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Monday, May 23, 2011

Ryan Giggs named by MP as Twitter row footballer

Ryan Giggs named by MP as Twitter row footballer



Manchester United's Ryan Giggs has been named in Parliament as the footballer at the centre of the Twitter row.

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming's outburst - which was heavily criticised by Speaker John Bercow - was broadcast live on the BBC's Parliament channel.

The member for Birmingham Yardley had earlier described the gagging order as "a joke".

Hemming's intervention came minutes after the High Court refused to lift the ban on naming the player. Mr Justice Eady rejected an application by News Corporation, owners of The Sun, to dicharge the privacy injunction on the grounds that it was "futile" in the light of recent publicity about the player's identity.

That has included hundreds of thousands of Twitter messages, articles in American magazines and a front-page photograph of the instantly-recognisable player in Scotland's Sunday Herald.

Hemming said: "With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter it seems impracticable."

He also named Times journalist Giles Coren, who has been threatened with legal action for naming a player with an injunction via the social network site.

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