France’s Constitutional Council has approved a controversial ‘anti-separatism’ bill, upholding its main provisions. The legislation, which drew criticism on various points, has been seen as a tool against hard-line Islamists.
The ruling on the legislation, officially known as the “Bill confirming respect for the principles of the Republic,” was announced by France’s top court on Friday. The judicial body upheld the legislation as a whole, confirming the constitutionality of its main provisions.
A Muslim cab driver tried to sue a taxi company after he was banned from wearing traditional garments and had to wear ‘smart western’ clothing under its dress code.
Zulquarnain Ali alleged he was discriminated on the grounds of his religion because he was not allowed to wear his shalwar kameez – a traditional dress worn in South Asian countries – which would allow him to conveniently visit a mosque and pray.
Leeds Taxi Owners Ltd temporarily suspended the veteran hackney carriage driver from its customer booking system when it emerged he was breaching the dress policy by wearing the traditional garments while working.
‘Squad’ member Ilhan Omar has accused a pro-Israel group of putting her life in danger over new attack ads claiming she sees no difference between America and the Taliban.
‘Stand with American. Stand against terrorists,’ reads an anti-Omar American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ad.
‘For Ilhan Omar, there is no difference between America and the Taliban. Between Israel and Hamas. Between democracies and terrorism.’
‘Tell Rep. Omar, condemn terrorists, not America.’
Paris, France – It all started with an Instagram broadcast on January 18 last year.
Mila, then 16, with a head of newly dyed purple hair, went on a rant against Islam, addressing some of her 10,000 followers who tuned in.
“The Quran is a religion of hatred. There is only hatred in it. Islam is s**t, your religion is s**t,” she said in her video, using crude imagery to refer to “your God.”
In the following weeks, as she defended her stance, she received about 100,000 hateful messages.
Sorry AlJazeera but she’s right.
The Indonesian army will no longer conduct virginity tests on women applying to join the forces, the chief of staff announced on Wednesday. The practice was long condemned by rights groups who called it degrading and traumatic.
“Whether the hymen was ruptured or partially ruptured was part of the examination … now there’s no more of that,” Andika Perkasa, the Indonesian army chief of staff, told reporters, referring to the invasive two-finger examination that was conducted to determine whether female applicants’ hymens were intact.
In the past, the military used the tests to determine recruits’ morality.
“The legal process in Iraq is not transparent. Survivors don’t even know if it’s happening, and they’re not involved,” says Abid Shamdeen, the director of Nadia’s Initiative, the NGO founded by the Nobel prize winner Nadia Murad that advocates for survivors of sexual violence.
“There were also many European and US nationals who participated to a certain degree in the attacks against the Yazidi people,” notes Shamdeen, “and there are no ways that the Iraqi courts will be able to prosecute them.”
I wonder how many slavers made it Canada.
Forced conversion to Islam of young Christian and Hindu girls, some under the age of 12, seems to be an everyday occurrence. To those who are in a position to stop this practice, it appears not to matter. Almost no day goes by without news of these events.
This major and growing problem in Pakistan affects religious minorities. Human rights organisations working on this issue estimate that every year 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are forced to convert to Islam — an estimate that could be far higher as many cases remain unreported. Most of the time, these girls are lured by much older men by the promise of a better life and sometimes are pushed into prostitution or even sold.
An SAS soldier who fought terrorists in a Kenyan hotel siege while off-duty has been forced to reveal his identity after people kept impersonating him on social media and in pubs near the elite force’s Hereford base.
The Special Forces veteran, who uses the pseudonym Chris Craighead on Instagram, shared a photograph showing his face for the first time.
The image shows Craighead leading Kenyan security forces towards the luxury DusitD2 hotel in Nairobi in 2019 before storming the complex and defeating al-Shabaab terrorists.
Two days ago I had to flee my home and life in the north of Afghanistan after the Taliban took my city. I am still on the run and there is no safe place for me to go.
Last week I was a news journalist. Today I can’t write under my own name or say where I am from or where I am. My whole life has been obliterated in just a few days.
I am so scared and I don’t know what will happen to me. Will I ever go home? Will I see my parents again? Where will I go? The highway is blocked in both directions. How will I survive?
Undercover police today told of their snap decision to open fire on Streatham terrorist Sudesh Amman, as jurors were shown CCTV depicting the moment he suddenly charged at police before being shot and writhing wildly on the ground where he later died.
The 20-year-old went on a 62-second stabbing rampage after stealing an 8in carving knife from a shop on Streatham High Road in South London and stabbing two members of the public at random, both of whom survived.
Ariel Bradley wasn’t even the only Islamic jihadi from Chattanooga, Tennessee. On July 17, 2015, a fellow resident of the Chattanooga suburb of Hixson, Mohammad Abdulazeez, murdered four Marines at a Navy base in Chattanooga. This delighted Bradley, who wrote: “Gifted this morning not only with Eid but w/ the news of a brother puttin fear n the heart of kufar [non-believers] n the city of my birth. Alhamdullilah [thanks be to Allah].” By that time, Bradley was far from Chattanooga; she was living in the domains of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria, and was calling herself Umm Aminah, that is, Aminah’s mother, after her two-year-old daughter, Aminah Mohamad. Six years later, Ariel Bradley is dead, and Aminah is being brought back to a United States that is even more riven now by the divisions and confusions that drove her mother’s life so wildly off course than it was when her mother made her fateful choices.
A special committee of the Berlin state parliament released its comprehensive report into the December 2016 Christmas market terror attack on Monday.
The attack at the Breitscheidplatz market was the most serious act of Islamist terrorism in Germany to date. The attacker, Anis Amri, drove a truck into the market, killing 12 people. He was later shot dead by police while on the run in Italy.
The 24-year-old Tunisian national, a small-scale drug vendor and rejected asylum-seeker, was known to police and had been monitored by authorities.
More than 51 people have been killed in northern Mali by jihadists, who attacked three villages near the border with Niger, killing and torching homes, in the latest mass attack in a region beset by violence.
Militants on motorbikes overwhelmed the villages simultaneously on Sunday evening, entering and killing indiscriminately and burning and ransacking homes, according to security officials.
“The terrorists went into the villages and massacred everyone,” a military officer told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. “More than 40 civilians were killed by terrorists on Sunday in the villages of Karou, Ouatagouna and Daoutegeft,” they said.
An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country.
The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest.
On Saturday, 20 people were arrested in connection with the temple attack.
The Iranian government called out the United States in a statement commemorating the 76th anniversary of the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and called for a world without nuclear weapons.
Saeed Khatibzadeh, a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, declared on Saturday that the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, showed the world that the US “spares no inhumane efforts and acts to achieve its illegitimate and irrational objectives.”
