A St. Petersburg Times investigation found that more than a dozen women said the culture in Scientology‘s Sea Org pushed them or women they knew to have abortions, in many cases, abortions they did not want.

Some said colleagues and supervisors pressured them to abort their pregnancies and remain productive workers without the distraction of raising children. Terminating a pregnancy and staying on the job affirmed one’s commitment to the all-important work of saving the planet.

A young Christian shopkeeper was sentenced to a life term in prison and fined more than $1,000 last week following a dubious conviction of desecrating the Quran, according to Pakistan’s National Commission for Justice and Peace.

A conviction for blaspheming Muhammad (Section 295-C) is punishable by death under Pakistani’s notorious blasphemy laws. Widely condemned by the international community as easily invoked to settle personal enmities, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have come under review in recent months, but to no avail.

Security forces of Israel’s immigration service broke into an African church in Tel Aviv damaging the ceiling and detaining several worshipers, news reports said Tuesday, December 22.

Immigration officers gathered everyone on the premises and detained those who did not hold papers with a request for refugee status, Haaretz reported. It was not immediately clear how many people were detained.

MILAN — An Italian judge says he has convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric from a Milan street in a CIA extraordinary rendition, AP reports.

The American suspects — all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents — are being tried in absentia and are considered fugitives.

In Indonesia, a series of attacks on followers of the Ahmadiyah sect by fanatical Muslims — who consider the movement to be a cult of Islam — continues to draw criticism.

Alfred C. Stepan, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion at Columbia University in New York, an expert in religion and democracy urging the government to exercise its authority when there are violations of human rights.

Indonesia’s staunchly Muslim Aceh province is set to enforce a strict form of Islamic criminal law, including stoning to death married adulterers, a lawmaker says.

Aceh, where separatists had been fighting the Indonesian government since 1976 until a peace deal in 2005, has so far only partially adopted sharia law, which requires modest Muslim dress codes, mandatory prayers five times a day, fasting and the giving of alms to the poor.

In our view, Islamic law is incompatible with modern civilization and should be rejected until Muslims rid Sharia of all laws that violate basic human rights.

A Protestant pastor who says he was tortured while being detained in the Philippines has warned of widespread killings and other attacks against church members in the Asian nation.

Berlin Guerrero of the United Church of Christ testified last week for the United Nations Committee against Torture, amid reports of executions and other abuses carried out by the Philippines’ military. Victims have been accused of supporting rebel groups opposing the government. “Church people have not been spared from torture,” Guerrero told the UN Committee

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.

But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

A new survey suggests the very Americans who claim to follow the Bible most assiduously don’t consult it when forming their views about torture and government policy.

It shows not only are white evangelical Southerners more likely than the general populace to believe torture is sometimes or often justified, but also that they are far more likely—to tweak a phrase from Proverbs—to “lean on their own understanding” regarding the subject.

Legal experts from 95 countries have devised a way of measuring how well leaders, officials and judges are meeting the basic principles of law and human rights. That means the USA no longer has to pretend that it is the standard by which all other countries should be judged.

Also: not coincidentally, Robert Jay Lifton comments on America’s use of torture.

A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader”, according to a new report.

The group was demonstrating today against what they call Scientology’s policy of “disconnect” — in which the friends and family who criticize the religion are allegedly shut out of a member’s life.

Anonymous this time protested Scientology’s human rights violations, in particular the cult’s family-destroying ‘disconnection’ policy.

An Australian man who was a former high-ranking member of the Church of Scientology is calling for the religion to be “totally dismantled” because of the human rights abuses he says it inflicts on its followers.

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