International

STOCKHOLM: As the uproar over Prophet Muhammad cartoons continues to roil the world, the crisis has come home to the region where it originated, striking a major blow to traditional Scandinavian solidarity. Despite the strong historical and cultural links the countries share - and their centuries of close cooperation, known here as "Nordism" - Sweden and Norway have carefully chosen to distance...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Syria on Friday disputed U.S. charges it had incited mob violence over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, saying Damascus had done its best to protect embassies during violent protests and would pay for damages. Dozens of Syrian police and security officers had been injured protecting foreign embassies during February 4 demonstrations in Damascus that started out...

Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The New Straits Times, the flagship newspaper of Malaysia's second-biggest publisher, said the government may take action against it over a Wiley Miller cartoon it published following complaints it insults the prophet Muhammad. ``The matter is in the hands of the authorities,'' New Straits Times (M) Bhd. Group Editor-in-Chief Hishamuddin Aun said in a statement published on...

23 February 2006 -- Belarus' Information Minister Uladzimir Rusakevich has threatened tough measures against a Belarusian newspaper that reprinted the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The private weekly "Zhoda" reprinted the cartoons on 17 February to illustrate an article about the deadly impact of the protests they sparked across the Muslim world. The Foreign Ministry lashed out at...

The storm over the Danish cartoons has been mistakenly described as a debate over the limits of free speech. One of the milder posters carried during a Londonistan anti-cartoon protest read "FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS WESTERN TERRORISM." The coverage in the mainstream American press has ranged from the banal to the bizarre, depicting broad-minded Danes and Dutchmen as raving xenophobes for refusing...

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia has reprimanded one of its biggest daily newspapers for printing a cartoon lampooning the global controversy over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. The government's move has fanned a hot debate in this mainly Muslim country about where to draw the line between press freedom and respect of religion, because this time it involves a newspaper closely aligned with...

Controversy over the publication of drawings of the Prophet Mohammed continued to grow as an international press freedom crisis on Thursday as Indian authorities imprisoned a magazine editor and Belarusian prosecutors opened a criminal probe into a weekly newspaper. In each case, the publications said they printed one or more cartoons to provide context for the worldwide furore that has now...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Muslim hackers angered by the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed have defaced nearly 3,000 Danish Web sites over the past month in the biggest politically motivated cyber attack long-time observers have ever seen. Experts say that the world-wide protests over a Danish newspaper's decision to publish the caricatures, an act offensive to Muslims who regard...

SANAA, Feb 22 (Reuters) - A Yemeni editor on trial for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed said he had done so to show Muslims how insulting they were, not to deride Islam. Now Mohammad al-Asaadi, editor-in-chief of the English daily Yemen Observer, says Islamists could kill him for his action. "The problem now is not the trial," he told Reuters on Wednesday from a cage in a Sanaa...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- One of the toughest battles facing America and Europe in the war on terrorism is the campaign to convince Muslims around that world that the West is not really engaged in a war on Islam. The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad carried in newspapers in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe have made the battle a lot harder to win. While newspapers that have published the...