AN Indonesian court yesterday ordered a local branch of the Paris-based Buddha Bar chain to close after convicting the licence holder of blasphemy. According to this report, it also ordered licensee PT Nireta Vista Creative, the official Jakarta tourism agency and Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo to pay damages of one billion rupiah (110,000 dollars) to [...]
DAYS after two men accused of blasphemy were gunned down in Pakistan, a Pakistan high court yesterday released a mentally ill woman held without trial for 14 years on allegations of desecrating the Koran. Despite “no evidence” being found against 60-year-old Zaibul Nisa, she had been left to languish in the prison section of a [...]
POLICE reinforcements were mobilised yesterday in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad a day after two Christians charged with blasphemy were shot dead outside court. Clashes broke out in the city, home to a large Christian community, after the brothers were gunned down. Pastor Rashid Emmanuel, 32, and Sajid, 24, were accused of writing a pamphlet [...]
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ARTWORKS that a Russian court found “blasphemous” this week are about to get a much wider audience. In the wake of the trial of art expert Andrei Yerofeyev and the Sakharov Museum’s then-director Yuri Samodurov, a magazine called Russia! has announced its intention to publish a book, The Banned Art, containing the “offensive” exhibits in [...]
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BUTTONED-UP, blasphemy-obsessed Pakistan has a dirty little secret – it’s the world’s No 1 consumer of on-line pornography. And not just your common-or-garden smut. According to this report it has been top-dog in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004; “donkey sex” since 2007; “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009; “rape sex” since 2004 and [...]
A TRIBUTE in the Portuguese edition of Playboy to the late Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago – a “militant atheist” – has gone horribly wrong, and the magazine has been shut down for “blasphemy”. Playboy’s “crime” was to re-imagine Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ as soft-core porno. Curiously, it wasn’t the Portuguese [...]
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The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
