Blogs

It was shortly after 7 in the morning when police spotted the man on a bicycle, a smear of blood around his mouth and more dribbling from cuts on his forearms. But he had an explanation. An ex-girlfriend "turned me on to vampirism," he told the officers, but he was ready to put all that behind him. Was there somewhere he could find a priest?

Mark Horvath, a documenter of homelessness who was once homeless himself, was touring a tent city in Sacramento when he raised his cellphone to take a photo of one man's ingenious shopping-cart storage system. Suddenly, another man rushed at him, screaming, with a knife. Horvath was terrified, he said, but not so scared that he stopped sending photos and text messages about what was happening.

It's fascinating to look at the blog postings Wednesday from the Cannes Film Festival of the premiere of "Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino's WWII Nazi-scalping action fantasy (he has the Reich apparently coming to an end not in Hitler's bunker but in a Paris movie theater). To me, the postings reflect each blog's rooting interest in the film and the director, whose PR campaign is orchestrated by the Weinstein Co., which will release the film later this summer.

An Internet blogger nicknamed Minerva was acquitted by a Seoul court Monday on charges that he spread malicious rumors about the South Korean economy that cost the government billions of dollars. Park Dae-sung was released after the court's ruling that he did not violate telecommunications laws with his popular weblogs, which regularly pontificated on South Korea's ailing economy, castigated policymakers and forecast dire scenarios that many investors took to heart.

This newspaper typically covers about 10% of the homicides in Los Angeles County each year. They are often the most sensational or shocking: a baby hit by a stray bullet, or a celebrity murder. But for the last year, the paper's website, latimes.com, has recorded every homicide. It was my idea. I reported on crime for the paper, and I wanted readers to see all the killings -- roughly 1,000 violent deaths each year, mostly of young Latinos and, most disproportionately, of young black men.

It was not the most comforting of e-mails: "May God honor my sword by slaying Wael Abbas." Cyberspace can be a messy, dangerous place, especially if you're Abbas, who with keyboard, digital camera and a bit of cunning has become one of Egypt's most popular bloggers. His posts, often with scratchy video, catalog police torture, political oppression, labor strikes, sexual harassment and radical Islam.

The blogosphere has been atwitter over a report in the New York Times about likely Republican presidential nominee John McCain and his relationship with a female lobbyist. One blogger who rose to his defense had a very personal interest in the story. After all, he's her dad. Meghan McCain, 23, frequently travels with her father on his bus, the "Straight Talk Express," filing commentary along the way.

On the night of the hard-fought Florida primary, John McCain spoke about weighty issues -- whether the Republican Party had lost its way and how he would fight America's enemies. His 23-year-old daughter, Meghan, broke down the night's atmospherics on her blog. "What does it feel like to win the Florida primary?" she mused. "It feels like the Doors song 'Break on Through.'

Here are a sample of the comments readers posted on the Homicide Report regarding the gang violence and police shootout Thursday in northeast L.A. that left two dead. Readers offered their own experiences living in the neighborhood and called on residents to help reduce the violence: "I live around the corner from Drew Street and can attest that the situation never seems to improve.