[Plugin: EzineArticles WordPress Plugin] Ezine Articles Plug-in will not activate

I have repeatedly attempted to activate this plug in. I am receiving the following error message…

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error
Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to api.ezinearticles.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home8/todaysv1/public_html/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1148

Could not contact the EzineArticles.com submission interface. Possible causes include:
* A firewall may be blocking the server from making outbound requests to https://api.ezinearticles.com/.
* PHP may not be allowed to open connections on your server.
* https://api.ezinearticles.com/ may be experiencing downtime.

Here is my system information:
Headway Version: 2.0.13
WordPress Version: 3.2.1
PHP Version: 5.2.17
MySQL Version: 5.1.60-community-log
Web Server Info: Apache
Browser Info: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
PHP cURL Support: Yes
PHP GD Support: Yes
PHP Memory Limit: 256M
PHP Post Max Size: 10M

And yes – I did turn off my firewall while attempting to activate the second time. No change.

I would love to use this plug in. Please let me know how to resolve this.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/ezinearticles-plugin/