Plans by France's Socialist government to legalize same-sex marriage are proving harder to enact than first thought after faith leaders and conservatives mobilized against it even as left-wing deputies try to expand it.

The first abortion clinic on the island of Ireland opened Thursday in downtown Belfast, unleashing angry protests on the street and uniting Catholic and Protestant politicians in calls to investigate the new facility.

At the sound of a bell from the altar, relayed over loud-speakers, about 50,000 people at an open-air mass last month in the Polish capital dropped down to kneel in the street.

As sharply contested parliamentary voting approached in Georgia last week, the country’s Orthodox patriarch implemented his own peculiar pre-election ritual: He arranged for an airplane carrying icons and holy relics to circle over Georgian airspace while priests prayed over the country’s future, in an updated version of an ancient practice employed ahead of enemy invasions and other calamities.

Jewish and Muslim leaders here warned on Monday of rising anti-Semitism among young Muslims, two days after the police arrested 11 men and fatally shot one in raids in a handful of cities aimed at young radical French Muslims.

It is a paradox of modern Germany that church and state remain so intimately tied.

Patricia Casey's views on abortion were formed at the age of 12 when she came across an image of what looked to her like a torn-apart baby - an aborted foetus.

Shopkeeper Nevzat Cavan is rushing to meet orders for the white, fur-trimmed costumes worn by Muslim boys for their circumcision, relieved that Berlin's city government has allowed the operations to resume.

The road to heaven is paved with more than good intentions for Germany's 24 million Catholics.

The divide in world opinion over what constitutes free speech will be on display again next week at the United Nations, where heated arguments over a proposed blasphemy law were an annual feature for the past decade.

A French magazine published vulgar caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad on Wednesday, brandishing its right to free speech amid global tensions over a movie insulting to Islam.

This sleepy town not far from the Czech border, in a hilly corner of Catholic Bavaria, is an unlikely place to find an active synagogue, and an even unlikelier focal point for a controversy that some see as a threat to religious tolerance in Europe and even the place of Jews in Germany.

Cash-strapped officials in Europe are looking for a way to ease their financial burden by upending centuries of tradition and seeking to tap one of the last untouched sources of wealth: the Catholic Church.

When pregnant women in Poland decide to have an abortion, they take a common but highly secretive step.

“The enemies of Holy Russia are everywhere,” says Ivan Ostrakovsky, the leader of a group of Russian Orthodox vigilantes who have taken to patrolling the streets of nighttime Moscow, dressed in all-black clothing emblazoned with skulls and crosses.

Atheists will not be invited to speak on the BBC's religious programme, Thought for the Day, despite repeated calls by secular groups.

PEOPLE with strong religious beliefs are free to express their faith privately but cannot insist their employer accommodate them, a landmark hearing on ­religious freedom has heard.

Seventy European Muslim and Jewish leaders pledged on Wednesday to show "zero tolerance" to hate preachers of any faith including their own ranks, citing what they called rising religious intolerance on the continent.

During a recent protest in Marseille, seven people were suddenly surrounded by the police, bundled into a van and brought in for questioning.

Little girls in hijabs peek out of tin-roof houses and boys play at "cops and insurgents" in the narrow dirt streets.