scandals-per-second

Step 1. Go to http://www.google.com/

Step 2. Type "malaysian health minister"

And boom, Results 1 - 10 of about 223,000 for malaysian health minister in 0.12 seconds. In a tiny fraction of a second, I was able to verify this "top news" on local TV I've seen tonight. The International Herald Tribune reports:

Malaysia's health minister resigned Wednesday after admitting that he and a female friend were the couple in a secretly filmed sex video that has severely embarrassed the government.

A one-hour DVD recording circulated anonymously last week showed Health Minister Chua Soi Lek, a married man with three children, performing sexual acts with the woman in a hotel room.

On Tuesday, Chua, 61, admitted he was the man in the video and described the woman as a "personal friend." He refused to elaborate.

The former physician has risen fast in the government in recent years, but the scandal has turned into a high-profile embarrassment for Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who brought Chua into the cabinet in 2004.

Being helplessly distracted by nature, I have two thoughts simultaneously in my mind right now. One, scandal spreads too damn fast nowadays. And two, google is a whole lot faster. I'm amazed at how information can travel at this rate. One minute some enterprising person sees a distinguished politician enters a hotel room with a woman decidedly not his wife. The next minute the person sets up his video camera and hits record. A few moments after that, the file is all over the interwebs, being featured on every geek habitat in the planet. Now, if the Malaysian health minister were aware of this, he would've double-checked for holes in the walls.