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Hooker beating: What if you read the Bible AND play GTA5?

Plus: 'I'll try not to play Candy Crush in Parliament in future'

QuoTW Angry Aussie gamers were up in arms this week after Target and Kmart pulled Grand Theft Auto V from sale in the country.

The shops dumped the game after a petition on Change.org claimed that GTA5 “encourages players to murder women for entertainment”:

The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points – and now Target are stocking it and promoting it for your Xmas stocking.

This is Grand Theft Auto 5. This game means that after various sex acts, players are given options to kill women by punching her unconscious, killing with a machete, bat or guns to get their money returned.

Target’s GM of corporate affairs Jim Cooper didn’t quite agree with the premise of the argument, but he was swayed by the amount of feedback from customers:

While these products often contain imagery that some customers find offensive, in the vast majority of cases, we believe they are appropriate products for us to sell to adult customers.

However, in the case of GTA5, we have listened to the strong feedback from customers that this is not a product they want us to sell.

But gamers aren’t about to take this lying down. They’ve started a Change.org petition of their own that’s trying to get another bastion of sex, violence and misogyny banned – the Holy Bible:

The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'god' points – and now Target are stocking it and promoting it for your Xmas stocking.

This is The Holy Bible. This book means that after various sex acts, readers are given options to kill women by stoning her unconscious, Setting them on fire, cutting off their hands, and killing their children!

One of many fan passages on In The Holy Bible depicts woman being set alight for having sex "And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire." (Leviticus 21:9).

This misogynistic book literally makes a game of bashing, killing and horrific violence against women. It also links sexual arousal and violence.

So far, the petition has racked up nearly 60,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, top penguin Linus Torvalds has released a new version of his eponymous kernel, numbering 3.18, with better sleep and resumption for Linux servers and more support for the Flash-Friendly File-System. There’s also more support for graphics devices from NVIDIA and AMD. But what it hasn’t done is solved the bug in 3.17. Torvalds said:

I'd love to say that we've figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven't.

In the UK, a Conservative MP found himself in a bit of bother when he was caught on camera by The Sun playing Candy Crush Saga on his iPad instead of talking about national pension reforms like he was supposed to be doing.

Nigel Mills was apparently tinkering about on the addictive puzzle game over two and a half hours during a committee meeting, although he only admitted to a “game or two”. Mills said:

It was a long meeting on pension reforms, which is an important issue that I take very seriously.

There was a bit of the meeting that I wasn’t focusing on and I probably had a game or two.

I shouldn’t do it but if you check the meeting I would say I was fully engaged in asking questions that I thought were particularly important in how we get the pensions issue right.

[I’ll] try not to do it in future.

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