Pakistan Blocks Twitter

Pakistan has decided it's had about 139 characters too many of Twitter, yanking the microblogging site over material it says is offensive to Islam, reports al-Jazeera. The material in question was promoting a Facebook contest to post images of the prophet Mohammed—which are considered blasphemous, even those framed in positive terms. "We have been negotiating with them [Twitter] until last night, but they did not agree to remove the stuff, so we had to block it,'' says the country's telecommunications chief. No word on how long Twitter will be down. (More Pakistan stories.)