Free Republic

Karachi, August 17: A Pakistani man sentenced to life imprisonment for blasphemy is being kept in solitary confinement because of fears other inmates will harm him for insulting Islam, police said on Tuesday. Mohammad Younus Sheikh was found guilty last week of writing and distributing books containing blasphemous and sacrilegious material. "In Pakistan, insulting Islam or Islamic teachings is a very sensitive matter and people try to take the law into their own hands," said investigating police officer Mohammad Younis. Other inmates had already picked fights with Sheikh, 40, and he was being kept in a separate cell. "We told...

After banning the press from videotaping its weekly meeting, the Cornell University Student Assembly (SA) rejected the Academic Bill of Rights. Citing the document’s objectives as “redundant,” “irrelevant,” “insulting,” and “objectionable,” the SA determined that academic freedom was unimportant to the Ivy League campus. The Resolution on Academic Freedom — based on David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights — was introduced by a bipartisan coalition of Cornell students, including the editor-in-chief of The Cornell Daily Sun. The resolution stated that the “SA affirms [the] principles of academic freedom and intellectual diversity” and went on to cite six principles: (1) Students...