WASHINGTON-The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) today announced its 2008 recommendations to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs.  The 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) requires that the United States designate as CPCs those countries whose governments have engaged in or tolerated systematic and egregious violations of the universal right to freedom of religion or belief.  ¼br> (more…)

Police pressure convert to return to Islam during ‘illegal’ five-day detention.

ALGIERS, Algeria, May 9 (Compass Direct News) - An Algerian Christian detained five days for carrying a Bible and personal Bible study books was handed a 300-euro (US$460) fine and a one-year suspended prison sentence last week, an Algerian church leader said.

Last Tuesday (April 29) a court in Djilfa, 150 miles south of Algiers, charged the 33-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity with “printing, storing and distributing” illegal religious material. A written copy of the verdict has yet to be issued.
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KABUL (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents have ordered residents of a province near the capital Kabul to stop watching television, saying the networks were showing un-Islamic programs, officials and local media said on Tuesday.

The order is the last in a wave of curbs that the resurgent militants have announced in areas they are active.
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He also called for Israel to allow greater mobility for Palestinians, including travel to places of worship, “so that they too can enjoy greater peace and security”.
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It follows a week of clashes between supporters of the Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition.

The latest violence has left more than 60 people dead.
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Sudan arrested Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi and at least four other members of his party on Monday after an attack by Darfur rebels on the capital, which has led to the rupture of ties between Sudan and neighbouring Chad.

“Security forces came to our house this morning and arrested my husband Beshir (Adam Rahma),” his wife Israa Mohammed al-Beshir said.
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A textbook used by the first-year students at Cairo University’s faculty of arts is the History of the Arab Islamic State , authored by none other than Mohamed Barakat al-Biali who heads the Islamic History Department at the same faculty.
In 308 large-size pages, the book tackles Islamic history from the Mohammedan [prophetic] mission until the fall of the Umayyad State, with the life of the Prophet Mohamed taking up 123 pages. Given that the book is a history textbook taught in a civil-not a religious-university, one would assume it would stick to historical facts. But this is far from the case; the book brims with material that lies strictly within the domain of faith. Christian students must acknowledge in the examinations that the Torah and the Bible currently in use are misquotations of previous versions that included prophesies of the coming of Mohamed and that have consequently been disfigured by ‘Zionists’, and that the only true religion before God is Islam.
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In the wee hours of dawn last Monday, the police knocked on the door of Bahiya Nagy al-Sissy in the small east-Delta town of Mit Ghamr, woke the family up, and arrested her. Bahiya is a 34-year old Coptic peasant woman, and she was caught in order to serve a three year prison sentence she was handed, together with her 36-year-old sister Shadya, in absentia in 2000 by a criminal court. Bahiya’s and Shadya’s crime: forgery, even though there were no forged documents to indict them in the first place. The two sisters were born Christian, had lived and had married as Christians, and had Christian children. The court, however, considered that they should have been Muslim according to their father’s brief conversion to Islam more than thirty years ago. Shadya and Bahiya had then been children and were ignorant of their father’s conversion, especially that he later reverted to his original Christianity. The story was kept secret by the father, but surfaced in 1996 when Ramadan Hassan Hussein, a forger, was arrested and, among his confessions, related how he had helped Sissy acquire Christian identity papers which were practically almost impossible to obtain once he had reverted to Christianity.

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