A law has come into force in Belgium banning women from wearing the full Islamic veil in public.

As of Saturday, any woman wearing the face-covering burqa or niqab in public risks a fine of 137 euros ($197) or up to seven days in jail.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said Sunday that communities should be able to prevent the construction of mosques in their neighborhoods.

Cain said his view doesn’t amount to religious discrimination because he says Muslims are trying to inject Shariah law into the U.S.

Enraged Muslims burned down several Christian-owned homes, surrounded a church and threatened to kill a priest last week in two unrelated incidents in Upper Egypt.

Salafis have made a series of attacks and threats against Coptic Christians since the fall of the Hosni Mubarak regime on Feb. 11.

A court in Amsterdam has acquitted MP Geert Wilders of charges of inciting hatred and insulting Muslims as a group.

The charges had been brought by individuals who felt they had been discriminated against by the anti-Islam nationalist MP.

Pakistan police this month tortured a young Christian woman into revealing the whereabouts of the legal team helping her family after an influential Muslim family kidnapped her and her sister, sources said.

Police also helped the Muslim family beat relatives of the Christian woman on court premises and attacked the offices of the organization trying to help her family, they said.

A group of Malaysian Muslim women is to launch a new platform called The Obedient Wife Club that aims to curb social ills like divorce, domestic violence and prostitution.

Wives who sign up will be given instruction in how to “obey, serve and entertain” their husbands to promote marital harmony and cut the risk their spouses will stray or misbehave.

Convicting a Christian convert for insulting the prophet of Islam, a judge in Algeria last week stunned the Christian community by sentencing him beyond what a prosecutor recommended.

In Oran, 470 kilometers (292 miles) west of Algiers, a criminal court in the city’s Djamel district on Wednesday (May 25) sentenced Siaghi Krimo to a prison term of five years for giving a CD about Christianity to a neighbor who subsequently claimed he had insulted Muhammad. Krimo was also fined 200,000 Algerian dinars (US$2,760), according to Algerian news reports.

Hundreds of Muslims, angered by the prospect of a government-closed church re-opening in their neighborhood, protested outside the church yesterday, causing the provisional military authority to back away from its promise to allow Orthodox clergy to reopen it.

Protestors started gathering on Thursday afternoon (May 19) outside the Church of the Virgin Mary and St. Abraam in Ain Shams, a poor section of northeastern Cairo. The church was scheduled to reopen that day, but protestors surrounded the building, preventing anyone from getting into it and trapping priests who were inside.

Christians from a local Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) congregation in this Plateau state town have been displaced after Muslim extremists set their church building and some homes on fire last month.

Attacks on Christians in the town go back to 2001, when the only Christian to ever become a council chairperson, identified only as Nimfel, was murdered following an outbreak of violence between Muslims and Christians in Plateau State, central Nigeria.

As she lay on the ground after being shot and then slashed with a machete by Muslim extremists, Dune James Rike looked into her husband’s tear-filled eyes and asked, “Is this the end between us, so we shall not be together again?”

Pastor James Musa Rike told Compass he held the hands of his dying, 35-year-old wife and told her, “Hold on to your faith in Jesus, and we shall meet and never part again.”

Holy drinking water contaminated with arsenic is being sold illegally to Muslims by UK shops, the BBC has found.

ZamZam water is taken from a well in Mecca and is considered sacred to Muslims, but samples from the source suggested it held high levels of arsenic.

Hundreds of Muslims in Gujranwala on Saturday attacked homes of Christians, a school and a Presbyterian church building after learning that police had released two Christians accused of “blasphemy” – amid reports of another alleged desecration of the Quran.

The riots compelled a large number of Christian families to flee, as they feared the kind of large-scale violence that occurred in Gojra on Aug. 1, 2009, when at least seven Christians were burned alive by Muslim mobs after the spread of a rumor of blasphemy.

Osama bin Laden‘s burial at sea was quickly criticised by Muslim scholars who claimed it had breached sharia law and warned that it may provoke calls for revenge attacks against US targets.

Others used the sea burial question to question whether he was dead at all, with doubts fuelled by the absence of authentic photographs of his corpse.

The Finsbury Park mosque in north London served as a “haven” for Islamic extremists as the capital became a central hub in the worldwide movement of Muslim militants, US documents seen by WikiLeaks showed Monday.

The files, written by senior US military commanders at Guantanamo Bay, called the Finsbury Park mosque “an attack planning and propaganda production base” and named preachers Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza as key recruiters.

Danish artist Kurt Westergaard, known for his controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, said Friday he had not been informed of a trial against him in Jordan and said he would in any case not attend.

“I have not done anything illegal in Denmark. I only did my job and I will always defend the right to freedom of expression,” he said, reiterating meanwhile that he had “never had the intention to offend Muslims and their faith with my caricature.”

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