64 People Have Been Arrested For Using Blogs

More bloggers than ever face arrest for exposing human rights abuses or criticising governments, says a report.

According to article published at BBC, Elections in China, Pakistan and the US could prompt more arrests for exposing human rights abuses or highlighting bad practices followed by governments. This is scary.

From the article:

Citizens have faced arrest and jail for blogging about many different topics, said the World Information Access (WIA) report.

Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights or suppression of protests. They criticised public policies and took political figures to task

Number of mobile telephone subscriptions equal to the global population

Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion equivalent to half the global population. In other words number of mobile phones now equal to half the human species.

In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa’s countryside to keep up the growth.

GSM is the most popular technology followed by CDMA technology.

=> Global cellphone penetration reaches 50 pct

Why Americans Should Never Be Allowed To Travel

A web page about why americans should never be allowed to travel. These are actual stories provided by travel agents. Here is my favorite one:

A businessman called and had a question about the documents he needed in order to fly to China. After a lengthy discussion about passports, I reminded him he needed a visa. “Oh no I don’t, I’ve been to China many times and never had to have one of those.” I double checked and sure enough, his stay required a visa. When I told him this he said, “Look, I’ve been to China four times and every time they have accepted my American Express.”

Read rest of stories.

Earthquake Prediction ?

According to US-based quake researcher Zhonghao Shou, who has been using satellite imagery to predict quakes on the basis of peculiar cloud formations, ancient Chinese and Italians studied special clouds which were indicative of impending earthquakes.

A website on earthquake clouds and short term prediction maintained by him ‘Earthquake clouds and short term prediction’ homepage, states that he had predicted “a China or Neighbour EQ Cloud” more than 24 hours before the Pakistan quake happened.

That is really a good stuff, IMPO.