Saudi Arabia to lead UN talks on religious tolerance
UNITED NATIONS, New York: Saudi Arabia, which deploys a special police force to ensure that only one narrow sect of Islam predominates in the kingdom, is sponsoring a discussion at the United Nations on religious tolerance starting Wednesday.
JERUSALEM: Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land.
Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material.
After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it.
The books were dumped into a pile and set afire in a lot near a synagogue, he said.
He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they [gays] had a virus.
JAKARTA, Indonesia: Islamic protesters hurled abuse at Playboy magazine's first Indonesian centerfold Thursday, calling her a prostitute and saying they hoped her daughter would be raped.
Andhara Early did not respond to demonstrators — among them several women wearing Islamic headscarves — as she left the South Jakarta District Court after testifying in the indecency trial of editor Playboy's Indonesia editor, Erwin Arnada.
Islamic conservatives loudly protested what they dubbed a global icon of pornography when a toned down version of Playboy hit the streets in the world's most populous Muslim nation last year.
Arnada could face 32 months in prison if convicted of violating indecency laws by publishing the magazine, which typically contains several shots of women in swimsuits or underwear along with feature articles.
Thursday's appearance by Early was the first by a model at the trial.
Protesters called Early a "cheap prostitute" who would go to hell and said "I hope your daughter gets raped." She later told reporters that the taunts had upset her.
Her testimony, like that of other witnesses at the trial, is closed to the media and the public.
Indonesia is a secular country with a population of some 190 million Muslims. While most practice a moderate form of the faith, conservatives are pushing hard to impose strict Islamic law.
NAIROBI, Kenya: A Catholic nun has been sentenced to 30 years for helping militia kill hundreds of people hiding in a hospital during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, an official said Friday. [...]
"She was responsible for selecting Tutsis and would throw them out of the hospital and the militia would then kill them," said Jean Baptiste Ndahumba, president of the local gacaca court in Butare town. "This nun was organizing people to be killed." [...]
A number of Hutu Catholic and Protestant church leaders are alleged to have played significant roles in the east African nation's 100-day massacre. More than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by the militia, orchestrated by the extremist Hutu government then in power. The genocide ended when Tutsi rebels toppled the government. [...]
In 2001, two Rwandan Catholic nuns were convicted by a Belgian court of aiding and abetting the mass murders. A Roman Catholic priest is on trial before Tanzania-based U.N. tribunal, accused of ordering the slaughter of 2,000 people who sought refuge in his church.