ABC Top Stories
Lars Vilks: Why He Built a Panic Room
Why did Lars Vilks, a mild-mannered Swede who calls himself "the artist," booby-trap his art with electrified barbed wire, keep an ax by his bedside, and build a panic room upstairs?
For one, Mr. Vilks's 2007 cartoon of the prophet Mohammed as a stray dog continues to bring death threats and even a bounty on his head from an Al Qaeda-related group in Iraq.
But after US authorities on Tuesday arrested Colleen LaRose, a Philadelphia woman known on the Internet as Jihad Jane, for allegedly planning to travel to rural Sweden and assassinate Vilks, civil libertarians such as George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley are pointing to another potential incentive for European artists to protect themselves: growing deference shown to Islam by European governments and journalists worried about stoking fanatical flames.
Has Blogging Peaked? Twitter Is So Much Easier
Is blogging going out of style? In December 2007, 28 percent of all 18-to-29-year-olds with an Internet connection kept some sort of blog. By the same time last year, that number hovered around 15 percent. Meanwhile, the number of teens who say they blog regularly continues to shrink, as the Web's youngest users ditch the blogosphere for the frantic pace of the social-media world.
