Noah Barron, writing at Online Journalism Review, offers up nine cool suggested toys for online journalistos and journalistas this Yuletide season.

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.