October 1, 2008

Spain's crackdown on child porn

Spanish police have arrested 121 people in the country's largest ever operation against internet child pornography. (BBC News)

Investigators say they have been helped by a software program which enables them to detect and gather the names and addresses of Internet users who connect to the pornographic sites. (AFP)

Who said that “good news is not news?”

If French Muslims find haven in Catholic schools


Imam Soheib Bencheikh is a former grand mufti in Marseille, France. He is also founder of the Marseille-based Higher Institute of Islamic Studies. And his oldest daughter attends Catholic school. Why? “Laïcité has become the state’s religion, and the republican school is its temple,” he says. “It’s ironic,” he adds, “but today the Catholic Church is more tolerant of—and knowledgeable about—Islam than the French state.”

Now in France Muslim students make up more than 10 percent of the two million students in Catholic schools. In ethnically mixed neighborhoods in Marseille and the industrial north, the proportion can be more than half. In today’s New York Times.