Giving a fake name to a reporter is a prank as old as newspapering itself. Pity the poor copy editor who fails to notice a quote from that most famous of pranksters, Heywood Jablomé (whose surname is given with a soft, French-style “j” and silent “e”). Though it seems unlikely, that doesn’t seem to be the case with “mushroom expert” Kill Persson, quoted in this story about students who nearly died from poisonous fungi. In 2007, a “K. Persson was cited in a Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences paper about invasive species (link here, PDF). His (her?) email starts with “kill.persson@”.

Remember that Facebook hit list in Puerto Asis, Colombia that made headlines a few weeks ago? (Caveat Viator was one of the first American sites to pick up the story, by the way.) According to the New World Human Security Observatory, it’s nothing new. Colombian gangs have always announced their presence with threats against locals. It’s just the technology that’s changed, not the scare tactic. “That they did so through Facebook and e-mail rather than phone calls and leaflets was surprising because Internet penetration in the area is relatively low.” Read the full analysis here.