The Cartoon Row

MOSCOW, February 15 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has launched a probe into the publication of a religious cartoon in a Volga-region newspaper, a spokesman said Wednesday. The cartoon, published in Volgograd newspaper Gorodskiye Izvestia depicts Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed, Moses and Buddha looking at two groups of people ready to fight on a TV screen. The caption...

Russian prosecutors have launched an investigation against a local Volgograd newspaper that has published a cartoon featuring Jesus, Moses, Buda, and Mohammed. The prosecutors are to decide whether to launch criminal proceedings for hate instigation on religious grounds against the Gorodskiye Izvestia newspaper. The cartoon portrays all the four gods looking at a TV that is showing two groups of...

Three people were killed and scores injured in a third consecutive day of violent protests in Pakistan over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. A crowd of more than 70,000 people in the north-western city of Peshawar burned businesses and attacked police, who hit back with teargas and batons. One of the three people killed was a young boy, shot in the head. A Pakistani security...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's state television has begun broadcasting appeals for the release of kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll including footage of her mother and a major Sunni Arab politician describing the 28-year-old freelancer as a friend of Iraq. Carroll, who reported from Iraq for the Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped Jan. 7 in Baghdad while on her way from the office of Sunni...

Russia's Muslim rights activists are ready to demand that Russian publishing houses be shut down if they publish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, a member of the Russian Public Chamber said Wednesday. 'We have information on the publication of [religious] cartoons,' said Kamilzhan Kalandarov, the head of the all-Russia public Islamic organization Al-Khak (Justice). 'We will be pushing for the...

COPENHAGEN (AFX) - The editor of the Danish newspaper that first published the controversial prophet Mohammed cartoons said the media was giving Muslims special treatment as a result of the subsequent uproar. 'It turned out that the freedom of the press crumbled much more quickly than I thought. It seems to me that the freedom of the press the world over is being limited as Muslims are being given...

The student newspaper at Northern Illinois University this week ran the controversial Danish political cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The student paper at the University of Illinois is still reeling from the consequences of running them. Harvard's conservative alternative paper has run them. On Wednesday, so did the alternative student paper at Illinois State University. By this point...

The weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire has accused Moroccan authorities of orchestrating protests against it for publishing a photograph of a French newspaper showing a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed. The Casablanca-based newspaper said in a statement that for two days this week protesters have demonstrated against it and that two state-run television stations have accused it of blasphemy. Le Journal...

With riots raging across the Muslim world over the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the editors of The Harvard Salient republished four of the cartoons in the paper’s Feb. 8 edition, angering a number of student groups. Asserting that they would not "[cater] to a sensitivity borne of fear of death that has plagued many would-be critics of Islam," the editors of the...

Over the last three months an Iranian news agency has provided an open platform to Western Holocaust deniers, in effect aiding the Iranian government's efforts to promote anti-Semitism and to cast doubt on the historical truth of the Holocaust. The semi-official Mehr News Agency, whose articles are made available on the Internet in Farsi, Arabic and English and widely circulated throughout the...