Planet Business

Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

OFFICE POLITICS

UNPAID INTERNS have a tough time of it enough already, without Twitmobs on their back. It’s not just the whole working for free thing – in boom times, at least the unpaid experience sometimes made their CVs attractive to paying employers. Now there are precious few jobs around on which they can capitalise on their internship.

So it was little wonder that when UK politician Tom Watson’s Twitter account read “I should log out of my twitter so that my intern doesn’t twit-rape me . . . ” yesterday morning, the initial “oh dear, that intern is so fired” and “it’s unacceptable to trivialise rape” tweets turned to sympathy. “My boss is in a meeting, i’ve made a terrible mistake, im very sorry everyone, it wasn’t meant to be offensive! Logging him off now! Sorry!” read the panicky follow-up, before Tom Watson himself returned with an apology and a promise that he would “deal with the matter offline”. #Savetheintern was trending within minutes, but #Paytheintern was almost as popular.

STATUS UPDATE

TWITTER #McFAIL: Having learnt nothing from a similar Qantas fail, McDonald’s attempt to generate some heart-warming #McDstories instead prompted illuminating tales from ex-employees and customers.

- @rupertmurdoch sums up his position with a grammatical flourish, showing little patience with the idea that one man’s copyright legislation is another man’s censorship bill.

SOME 200,000 more business passengers flew with low-cost airline EasyJet in the final quarter of 2011 compared with a year earlier, despite an overall decline in the market.

SCREEN BUMS

MERE DAYS after Moody’s downgraded Sony and Panasonic – citing losses in their television units – Japanese tech giant Hitachi announced it is to stop making telly boxes.

COMMODITY WATCH

IT’S THE story that’s more alarming than bond repayments, Republican presidential candidate selection and global warming put together: chocolate prices are going up. Well, cocoa prices are anyway.

Cocoa futures surged to an eight-week high on commodity markets on speculation that supplies from Ivory Coast, the world’s top producer, may be hindered by stronger-than-usual seasonal winds known as the Harmattan, which bring dry, dusty air south from the Sahara desert.

Global production could drop as much as 10 per cent in the current season, which started in October, compared to a year earlier, according to the International Cocoa Organisation. The sort-of good news for chocolate buyers is that most commercial chocolate contains very little cocoa anyway.

21 %:year-on-year decline in the sale of iPods, as the music player is increasingly superseded by the ever-advancing iPhone, Apple's latest quarterly update reveals. The company now sells more iPads than iPods.