Gorodskiye Vesti, or City News, the official paper of Volvograd, has been given a month to liquidate itself after publishing a cartoon  showing Muhammad along with Jesus, Moses and Buddha. "Well, we did not teach them that," Moses says in a caption, as the four watched a TV broadcast of a conflict between two groups.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Volgograd's first deputy mayor, Andrei O. Doronin, announced the closing of the newspaper, Gorodskiye Vesti, or City News, "in order not to inflame ethnic hostilities," according to the official Russian Information Agency. He gave the newspaper a month to liquidate its assets, leaving the fate of its staff unclear.

The closing came in the wake of the international protests over the Danish cartoons, which reverberated in Russia, a country with an estimated 20 million Muslims. Political and religious leaders here joined in denouncing the cartoons, although there have not been violent protests like those elsewhere.

Chechnya's vice premier, Ramzan Kadyrov, suspended the work of the Danish Refugee Council in the battered republic. The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, said, "One has to think a hundred times before publishing something, doing something or drawing something."

Most of the criticism against the cartoon in Volgograd came not from Muslim or other religious leaders, but rather from the local branch of United Russia, the pro-Putin political party that dominates governments across the country. Those complaints prompted Russia's deputy prosecutor general, Nikolai I. Shepel, to announce an inquiry on Wednesday.

Officials in Volgograd initially defended the newspaper, but another deputy mayor, Konstantin E. Kalachyov, said the decision to close the newspaper was an effort to contain a scandal that was "fanned up artificially" in the wake of the fury over the Danish cartoons.

"You can say that the journalists were taught a lesson in political correctness," he said in a telephone interview.

Since a city enterprise owns the newspaper, the mayor's office was essentially shutting its own business, though Mr. Kalachyov said he hoped the newspaper's staff could continue to work at a new city-owned paper that would replace Gorodskiye Vesti.

According to the article, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Islamic Rights Centre both considered the closing to be excessively strict. The Russian Union of Journalists condemned the shut-down as censorship.