Publisher challenges genitals picture ban

A publisher has taken to Japan's top court his eight-year fight over the banning of imported images of male genitals in a book of pictures by the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Publisher Takashi Asai told Reuters he expected to win his case because the court had taken the step of agreeing to hear his appeal of a lower court ruling that the book, which includes sado-masochistic homosexual images, was obscene. Asai, who heads a film distribution company, translated and published a collection of Mapplethorpe's works in Japan in 1994, based on imported negatives that customs did not check. But when Asai carried a copy of his book back from the United States in 1999, it was seized by customs officials and he has battled with courts since to reverse the move. Japan's domestic obscenity laws were relaxed in the 1990s to allow pictures of pubic hair, but imported publications are handled by customs and it still bans images of genitals.

Sect holes up in cave to await end of world

At least 30 members of a Russian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves in a remote cave to await the end of the world and are threatening to commit suicide if police intervene, officials and media said Thursday. "They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up," an official in the local prosecutor's office told Reuters by telephone. "They threaten to detonate a gas tank and blow themselves up." The cult members, who include 29 adults and four children, are hidden inside a snow-covered hillside in the Penza region of central Russia. A Penza police spokeswoman said they had moved into the dug-out on November 7. "No one wants to take on the responsibility of provoking them ... because our information is that there are children among them," said the official. They are thought to have taken food and fuel supplies in with them and Russian television pictures from the scene showed smoke or steam coming out of a hole in the snow-covered ravine where it was built. A police patrol was guarding the area to prevent anyone provoking them. "They are simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television station. "They say: 'The church is doing a bad job, the end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves'."