Playboy magazine is to terminate its Portuguese edition after an outcry over a photo shoot depicting Jesus Christ alongside topless models. It emerged yesterday that the Portuguese version of the men's magazine had recruited Christ as an unlikely cover star in a purported photo tribute to the late author Jose Saramago.

The pictures show an airbrushed, idealised Jesus with familiar centre-parting, long hair, beard and robes radiating an unearthly glow as he watches various topless models. Two women enjoy a lesbian clinch, another reads a book, a fourth seems to be a prostitute touting for business while the last woman appears to have died in Christ's arms.

We did not see or approve the cover and pictorial in the July issue of Playboy Portugal, a spokeswoman for Hugh Hefner's empire told Gawker. It is a shocking breach of our standards, and we would not have allowed it to be published if we had seen it in advance.

As a result of this and other issues with the Portuguese publisher, we are in the process of terminating our agreement.

Jose Saramago's 1991 novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is a fictional retelling of the life of Christ, seen from his perspective. Its publication caused outrage because it depicts a human, passionate Christ who ends up firmly opposed to God's plan to create a new religion through him.

In one particularly criticised scene, a shepherd tries, unsuccessfully, to persuade Christ to have sex with a sheep. The book caused such controversy in Catholic Portugal that Saramago moved to the Canary Islands to escape, dying there on June 18 this year.

Sports Illustrated magazine has been cleared of blasphemy in South Africa.

The ruling followed a complaint by a member of the public against an article in the March edition about the pursuit of sporting perfection.

Deputy press ombudsman Johan Retief said the article included a joke about St Peter and Jesus playing golf in heaven.

He said the joke went that when Jesus hooked his first tee-shot, an angel guided the ball back into play, the dove of peace caught the ball in its beak and dropped it on the green, from where the holy spirit blew the ball into the hole.

So St Peter said to Jesus: 'Do you wanna play golf or do you wanna fuck around?'

Retief said the complainant, André Williams, maintained the article went too far by telling a joke about Jesus, and that the word fuck was a swearword that amounted to blasphemy.

However Retief said that in the joke, St Peter felt done in, and that Jesus was not playing fair: The phrase 'fuck around' is used to express this feeling, and does not as such amount to swearing. 'Fuck you' would have been swearing. Although it can be said that the use of the phrase 'fuck around' constitutes bad taste, it does not, by definition, amount to a breach of the Press Code.

Retief dismissed the complaint.

A woman complained to the Press Complaints Commission that an article headlined Wanted! The Epic Boobs girl!, published in the February 2010 edition of Loaded, intruded into her privacy. The complaint was not upheld.

The article featured a number of photographs of the complainant - who was said to have the best breasts on the block - taken from the internet and offered readers of the magazine a reward of £500 for assistance in encouraging her to do a photo shoot with it.

The complainant said that the article was intrusive: the magazine had published her name and the photographs, which had been uploaded to her Bebo site in December 2006 when she was 15 years old, had been taken from there and published without permission.

The publication of the article had caused her upset and embarrassment. The magazine said that that it had not taken the photographs from the complainant's Bebo site; rather, they were widely available on the internet. The complainant's photograph, for example, came up in the top three in a Google image search on the word boobs. At the time of complaint, there were 1,760,000 matches that related to her and 203,000 image matches of her as the Epic Boobs girl. Moreover, the complainant's name had been widely circulated and achieved over 100,000 Google hits, including over 8,000 photographs.

PCC Decision: Not Upheld

This case raised the important principle of the extent to which newspapers and magazines are able to make use of information that is already freely available online. The Commission has previously published decisions about the use of material uploaded to social networking sites, which have gone towards establishing a set of principles in this area.

However, this complaint was different: the magazine had not taken the material from the complainant's Bebo site; rather it had published a piece commenting on something that had widespread circulation online (having been taken from the Bebo page sometime ago by others) and was easily accessed by Google searches.

The Commission did not think it was possible for it to censure the magazine for commenting on material already given a wide circulation, and which had already been contextualised in the same specific way, by many others. Although the Code imposes higher standards on the press than exist for material on unregulated sites, the Commission felt that the images were so widely established for it to be untenable for the Commission to rule that it was wrong for the magazine to use them.

That said, the Commission wished to make clear that it had some sympathy with the complainant. The fact that she was fifteen-years-old when the images were originally taken - although she is an adult now - only added to the questionable tastefulness of the article. However, issues of taste and offence - and any question of the legality of the material - could not be ruled upon by the Commission, which was compelled to consider only the terms of the Editors' Code. The Code does include references to children but the complainant was not a child at the time the article was published.

The test, therefore, was whether the publication intruded into the complainant's privacy, and the Code required the Commission to have regard to the extent to which material is already in the public domain. In the Commission's view, the information, in the same form as published in the magazine, was widely available to such an extent that its republication did not raise a breach of the Code. The complaint was not upheld on that basis.