PEOPLE, and churches, are free to believe what they like, but not to do as they like.

Increasing numbers of English-language Web sites are spreading al-Qaida's message to Muslims in the West.

Some D.C. Council members and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton are reaching out to the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington to see whether they can find a compromise so the Church will not end its social services contracts with the city if the council legalizes same-sex marriage.

Drive through Vallejo and you will see a once-proud Navy town clearly down on its luck. A motel room goes for $30.99 a night, including HBO.

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

The White House is on a collision course with Catholic bishops in an intractable dispute over abortion that could blow up the fragile political coalition behind President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited the Golden Temple in Punjab on Wednesday, the long arm of political influence that extends from Sikhdom's holiest shrine was surely on his mind.

A Philippine gay rights group is waging a legal battle to be allowed to run in next year's polls after the Elections Commission ruled it cannot register as a political party on grounds that it advocates immorality.

Four years after cartoons of the prophet Muhammad set off violent protests across the Muslim world, Islamic nations are mounting a campaign for an international treaty to protect religious symbols and beliefs from mockery ? essentially a ban on blasphemy that would put them on a collision course with free speech laws in the West.

Conservative members of America's largest Lutheran denomination announced that they are splitting from the Chicago-based Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, making it the second mainline Protestant church to undergo a major schism over the issue of homosexuality and related matters of biblical authority.