The ESL Free Press

Cuban Bloggers Beaten

Three Cuban bloggers were attacked in Havana on Friday. They were on their way to a peaceful protest. The U.S. State Department says "security personnel" stopped them on the street and beat them.

The three are Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo. To see Ms. Sanchez' blog, Generacion Y (in Spanish), click here.

Source

Printable:Download cuban bloggers beaten.pdf (18.8K)

Many Blogs Are Just Spam

Many of the blogs run on free sites are mostly spam. These are called "splogs" and are put up only to get traffic.

WebmasterWorld.com did a survey of popular sites where users can set up free blogs. They all had at least 74% splogs. One site had 100%.

Why does this happen? Experts from WebmasterWorld say it's because the blogs don't cost anything.

Adapted from www.wikinews.org . You are free to reprint this post.  (Click Permalink for a print-ready version.) To learn more, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Sources:

"Google's Blogspot Contains 75% Spam". InfoNIAC, March 21, 2007.

"75% of Google's Blogspot Blogs are Spam". SERoundTable, March 20, 2007

Retrieved from "http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WebmasterWorld_reports_75%25_of_Google%27s_blogspot_as_spam"

Egyptian Blogger Goes to Jail

An Egyptian blogger has been sent to jail for four years for insulting Islam.

The man, Abdul Kareem Suleiman Amer, was arrested last November. He had used his weblog to criticize Islam. He had also said God might not exist. Amer had posted to several Coptic (Egyptian Christian) blogs.

Bloggers in the Middle East have been arrested before. But Amer is the first one to be sentenced to jail.

Adapted from www.wikinews.org . You are free to reprint this post.  (Click Permalink for a print-ready version.) To learn more, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Sources:

Amany Radwan "The Blogger-Martyr of Egypt". Time, Friday, Feb. 23, 2007

Press Release: "Four-year prison sentence for blogger “Kareem Amer”". Reporters Without Borders, February 22, 2007