Some interesting law & religion stories from around the web this week:
- Crimean Tatars have been asked to vacate part of their land in exchange for new territory elsewhere in the region. The new government in Crimea says it wants to regularize the land unofficially taken over by the Tatars
- A Buddhist 6th grader and his family settled a case against a Louisiana school district. Plaintiffs alleged the student was harassed at school and that officials routinely pushed Christian beliefs
- The Catholic Church, the Church of England, and al-Azhar, the Cairo-based seat of Sunni Muslim learning, together called for an end to modern slavery within 20 years
- President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority met with President Obama in Washington this week and made it clear that he was no closer to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state
- In Tennessee, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against the state’s ban on same-sex marriage as it applies to three same-sex couples who were legally married in other states. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam will appeal the ruling
- The new leader of Germany’s Catholic bishops signaled support for allowing some divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion after a “penitential period”
- A British court ruled that the president of the Mormon church doesn’t have to answer fraud allegations. The court said the lawsuit brought by a former Mormon leader attempts to manipulate the court to attack the religious beliefs of others
- A Bulgarian man was sentenced to a year in jail for spreading radical Islam, in a case seen as a test for the delicate relations between the country’s minority Muslims and Orthodox Christian majority
- A Muslim couple from Long Island is suing the Empire State Building for religious discrimination after they were “assaulted, battered, and forcibly removed” from the building’s observation deck as they peacefully recited evening prayers
- On Saturday, hundreds of angry Pakistanis attacked a Hindu temple and set it on fire in southern Pakistan following a rumour that a member of the Hindu community had desecrated the Koran