On July 22, 2021, the Atheist Republic received a letter containing a legal complaint filed by Akhilesh Vyas, a lawyer based in Punjab, India. The legal complaint named Nirmal Sharma, a law student and a resident of Nawanshahr in the Punjab State, as the complainant. Vyas issued the notice on June 22, 2021.
For 14 years in a row, statistics for Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, are still declining. In 2020, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) saw crucialcomponents falling, including membership, attendance, donations, and the total number of congregations.
On May 24, 2021, the central government-supervised Delhi Police Special Cell raided Twitter India's Delhi and Gurgaon offices concerning the social media outlet tagging BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra's tweet on "congress toolkit" as "manipulated media". As social media platforms are under fire from the central government to hand over rights of policing content, the freedom of speech in India takes another hit as the government unleashes police force on Twitter for not favouring the ruling party on its platform.
NBC News interviewed a handful of former students (or ex-interns) regarding a Christian leadership training program at Bethany Church in Baton Rouge, LA. These ex-interns attested that the program was abnormally brutal. They described their disturbing experiences.
On April 28th, 2020, Mubarak Bala (age 37), an Ex-Muslim atheist and President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was apprehended at his home and then taken to the northern state of Kano. There he faced blasphemy accusations from religious figures. Blasphemy is punishable by death in the region where sharia law is enforced on Muslims despite Nigeria’s own Constitution.
On April 23rd, at least 45 people were killed, and approximately 150 others were treated for injuries after a stampede crushed them at a religious festival in Israel. Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered in celebration at one of the most significant events in the country.
On the morning of Tuesday April 20th, the Canadian Province of Quebec announced plans to appeal a ruling which exempted minority teachers and some politicians from wearing religious attire or symbols.
The ruling, that supports much of a 2019 law, does not apply to teachers in Quebec's English-language school boards, as they hold special rights over education under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
