I agree. The media seemed to have jumped on the flirting angle because he was smiling. Isn’t that a little insulting to the hostel employee? I smiled at my barber today. Definitely wasn’t flirting.

>Isn’t that a little insulting to the hostel employee?

Why would that be "insulting"? HE was supposed to be flirting, not necessarily her.

Plus, even if both were flirting, there's nothing insulting about that.

If I am the employee, I don’t want my employer to think I’m flirting with customers when it’s just small talk. And..uhh..if I’m married, etc. Anyways, we don’t know for sure either way

As I've heard it, it was characterized as flirting by the employee.

Filtered through the police and then through the media. It's a game of Chinese telephone and a lot gets lost in the translations, which leads to a huge amount of misinformation. Case in point b and t 9.

Since when is it "chinese telephone" and not just "telephone"?

It’s a mixture of Chinese Whispers and Telephone, two names for the same game.

Pick a common language in a different language family that results stilted translations. It was always Chinese telephone.

Since the Millennial generation, pretty much, at least among the (over-)educated. It kills me; I'd prefer to pretend we're all participating in some shared project called "civilization".

But, as the shooting in the street and the cheering on the Internet have shown (and the price gouging before that), our society has been coarsening along a great many dimensions.