U.S. Copts Association

Sweden’s embassy in Pakistan has expressed regret over the publication of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper.Pakistan had complained about the cartoon, which depicted the head of the Prophet on the body of a dog.
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By Bridget Johnson

Democracy and the hunger for free speech are creeping across repressive societies, and the revolutionaries leading this charge are often the unlikeliest of soldiers - lone thinkers with minds for change and keyboards as their weapons. Linked to other warriors via the Internet, bloggers are finding that their views from politics to religion to pop culture share a unifying battle cry: a desire to speak freely.

Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, a 22-year-old Egyptian student, blogged under the name “Kareem Amer” starting in 2004. He captured authorities’ attention the next year. Soliman denounced attacks he witnessed by Muslims on Coptic Christian establishments and panned extremist views taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo - and risked his life in the process. Things only got worse for Soliman.
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Chhattisgarh chief questions religious double standard, excessive state control.

NEW DELHI, August 30 (Compass Direct News) - The governor of Chhattisgarh has objected to excessive government control and a religious double standard in a state “anti-conversion” amendment bill proposed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Chhattisgarh state Gov. Ekkadu Srinivasan Lakshmi Narsimhan raised objections to two provisions in the bill - obtaining permission from the district collector (administrative head) before any conversion, and “allowing people to return to Hinduism and not treating this as conversion,” reported news agency Press Trust of India on August 22.

Gov. Narsimhan has reportedly referred the bill to the state law department for assessment.

Such “anti-conversion” laws are used to levy false accusations of “forcible conversion” at Christians. Similar bills introduced by the BJP are facing obstacles in three other states: Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
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UNITED NATIONS (CNN) — Workers found vials believed to contain the poison gas phosgene at a U.N. office building in New York, U.N. officials said Thursday.

U.N. archivists for UNMOVIC, the U.N. chemical weapons agency, unexpectedly turned up samples of material from an Iraqi chemical weapons plant in old files on Friday, U.N. officials said.

The samples were in weapons inspectors’ files dating back to the 1990s, but the substance is not believed to pose any immediate danger, the officials said.

The building where the samples turned up is several blocks away from main U.N. Secretariat building along New York’s East River. Tests found no toxic vapors in the offices, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.
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By Syed Shoaib Hasan
BBC News, Islamabad

Pakistani police have detained two people in connection with the murder of a bishop and his wife in Islamabad.

Police said that Bishop Arif Khan and his wife were shot dead at their home in the capital on Wednesday night.
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Key organisational failures that left Virginia Tech student Seung-hui Cho free to kill 32 people should never be repeated, Virginia’s governor has said.Tim Kaine lamented a series of “missed opportunities” that allowed Cho to remain at large despite serious concerns over his mental health.
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The case of Mohammad Hegazi, young Egyptian converted to Christianity, who wishes to be legally recognized as such, has opened a new debate in the Islamic world on conversions, which are often seen as acts of apostasy that merit death. What has emerged is a veritable obsession in Islam for personal conversions, this religion having been reduced more to an ethnic and sociological submission. There is even talk of a plan to convert Europe and the world to Islam, to which European governments are giving a hand. The first part in an analysis by Fr Samir Khalil Samir, Egyptian Jesuit, expert on Islam.
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A STUDENT facing terrorism charges spoke of attending “training groups” in Edinburgh, a court heard today.

Mohammed Atif Siddique, 21, also told a fellow student how he wanted to be a suicide bomber, blow up Glasgow and that he had met Osama bin Laden.

He is facing five charges including possessing, collecting and distributing terrorist propaganda and providing instructional material for bomb making.
Siddique, from Alva in Clackmannanshire, denies all the charges.

At the High Court in Glasgow, Razia Hussain said the accused made a series of claims while they were studying computing at Glasgow Metropolitan College.
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Egyptian movement seeks to hold up privatisation on ground that government cannot be trusted.
By Will Rasmussen - CAIRO

An Egyptian former public-sector manager says a movement he began earlier this year is mobilising opposition to the government’s privatisation programme and has started to have some effect on the pace of sales.

Yehia Hussein Abdel Hady said in an interview that his campaign group, called “No To Selling Egypt”, wants all sales of state assets halted, on the grounds that the government cannot be trusted to dispose of companies properly and has seriously undersold some state assets.
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The Lebanese government and Hezbollah have condemned a watchdog report which criticises Hezbollah’s conduct in the conflict against Israel last year. The report by Human Rights Watch accuses Hezbollah of “indiscriminately and at times deliberately” targeting Israeli civilians.

The group called off the report’s launch in Beirut on Thursday on hearing that Hezbollah planned to disrupt it.
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