Eleven Danes have been summoned to appear before the Jordanian public prosecutor to answer charges of blasphemy and threatening the national peace. They include the cartoonist who drew one of the Mohammed cartoons and editors from 10 of the 17 newspapers that reprinted them.

The group behind the announcement is called The Prophet Unites Us, a union of Jordanian media organisations, organisations and private individuals.
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Osama al-Bettar, the group's lawyer, said that if the Danes do not appear, the next step will be to inform Interpol and seek their arrest.
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The case is being brought under changes made to the Jordanian Justice Act in 2006.

The mayor of a Greek island has defied the threat of prosecution to carry out the country's first gay "marriages".

Two men and two women were "married" by Tassos Alfieris in the ceremonies on the eastern Aegean island of Tilos.
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Although homosexual practices were widely tolerated in ancient Greece, the modern nation is exceedingly hostile towards gays, he adds. The conservative Greek Orthodox Church has expressed strong objections, and the country's Justice Minister, Sotiris Hatzigakis, said he believed gay marriages were illegal.

Two Spanish men have been arrested in The Gambia accused of making homosexual advances to taxi drivers, police say.

Last month, President Yahya Jammeh[] threatened to behead gay people at a political rally and said they had 24 hours to leave the country.

Mr Jammeh's statements have been condemned by gay rights activists but the AP news agency says it was backed by the country's Supreme Islamic Council, which said the president had taken a "principled stand".

Gay rights activists have condemned Gambian President Yahya Jammeh's threat to behead homosexuals.

Last week he told a political rally that gay people had 24 hours to leave the country.

He promised "stricter laws than Iran" on homosexuality and said he would "cut off the head" of any gay person found in The Gambia.

Correspondents say a number of homosexual men have fled to The Gambia from neighbouring Senegal after a crackdown there following arrests at a "gay wedding" in February.

Both countries are predominantly Muslim and President Jammeh cultivates an image of being a devout Muslim.

A top Iranian judiciary official has warned against the "destructive" cultural and social consequences of importing Barbie dolls and other Western toys.

Prosecutor General Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi said in an official letter to Vice President Parviz Davoudi that the Western toys was a "danger" that needed to be stopped.

Iranian markets have been inundated with smuggled Western toys in recent years partly due to a dramatic rise in purchasing power as a result of huge increase in oil revenues.

In Monday's letter, Najafabadi called for a crackdown on the smuggling of these toys which threatened Iranian culture.

We take all of our human rights commitments seriously and, in our good faith efforts to meet those commitments, we value the vital role played by civil society and independent media. We do not consider views about our performance voiced by others in the international community to be interference in our internal affairs, nor should other governments regard expressions about their performance as such. Indeed, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is the right and the responsibility of "every individual and every organ of society to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance."

Violence and legal and societal discrimination against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals; trafficking in persons; and incitement to anti-Semitism remained problems.
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On August 6, the general prosecutor ordered to close the last major reformist daily Shargh. The ban placed on Shargh in September 2006 was lifted on May 14, but the paper was operational for less than three months before being closed again. The government reportedly closed the newspaper in response to a published interview with a writer accused of being a homosexual activist.
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In 2004 the judiciary formed the Special Protection Division, a volunteer unit that monitored and reported moral crimes. The law prohibited and punished homosexuality; sodomy between consenting adults was a capital crime. The punishment of a non-Muslim homosexual was harsher if the homosexual's partner was Muslim. At a speech at Columbia University in September, the president publicly denied the existence of homosexuals in the country.

An Iranian homosexual man who has said he will be executed if he is deported from the Netherlands has had his claim for asylum overturned.

Mehdi Kazemi has said his life is in danger if he is returned to Iran, where he says his boyfriend named him as a partner before being executed. Homosexual acts are illegal in the Islamic republic.

A Dutch spokesman said Mr Kazemi would now be sent to the UK, the first European country he entered. A claim for asylum in the UK had already been turned down.
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Mr Kazemi, 19, said he had travelled to Britain in 2005 to study English, and learned that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy, his lawyer Borg Palm said.

After his asylum application was turned down, he fled to the Netherlands in 2006, having narrowly avoided being sent back to Iran.
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The Dutch are refusing to consider the case. Under the EU's 2003 Dublin Regulation, the state the applicant first enters is responsible for processing their application.

The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday that pictures showed the bombers had Down syndrome and likely did not know they were being used in Friday's attacks.
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"It appears the suicide bombers were not willing martyrs, they were used by al-Qaida for these horrific attacks," he said. "These two women were likely used because they didn't understand what was happening and they were less likely to be searched."

Police in Senegal have arrested several men following the publication of pictures claiming to depict a wedding ceremony between two men.
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Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country and gay men and women remain socially marginalised.

An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.

The student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, who also works for a local newspaper, was charged with insulting Muhammad by calling the prophet "a killer and adulterer," the judge, Shamsurahman Muhmand, said in a telephone interview.

The sentence was denounced as unfair by Mr. Kambakhsh's family and journalists' organizations. Mr. Kambakhsh's brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, denied that his sibling had committed blasphemy, and said that his brother was not given enough time to prepare his defense and was denied a lawyer.
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The case is the third time that clerics have called for death for a blasphemer in the six years since the removal of the Taliban leadership and reflects the deep conservatism that prevails even under the more liberal government of President Hamid Karzai.

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.

He's forty, she's eleven. And they are a couple — the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. "We needed the money", Ghulam's parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan's Ghor province know better: "Our men don't want educated women." They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

(Photo by Stephanie Sinclair.)

Overworked nurses have been ordered to stop their work five times a day — and move Muslim patients' beds to face towards Mecca.

The procedure is creating turmoil among staff on NHS wards already struggling through a lack of beds.
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One nurse at Dewsbury said: "It would be easier to create Muslim-only wards with every bed facing Mecca. Some people might think it is not that big a deal but we have a huge Muslim population in Dewsbury. If we are having to turn dozens of beds to face Mecca five times a day, plus provide running water for them to wash before and after prayers, it is bound to impact on the essential medical service we are supposed to be providing."

But we also are keen to accommodate all faiths, for example if a patient is Roman Catholic then we would try and ensure they can receive Holy Communion.

Ms. Gibbons, 54, asked a 7-year-old girl to bring in a teddy bear and asked her classmates to pick a name for it.

"They came up with eight names including Abdullah, Hassan and Muhammad," [the school's director] said.

When it came time to vote, 20 out of 23 children choose Muhammad, one of the most common names in the Muslim world.

is known as one of the more expensive private schools in Khartoum. The students are the children of wealthy Sudanese families and foreign diplomats, a mix of mostly Muslims and Christians, and the lessons are in English.

One recent afternoon, vice squad Lieutenant Murad Qendah got a radio call telling him a suspect was spotted in the street imbibing karoub -- a local soft drink made from carob pods. He ordered his six-man squad to seize the man's papers pending investigation. Police say violators are usually held for 24 hours.

"If anybody violates respect for Ramadan in the street, we take their identity papers and hold them for investigation," said Qendah, 27, whose officers wear red shoulder badges that say "morality police."
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"The duty of the morality police is to preserve public manners in public places and to preserve the feelings of the people who are fasting," he said. "Violating the holiness of Ramadan is a violation of people's freedom."

In a recent episode of Saudi Arabia's most popular television show airing during Ramadan this month, a Saudi man of the future is seen sitting in his house as his daughter pulls into the driveway, her kids piled into the back of the car.

"Where have you been?" the father asks.

"The kids were bored, so I took them to the movies," she replies, matter-of-factly, as she gets out of the driver's seat.

The suicide bomber behind last week's attack at an Algerian naval barracks which killed 30 was a 15-year-old student, according to a statement from Al-Qaeda's self-styled offshoot quoted Monday.

Nabil Belkacemi, who carried out Saturday's blast at the port town of Dellys, 70 kilometres (45 miles) east of Algiers, had assumed the nom-de-guerre Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after a Jordanian Al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in Iraq, the Al-Watan daily said, quoting the statement.
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"He spent the night in the mosque and then he disappeared," [his mother] told Al-Watan. "He called me on a cellphone and asked me not to worry and said he would be back soon. It was ten days before a critical school exam," she said.

But in another telephone call, he said: "Mother, I am scared, I don't know where I am. I would like to escape but I am scared they (the Islamists) will kill you. They told me that if I ever escaped, they would take it out on you.

Iranian police have closed more than 20 barbers' shops in the capital Tehran.

The authorities say the barbers were encouraging un-Islamic behaviour by offering Western hairstyles, tattooing and also eyebrow-plucking for men.

Police say they have inspected more than 700 shops during a two-week crackdown in the city.

The move is part of an annual campaign against what is known locally as bad hijab, or un-Islamic clothing, that this year is also targeting men.

Hundreds of people held an anti-gay protest in Uganda's capital Tuesday, denouncing what they called an "immoral" lifestyle and demanding the deportation of an American journalist writing about gay rights in the deeply conservative country.
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Last week, [Katherine] Roubos covered a news conference in Kampala where Uganda's gay community spoke out publicly for the first time. The participants wore masks to hide their identities for fear of recrimination, but asked for Ugandans to respect their rights and allow them to live in dignity.

Demonstrators at Tuesday's event, organized by a coalition of Christian, Muslim and Bahai groups, accused Roubos of advocating for gay rights in the country.

The Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Nsaba Buturo, also attended the protest and said the government supported the enforcement of existing anti-gay laws.

"We people of Uganda have values. If this lady cannot respect them then she had better be deported," said Eddie Semakula, a member of the coalition. "She is advocating for the rights of homosexuals in a paper that is read by children even. We must protect our children."

A detained Iranian-American academic accused of conspiring against the government was freed on bail Tuesday from the Tehran prison where she had been jailed since early May, a top judiciary official said.

Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been jailed largely incommunicado at Tehran's Evin prison on charges of acting against national security.

Mohammad Shadabi, an official at the Tehran prosecutor's office, told The Associated Press she was freed on $333,000 bail. Shadabi said he could not say whether Esfandiari would be allowed to leave Iran.

A one-legged Emirati father of 78 is lining up his next two wives in a bid to reach his target of 100 children by 2015[.]

Daad Mohammed Murad Abdul Rahman, 60, has already had 15 brides although he has to divorce them as he goes along to remain within the legal limit of four wives at a time.

With the Russian population in steady decline, the region of Ulyanovsk has declared Sept. 12 "The Day Of Conception," and anyone in the region who has a child exactly nine months later will win money, cars and other prizes.

Several eastern European countries would forgive Libyan debt dating back to the Cold War under a proposal to compensate families whose children were allegedly infected with the AIDS virus by five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, a victims' advocate said Saturday.

The six foreign medics have been sentenced to death in the case, and Libyan officials have said a settlement could pave the way for their release.