From the Nov. 28 Guardian:

A Turkish prosecutor is considering whether to prosecute the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins' bestselling atheist polemic, The God Delusion, on the grounds that it incites religious hatred.

The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values".

The BBC moved an alert saying Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher who named a Teddy bear 'Muhammad' in her class, has been sentenced to 15 days by a Sudan court.

After serving her sentence, she faces deportation.

Addendum

Here's the Guardian story and some commentary from Meera Selva:

Gillian Gibbons has fallen foul of the most ridiculous regime, which cannot seem to see the absurdity and injustice in even arresting, never mind charging, a teacher over the naming of a soft toy.

But this case is not, as is being portrayed, a confrontation between Islam and the west - it is about the hazards of living under a chauvinistic military regime with an all-pervasive secret service. ...

Selva said the regime of Omar al-Bashir needs the support of Islamists to survive. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been agitating for Gibbons to get the maximum sentence of six months in jail and 40 lashes:

Bashir now uses the concept of Arab supremacy rather than Islam, as a rallying call to prop up his own power base. This is the language he used in Darfur to incite militias to attack devout Muslim civilians, and is the language used to encourage suspicion and mistrust of foreigners.

The Sudanese government has conceded several points to the international community recently in agreeing to allow UN and AU troops into Darfur and southern Sudan, but the Sudanese are deeply uncomfortable with having foreign troops on their soil. In this climate, it is easy and tempting for the Sudanese politicians in Khartoum to whip up anti-foreign sentiment against a teacher to disguise their loss of sovereignty elsewhere. One can only hope they realise just how much damage is being done by their irresponsible actions soon and defuse this insane situation.

British teacher Gillian Gibbons' exercise in classroom democracy -- having her students vote on a name for a teddy bear; they picked Muhammad -- has her facing charges of insulting religion, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs.

From the BBC:

British officials are trying to secure the release of a British schoolteacher arrested in Sudan for letting her pupils name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, of Liverpool, may face blasphemy charges for insulting Islam's Prophet. A conviction could mean six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.

The Sudan Embassy in London said the situation was a "storm in a teacup", based on a cultural misunderstanding.

Hopefully this won't come to a nasty conclusion:

Dr Khalid al Mubarak, a spokesman for the Sudan embassy in London, said he was confident that Ms Gibbons would be cleared quickly.

He told BBC News: "We have Christian schools in the Sudan, we have Christian teachers who teach Muslim children, which shows a great deal of tolerance.

"The vice-president of our country is a Christian, we have many ministers who are Christian, and historically we became Christians round about the same time as England.

"Our relationship with Britain is so good that we wouldn't like such a minute event to be overblown." ...

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also said it appeared to have been a "quite horrible misunderstanding" and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested.

There was no apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad, he said.

Call me crazy, call me a Western cultural imperialist, but even if Gibbons did intend to be blasphemous, that wouldn't justify lashings and/or a prison sentence in my world.

The BBC reports that Saudi authorities say the female sexual assault victim sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison has confessed to an extramarital affair:

The woman was initially to be punished for violating strict gender segregation laws in Saudi Arabia, for riding in the car of a man who was not related to her when they were both attacked.

"The Saudi justice minister expressed his regret about the media reports over the role of the woman in this case which put out false information and wrongly defend her," the statement said.

"The charged girl is a married woman who confessed to having an affair with the man she was caught with."

Here's my first post on this topic.

From the BBC:

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have defended a judicial sentence of 200 lashes for a rape victim.

The justice ministry said in a statement that the sentence was justified because the woman was in a car with an unrelated man. ...

The 19-year-old, who has not been named, was travelling in a car with a male friend last year, when the car was attacked by a gang of seven men who raped both of them.

She has become known as the "Qatif girl", a reference to the largely Shia town which she comes from.

Qatif Girl has also been sentenced to six months in prison. The court banned her lawyer from the courtroom. The lawyer's licence has been taken away.

This Arab News story has some additional detail.

Some notes on lashing from a Nov. 16 International Herald Tribune story:

The woman remains free for the time being and has not yet been lashed.

Lashing is a common sentence under the Saudi penal code, applied for crimes ranging from homosexuality and drinking alcohol to theft and adultery. Usually, lashes are meted out in increments because offenders could not survive hundreds of lashes at once. The administrator of the punishment is supposed to hold a Koran under his arm so he cannot swing the whip too fiercely; lashes are not supposed to leave permanent scars. The sentence is frequently delivered in public, often at the entrance to a jail.

Islamists? Islamofascists? Terrorists? Violent jihadists?

Timothy Garton Ash said the label matters when we are trying to talk about those Muslims who are trying to cause real harm to Western society without creating new enemies by alienating moderate Muslims.

The economic rise of Asia has been fueled in part by a 19th Century approach to industrialization, with coal-fired power plants going up almost weekly in China. This has pushed China into position to pass the United States as the world's biggest total emitter of greenhouse gases.

However, climate change may well strip Asia of any economic gains it makes, claims a new report.

From the BBC:

The leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge was a patriot who staunchly defended social justice, the regime's former head of state has said (about Pol Pot).

In a new book, Khieu Samphan says there was never a policy to starve people and no order to carry out mass killings.

Prosecutors are studying the book to determine what defence Khieu Samphan may take if he is ever charged.

Some estimates say up to 2.5 million people died during the Khmer Rouge reign from 1975 to 1979.

Khieu Samphan is one of the few surviving senior figures of the regime.

Four of his colleagues have been charged by a UN-backed genocide tribunal and Khieu Samphan, 76, is expected to be added.

Then I guess the people behind this are either horribly mistaken or deliberately lying their faces off.

Update

On Nov. 19, Cambodian police arrested Khieu Samphan and charged him with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Here's a BBC backgrounder on the Khmer Rouge. Here's another on some key KR figures.

From the BBC:

A UN panel has agreed a landmark report on climate change, and says the world must act hastily to prevent the worst predicted effects coming to pass.

After arduous talks in Valencia, Spain, scientists agreed a document they hope will shape debate on the next phase of the fight against climate change. ...

The text will be officially launched by UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Saturday.

Delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarised thousands of pages of scientific analysis, bringing together elements of the three reports already released this year, on the science of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and options for mitigating the problem. ...

Among the report's top-line conclusions are that climate change is "unequivocal", that humankind's emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost.

The synthesis summary finalised late on Friday strengthens the language of those earlier reports with a warning that climate change may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts.

Such impacts could include the fast melting of glaciers and species extinctions.

Here's the NYT story.

This NYT article reports that despite the jailing of lawyers and human rights activists under President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule, the Islamist militants in the outer regions of Pakistan are making territorial gains.