The appeal for the Church of Scientology’s conviction on fraud has opened in a Paris court.

The cult’s defense lawyersh plan to argue during the appeal that the conviction curtails freedom of religion and association.

One of the first women to be arrested for breaking France’s burka ban today announced that she was standing for President.

Her campaign will be bankrolled by a number of influential pro-Islam support groups and influential millionaires.

Two Muslim women wearing full face veils have been arrested within hours of France’s burka ban becoming a law, as they were taking part in a demonstration against the new measure in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris

A law banning the wearing of garments that cover the face in public has today come into force in France — the first European country to impose such a ban. Penalties for forcing a person to wear a burqa are part of the law.

The ban is seen as primarily affecting Muslim women who wear the niqab or burqa.

The daughter of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen came under fire for comparing Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques in France to the Nazi occupation., AFP reports

Marine Le Pen said Friday at a rally of the anti-immigrant National Front that there were “ten to fifteen” places in France where Muslims worshipped in the streets outside mosques when these were full.

“For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it’s about occupation, then we could also talk about it (Muslim prayers in the streets), because that is occupation of territory,” she said at the gathering in Lyon.

“It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply. It’s an occupation,” she said at the rally that was part of her bid to take the party leadership when her father steps down in January.

The comments sparked condemnation from politicians from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party and from the opposition Socialists and the Greens.

The French parliament passed a law Tuesday prohibiting wearing a full-face veil in public, meaning a ban will come into force early next year if it is not overturned by senior judges.

The Senate passed the bill by 246 votes to one. The bill already cleared the lower house in July, and will now be reviewed by the Constitutional Council, which has a month to confirm its legality.

The French parliament unanimously approved a resolution that would declare the full facial veil known as a burqa as an affront to French values, paving the way for a full-fledged ban on the garment worn by a small minority of French Muslim women.

If the bill becomes law, France would be the second country in Europe after Belgium to prohibit the wearing of the full veil in public.

PARIS — A parliamentary panel will recommend on Tuesday that France ban face-covering Muslim veils in public locations such as hospitals and schools, but not in private buildings or on the street, the group’s president said.

The decision appeared to indicate that the 32-member, multiparty panel had heeded warnings that a full ban of the all-encompassing veils would be unfair, possibly unconstitutional, and could even cause trouble in a country where Islam is the second largest religion.

A 2004 law already bans Muslim headscarves in classrooms.

Five years ago bombings and riots fuelled anxiety that Europe’s Muslims were on the verge of mass radicalisation. Those predictions have not been borne out, The Observer writes.

Polls have found that Muslim communities are profoundly influenced by their countries of residence. French Muslims have absorbed the values of France, and are more secular than their German counterparts, for example.

A government report warns that religious sects are on the increase in France, tripling in the last 15 years to reach at least 600 different movements across the country.

The report also denounces a huge increase in unqualified therapists, warning that sects are using the personality coaching and self-help trends to target impressionable people.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined Muslim groups Sunday in condemning attackers who set fire to a mosque in a Lyon suburb, and hundreds gathered outside the building to protest against racism and Islamophobia.

The fire at the mosque in the Lyon suburb of Saint-Priest was started early Saturday before morning prayers and caused damage to the entrance, walls and religious books before being put out.

Europe’s human rights court has thrown out a complaint by two French Muslim girls who were expelled from their school for refusing to remove their headscarves during sports lessons.

France, which takes secularism in state schools very seriously, passed a law in 2004 banning pupils from wearing conspicuous signs of their religion at school after a decade of bitter debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in class.

Extraordinarily for secular France, in the Alsace-Moselle region the state not only helps to finance the construction of places of worship but also approves the appointments of clergy members and even pays their salaries. But not for Islam.

Plus: France has only four Muslim schools. So the 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become a refuge for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics and higher academic standards.

A series of highly publicized incidents involving Muslim women has reinforced popular perceptions that an intolerant, sexist brand of Islam is on the march in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim population.

Yet religion experts, and many Muslims, caution against easy stereotypes. Far from submissive, they say, Muslim women are looking for a fit between their faith and the highly secularized society around them.

A Muslim member of the French government has backed a court’s decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears the burqa.

Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara said she hoped last month’s ruling would “dissuade certain fanatics from imposing the burqa on their wives”.

She told the newspaper, Le Parisien, the head-to-toe garment was a “prison”.