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<p>A popular shopkeeper who wished Christians a happy Easter on Facebook was stabbed to death in what police in Scotland say was a “religiously prejudiced” attack carried out by a fellow Muslim, it was reported Saturday.</p> <p>A vigil was held Friday night in Glasgow’s Shawlands neighborhood in memory of Asad Shah who was killed the day before-- a few hours after he apparently posted messages on Facebook that said “Good Friday and very happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation.”</p>

A loud explosion jolted the diplomatic quarter of Afghanistan's capital on Friday evening, breaking a rare period of calm in Kabul.

AsiaNews spoke to Josephine, one of hundreds of Christians from Al-Hasakah, who spent a year in the hands of the Islamic State group. She talked about psychological suffering, conversion attempts, and separation from her male relatives. She survived thanks to her faith. Her mother Caroline, a Caritas official, is the only one in her family to have been spared the ordeal. She also negotiated their release with IS, and gave a Jihadi copies of the Bible. Now she hopes “to meet the pope” with her entire family. Damascus (AsiaNews) – Josephine Martin Tamras is a young Assyrian woman. For a...

Killing resembles recent attacks on religious minorities, police sayPolice are hunting for the killers of a Christian man hacked to death in northwestern Bangladesh on March 22. The murder was the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities in the Muslim-majority country. Three attackers rode up on motorbikes and repeatedly stabbed Hossain Ali, 68, while he was taking a regular morning walk in Kurigram district. They then fled after detonating two small homemade bombs as local people tried to help the victim, police said. Ali, a retired Family Planning Department official, also fought against Pakistani troops in Bangladesh's...

It’s no surprise that a pair of brothers was among the suspects believed to have carried out the deadly attacks in Brussels Tuesday, terror experts say. This is hardly the first time that brothers have been part of such a plot. In addition to the El-Bakraoui brothers -- Khalid and Ibrahim -- who died in Tuesday's suicide bombings, other sets of brothers were involved in the November terror attacks in Paris, the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris in January 2015, the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and even in the Sept. 11 attacks, where three sets of brothers were among...

The situation in Turkey is bad and getting worse. It’s not just the deterioration in security amidst a wave of terrorism. Public debt might be stable, but private debt is out of control, the tourism sector is in free-fall and the decline in the currency has impacted every citizen’s buying power. There is a broad sense, election results notwithstanding, that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is out of control. He is imprisoning opponents, seizing newspapers left and right and building palaces at the rate of a mad sultan or aspiring caliph. In recent weeks, he has once again threatened to dissolve...

The brothers fit what European anti-terrorism investigators call a disturbing but now-familiar profile. They were young Belgian nationals of Moroccan descent, both with extensive criminal records involving violent crime and guns. But neither had been previously linked to terrorism, Belgium's chief prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw, said Wednesday at a news conference here. The siblings — Brahim and Khalid El Bakraoui — were publicly identified Wednesday as two of the suicide bombers in attacks at an airport and on a metro train Tuesday that left 31 people dead and 260 injured, the latest terrorist strikes to stun a continent reeling from...

Unidentified attackers hacked a Christian convert to death in northern Bangladesh Tuesday, amid growing attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamist militants in the Muslim-majority country. Police said at least two attackers stopped Hossain Ali while the 68-year-old was taking his regular morning walk in the town of Kurigram and then lunged at his neck with sharp weapons. "He died on the spot. The attackers exploded a molotov cocktail to create panic and left the scene on a motorcycle," Kurigram district police chief Tobarak Ullah told AFP. Ullah said Ali had converted to Christianity from Islam in 1999 but he...

World monuments in solidarity with victimsBurj Khalifa lit up in the colours of the Belgium flag on Tuesday night. Burj Khalifa in colours of Belgium flag in solidarity with victims of Brussels attacks, tweeted Dubai Media Office. The UAE has condemned the terrorist attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, which claimed the lives of innocent civilians and left many people injured.

Muslim mothers of Martyrs expressing their joy over the Martyrdom of their respective sons…

A Yazidi sex slave who was raped three times a day for over 16 month by various Islamic State fighters detailed in a recent interview how she was bought and sold by eight different jihadis and how the group sold off over 800 Yazidi girls inside a Raqqa "meat market."In an interview with The Daily Mail, 20-year-old Khalida, who was captured by the militant group in Iraq in August 2014, explained how she and her family were attempting to escape from the wrath of IS (also known as ISIS or ISIL) when a Muslim neighbor outed them as un-believers when...

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region. "Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool ... that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from," Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company's "Google Ideas" division, wrote in a July 2012...

Five bodies hang from a pole suspended between two cranes, a public display which serves as a reminder to those who might contemplate a life of crime. They belonged to a gang of five robbers, all of whom were publicly beheaded before their corpses were hoisted high in the air, where they remained for days. The gruesome sight is one scene in a shocking documentary to be aired this week which sheds light on life in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s bloodiest and most secretive countries. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3502079/Saudi-Arabia-s-kingdom-savagery-DOES-Britain-cosy-butchers.html#ixzz43V8fu0Xn Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

A Northern Virginia man admitted Friday in federal court that he spent months plotting to travel to Syria so he could become a fighter with the Islamic State. Joseph Hassan Farrokh, 28, of Woodbridge, unknowingly discussed his plans with FBI informants all along, prosecutors said. He was arrested in January at Richmond International Airport as he was about to board a flight for the first leg of his trip. During a hearing in federal court in Alexandria, Farrokh pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to the terrorist organization.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will miss a deadline set by the U.S. Congress for determining whether Islamic State atrocities against Christians and other religious groups are genocide, but he should have a decision soon, a spokesman said on Wednesday. Congress directed Kerry in legislation passed last year to consult with government agencies and rights organizations and report back to lawmakers on whether atrocities committed by Islamist extremists against Christians and other religious groups should be considered mass atrocities or genocide under U.S. law. The legislation sought a similar determination on whether Buddhist extremists in Burma...

Commenting on the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East, Rev. Franklin Graham noted the barbarity of the Islamic State but also the often oppressive nature of Islam itself, stating, “This is Islam: They persecute the church, they persecute Christians.” “The Sunnis persecute the Christians,” said Rev. Graham in an interview with CBN News. “We see in Syria and Iraq where they cut the heads of Christians, they rape the women, take them as sex slaves.” “They take the Yazidis, the minorities, and they do the same thing,” he said. “They kill the men but take...

The discovery of the oldest-known pre-Islamic Arabic writing in Saudi Arabia, from ca. 470 CE, evidently caused some consternation, given its Christian and Jewish context.In 2014, researchers from a French-Saudi expedition studying rock inscriptions in southern Saudi Arabia announced they had discovered what could be the oldest texts written in the Arabic alphabet. But they did so very quietly, perhaps because the context of the texts is something of an embarrassment to some. The dozen or so engravings had been carved into the soft sandstone of the mountain passes around Bir Hima – a site about 100 kilometers north...

Mosul (Agenzia Fides) - The jihadists of the Islamic State (Daesh) have released via the internet a short video documenting the burning of Christian books in the area of Mosul. The images show a militant jihadist who throws in flames books and dossiers that have crucifixes on the cover. The video, launched under the title "The Diwan (office) for Education destroys books regarding Christian Education in Mosul", was released on the net at the end of last week through the application Android jihadist Amaq News, with the intent to promptly disseminate all the news that concerns operations and terrorist attacks...

The French see René Descartes, a 17th century philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, as the truest expression of their national mind. I am afraid they are right.Descartes rejected authority in intellectual life and insisted on reconstructing knowledge on plain sense and strict reasoning, hence his famous motto, cogito ergo sum (“I think and therefore I am”). However, he also disdained experience as long as it could not be boiled down into logical and mathematical terms. This approach, so much at odds with the empirical and pragmatic approach favored in the Anglo-Saxon world, is indeed a hallmark of French culture -- including...

A huge explosion has taken place in the Kizilay neighbourhood of the Turkish capital Ankara, with reports of injuries. Turkish broadcaster NTV said the blast was caused by a car bomb, but this has not been confirmed. Witnesses say the explosion happened near the main bus station on Ataturk boulevard and close to many government ministries. Some vehicles were on fire.