Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:

• Only hours before the law was to take effect, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a last-minute injunction from part of the Obamacare healthcare law that requires employers to provide insurance policies covering contraception
• On Thursday, radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda threatened to take control of two important Iraqi cities, further evidence of growing Sunni extremism in the country after Islamist militants stormed police stations in several cities in Anbar province
• In ongoing peace talks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is the “real key to peace”
• Human Rights Without Frontiers International, a non-profit advocacy organization based in Brussels, released a report highlighting the failure of the U.N. Human Rights Council to protect religious freedom
• For the first time, Israel is paying salaries to Reform rabbis
• Malaysia’s Islamic authorities seized 321 bibles from a Christian group because they used the word Allah to refer to God
• China blames religious extremism for a deadly “terrorist attack” in the western region of Xinjiang on Tuesday
• Saudi Arabia’s religious police warned against New Year’s Eve revelry
• A Philadelphia monsignor who won an appeal of his conviction in a priest-abuse scandal was released from prison on Thursday
• An informal grass-roots movement of Arab Christians, prompted in part by the persecution of Christians in the Middle East since the Arab Spring, wants to cooperate more closely with Israeli Jewish society
• The Israeli Knesset rejected the Freedom of Religion and Conscience bill, which aimed to block discrimination on religious grounds and allow for civil marriage regardless of race, sex, citizenship, and religion