The source of the dispute, which Austrian media has dubbed Vienna’s version of the Mohammad caricature row, is a retrospective honoring Austria’s cherished artist Alfred Hrdlicka, who turned 80 earlier this year.

A website that a Dutch right-wing politician was planning to use to release a film expected to be fiercely critical of Islam has been suspended.

ISLAMIC cleric Abu Bakar Bashir has returned to his hardline rhetoric with a call for followers to “beat up” Western tourists and for young Muslims to die as martyrs.

The Vatican on Thursday rejected an accusation by Osama bin Laden that Pope Benedict XVI was leading a “new crusade” against Muslims, but Italian security officials were concerned about the threats contained in bin Laden’s latest audiotape message.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India: At least 50 people in Kottayam district have reportedly lost their vision after gazing at the sun looking for an image of Virgin Mary.

How do you re-package that tried, untested and untestable faith-without-facts warhorse, “Creationism” after its nearly-annual beat-down by an increasingly exasperated scientific community?

TALLAHASSEE - Hollywood lent some of its glitz Wednesday to the debate over teaching evolution in Florida, where a bill has lawmakers questioning the very meanings of science and freedom of speech.

A movement which claims to be an alternative to the scientific theory of evolution is nothing than an attempt to inject politics and religion into the classroom, a University of Oklahoma professor said Friday.

Is funding of science research programs not self-evidently political?

This professor Hutchinson spoke at a regional Democratic Party meeting in Oklahoma, and told them that ID was part of the “ongoing culture war” in America.

“Evolution is not a faith and intelligent design is not a scientific theory,” Hutchinson told the audience at the weekly Democratic Party luncheon. “Science can only ask ‘how,’ science cannot ask ‘why?’ “

But of course, in truth, science — and Darwinism in particular — *loves* to tell us why: From vacuum genesis to punctuated equilibrium, Darwinism always assumes a root mechanical cause for all events (no matter how unlikely any event may be).

In other words, many orthodox scientists will, when cornered, insist that the universe and everything in exists not from any conscious or intelligent decision, but because Chaos Causes Everything.

“As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,” Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

SEDONA, Ariz. - Endorsed by an influential Texas televangelist, Republican John McCain endeared himself to one group of voters but risked alienating another with the pastor’s anti-Catholic views.