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.

A Muslim Frenchman cited by officials as a reason behind a crackdown on polygamy has been charged with aggravated rape, the state prosecutor said Sunday.Xavier Ronsin said Lies Hebbadj, who lives in the Nantes region of western France, was charged with aggravated rape based on a complaint from a former companion.

Indonesian police have arrested the controversial Muslim preacher Abu Bakir Bashir on terror charges.

Officials said they had proof he was linked a training camp recently discovered in Aceh, West Sumatra.

Another mob attack on Christian worshipers in Bekasi on Sunday has led to renewed calls for police and national leaders to crack down on the apparently swelling tide of religious violence.

About 20 members of the Batak Christian Protestant Church in Pondok Timur Indah were chased and beaten with sticks by a mob believed linked to the hard-line Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) after they tried to conduct Sunday services at a field in Ciketing, Bekasi.

Muslims nationwide have condemned the hard-line Islamic organization for an attack on a church group on Sunday, saying the incident had tarnished the image of Islam.

Around 300 Muslim protestors and 300 police officers surrounded members of the Batak Christian Protestant Church (Huria Kristen Batak Protestan or HKBP) on Sunday (Aug. 1) as they worshiped in an open field in Ciketing, Bekasi, local sources said.

“There were many police on guard, but the attackers were able to get very close to the congregation,” Theophilus Bela, president of the Jakarta Christian Communication Forum, said in a statement to international government and advocacy groups. “We are afraid that they will attack the church again next Sunday.”

Two Christian women in Bangladesh’s northern district of Jamalpur said village officials extorted relatively large sums of money from them – and severely beat the husband of one – for proclaiming Christ to Muslims.

Johura Begum, 42, of Pingna village said a member of the local union council, an area government representative and the father of a police officer threatened to harm her grown daughters if her family did not pay them 20,000 taka (US$283).

Three people were allegedly injured and houses damaged when clashes broke out between an angry mob and members of Islamic sect Jamaah Ahmadiyah in Kuningan regency, West Java, on Thursday.

The Ahmadiyah sect, with 500,000 followers in Indonesia, believes that its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was the final prophet and not Mohammad, contrary to the central tenet of mainstream Islam, which says Mohammad is the last prophet.

Syria’s education minister has issued a decree banning women on university campuses from wearing veils that cover their faces.

The minister’s decree follows a decision last month to dismiss 1200 Syrian school teachers who wear the face veil in class. Education officials, at the time, stressed that Syria was a “secular society,” and that extremism is “unacceptable.”

Suspected Muslim militants shot and killed two Christian men who were due to appear in court on charges of blasphemy against Islam in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Brothers Sajid Emmanuel, 30, and Rashid Emmanuel, 32, were assassinated by masked gun men Monday, July 19, inside a district court building in the city of Faisalabad.

ndonesia’s top Islamic body says it may forbid followers from drinking the world’s most expensive coffee — extracted from the dung of a civet cat — over concerns it is unclean.

Indonesian Muslim groups have been criticized for issuing a raft of fatwa covering the spectrum of human behavior though they have no legal standing and are often ignored by most.

A British lawmaker is refusing to meet female Muslim constituents who wear face-covering veils and has proposed a law banning the practice altogether, he said on Saturday.

The MP, Philip Hollobone, says “God gave us faces to be expressive. It is not just the words we utter but whether we are smiling, sad, angry or frustrated. You don’t get any of that if your face is covered.”

A Swedish court convicted two brothers of trying to burn down the home of an artist whose Prophet Muhammad depiction infuriated some Muslims, and sentenced each of them Thursday to more than two years in prison.

The attempted arson attack was motivated by a controversial 2007 sketch by artist Lars Vilks that depicted Muhammad as a dog, the Helsingborg District Court said. The defendants, aged 19 and 21, were not identified by name due to Swedish privacy rules.

An anti-Islam lawmaker in the Netherlands is forming an international alliance to spread his message across the West in a bid to ban immigration from Islamic countries, among other goals.

Geert Wilders told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday he will launch the movement late this year, initially in five countries: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and Germany.

Two US TV networks have refused to air a controversial advert condemning plans to build a mosque near the site of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York.

either CBS nor NBC, two of the major US television networks, will screen the advert.

On July 13, members of the lower house of the French parliament are expected to vote on a bill that would make it illegal for Muslim women to wear full veils — those that cover all of the face except the eyes — in public places.

Majorities in Germany (71%), Britain (62%) and Spain (59%) would also support a similar ban in their own countries. In contrast, most Americans would oppose such a measure; 65% say they would disapprove of a ban on Muslim women wearing full veils in public places compared with 28% who say they would approve.

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