A map to great melodies

Simon Gooding and Brendon Morrow already knew their way around the studio as session musicians for other bands and had already mapped out their future before they ever met. While studying audio engineering at SAE in Byron Bay, Australia, they shared a cramped dorm room, and discovered a mutual love for Radiohead, The Beatles and The Mars Volta and when they returned to Auckland, The Map Room was already half born.

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Fake trolling story dupes Australian news

Internet troll group, Facebeef, has made a public mockery of Australian news program Today Tonight after convincing the show to run a bogus cyber bullying story as its lead expose. A member of the group, whose real surname is reportedly Vanmidde, went on the show as “Jasmine Frost”, told the show that she had been targetted by Tristan Barker, who had emailed her pictures of male genitalia

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A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men

A conversation between Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Coen If you were going to play the parlor game of arranging the most interesting, improbable, imaginary conversation among American entertainers, you could do worse than the one that took place in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. The participants were the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for smart, stylish and slightly silly movies like Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road.

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Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock Negates Obama’s New Arab Outreach

When President Barack Obama flew to Cairo two years ago to deliver a speech designed to start an American conversation with the Muslim world, it seemed an almost revolutionary act — and the enthusiasm of his reception was in sharp contrast with the Arab world’s widespread hostility towards President George W.

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Remembering the First Lady of New York

On Monday, a chapter was closed in the social history of New York City: a great dame, the arbiter of New York society, died without leaving any successors. Brooke Astor, who passed away at age 105, was a combination of the Victorian age, with all its wit and elegance, and of the modern era, with its sharp-minded determination.

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Reporter escapes Taliban death sentence

Zarghon Shah is a man who knows just how lucky he is to be alive. He came face-to-face with the feared Taliban fighters of Pakistan’s Swat Valley, was ordered to be executed and gained a chilling insight into the mind of a fearsome militant who has waged a campaign of terror

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