Harry Nicolaides, an Australian expatriate living in Thailand, has been sentenced to three years for lèse-majesté. He was arrested last August and charged with insulting the monarchy in a single paragraph of his 2005 novel Verisimilitude. At trial this week, Mr Nicolaides was initially sentenced to six years, but his term was halved because [...]

Winston Blackmore’s lawyer Blair Suffredine has announced that he will cite Canada’s legalisation of same-sex “marriage” in defending his client against polygamy charges.
“It’s pretty hard to justify why gay marriage is OK and polygamy’s not,” Suffredine said. “The truth is he claims this is part of his religion.”
For good measure, Mr Suffredine also brought Islam [...]

Cartoon: Gary Brookins, Richmond Times-Dispatch

London Telegraph reporter Gerald Warner has a very bad feeling about the presidency of Barack Obama. Brits, of all people, should know better than to be enthralled by Mr Obama. They’ve been there.
This will end in tears. The Obama hysteria is not merely embarrassing to witness, it is itself contributory to the scale [...]

Two more Christians incarcerated in Eritrea have reportedly died following torture.  That brings to eight the total known to have perished in custody in recent years.
At least two detained Christians have died this month in Eritrea after a “long period of torture” in a notorious military prison camp, while the number of Christians jailed in [...]

The collect for today, the Feast Day of St Agnes (d. 304), virgin and martyr (source):
Eternal God, Shepherd of thy sheep,
by whose grace thy child Agnes was strengthened to bear witness,
in her life and in her death,
to the true love of her redeemer:
grant us the power to understand, with all thy saints,
what is the breadth [...]