International

Kabul – Afghanistan's top Islamic organization on Wednesday called for an end to violent protests over drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, as police shot four protesters to death to stop a crowd from marching on a U.S. military base in the southern part of the country. "Islam says it's all right to demonstrate but not to resort to violence. This must stop," senior cleric Mohammed Usman told the...

SANAA, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Yemen closed down on Wednesday a second newspaper that reprinted controversial caricatures of Prophet Mohammad, an official at the information ministry said. The official said the English-language Yemen Observer would be shut until further notice. The newspaper published the inflammatory cartoons last week, he added. On Monday, the ministry ordered the closure of a small...

NEW YORK: Editors across the country continue to face difficult decisions surrounding the cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammad, which have set off rioting abroad. Few American papers have published the cartoon so far, although several have shown them on their Web sites or provided Web links. Here is a look-around: * Four top editors at the New York Press, a weekly in New York City, resigned...

DUBAI, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Muslims have decried as hypocrites Western dailies which have cited free speech as the reason for printing disrespectful cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, saying the same newspapers take pains to avoid lampooning Jews. The caricatures, first published in a Danish daily in September and then reprinted across Europe, have unleashed fury among Muslims who view any portrayal...

Bloggers in the Middle East have been attempting to make sense of the furore that followed the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The following is a selection of some of the best. It is not hard to find Islamist sites in the region and beyond promoting the message that it is incumbent on Muslims to "defend God's messenger, the Prophet Mohammed" against attacks in the western media...

NEW YORK As days pass, more and more newspapers are choosing to publish at least one of the Muhammad cartoons that are sparking violence abroad, after first appearing in Danish newspapers many months ago. Still, the number remains small. The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle in Cheyenne, which has a tiny Muslim population, published two of the cartoons on Tuesday, including one with a bomb coming out of the...

The Associated Press protested Wednesday the misleading inclusion of an AP photograph in a pamphlet purporting to show images offensive to Islam. The picture shows a bearded man wearing fake pig ears, a pig nose, and a pink embroidered cap on his head. He was wearing the costume while participating in a pig-squealing contest at an annual festival in a farm village in southern France last summer...

Wars often start when extremists, and extreme points of view, prevail. That's worth bearing in mind as violent clashes continue over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. They were published more than four months ago in a Danish newspaper, but like a slow-burning fuse, radical Muslims have exploited them to ignite anti-Western violence across the Muslim world from Iran and Afghanistan to India and...

Premier Peter Beattie has strongly supported freedom of speech after a second Queensland newspaper published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. The Rockhampton Morning Bulletin today joined Brisbane's Courier-Mail in publishing one of 12 cartoons first printed in Denmark and which have sparked a violent backlash across the Muslim world. Any depiction of Mohammed is considered blasphemous and...

Suspected Muslim hackers have broken into around 600 Danish websites to post threats and protest against satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, an Internet monitoring group said on Wednesday. If pages outside Denmark, where the cartoons first appeared, were included, then the hack attacks numbered around 1,000, the Zone-H Web site, www.zone-h.org, said. Zone-H tracks attacks on websites and...