conviction

Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.

For sale

A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.

- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico

- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000

- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950

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