The Satanic Temple (TST) filed suit against the city of Boston, Massachusetts. The city provides council members the choice of who gives the invocation before each meeting when they should be accepting requests from any community member to cite the prayer without regard for which deity they worship.
Authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province publicly caned two gay men — a total of 77 times each — with rattan sticks.
In Aceh's Tamansari city park, dozens of citizens witnessed the cruel enforcement of sharia law. Human rights activists chided Indonesia's authorities for the sadistic showcase.
In a July 2020 interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Adrian Zenz, a German academic, explained how his opinion of the Communist Party of China’s actions in the Xinjiang region of Western China have changed. He once argued that China's actions are a "cultural genocide" as opposed to a literal one. But since recent developments regarding the suppression of birth rates among minorities of Xinjiang, Zenz now says that "we do need to probably call it genocide."
Three female Polish activists are on trial, facing two years in prison for offending religious feelings. They created an image of the Virgin Mary, Poland's sacred icon, wearing a rainbow halo.
The indictment follows an incident in April 2019, when posters and stickers bearing a rainbow-haloed version of the Black Madonna appeared near a church in Płock, a city in central Poland.The doctored image traded the golden halos around the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus with representations of a rainbow flag, a common symbol of the LGBT community.
According to his friends, Munawar Faruqui was "shaken" with a foreboding that something might happen after the video of his April 2020 performance, which led to FIRs against Faruqui, and hashtags trended on social media demanding his arrest.
Munawar Faruqui was detained following a complaint by members of a right-wing vigilante group in India. He was denied bail twice despite officials saying they had no video evidence of him "insulting" Hindu deities.
Uighur people live in northwestern China's Xinjiang province and are mostly a Muslim minority group. In June, the Associated Press (AP) found that the Chinese government mandates inhumane birth control measures on ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
According to the scholar Adrian Zenz, population growth in Xinjiang has declined dramatically in recent years. Growth rates in the two largest Uighur prefectures have fallen by 84% between 2015 and 2018 and continued further decline in 2019.
According to police, a Mumbai-based comedian, Munawar Faruqui, is alleged to have "mocked Hindu gods and goddesses" during his show. The Madhya Pradesh Police arrested and booked the comedian for alleged derogatory comments about Hindu deities on Saturday, January 1, 2021, NDTV reported. Authorities also allege the Monroe Cafe organizers presented the New Year's Day comedy event "without permission" from the city of Indore.