Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

• The Supreme Court held in a 7-2 decision that the Peace Cross, a WWI memorial in Bladensburg, Maryland, does not violate the Establishment Clause.
• The Supreme Court declined to hear a case concerning a $135,000 award against the Christian owners of an Oregon bakery who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, citing their religious beliefs.
• Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed into law a bill that permits Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham to establish a private law enforcement department to make arrests when crimes are committed on its properties.
• A Satanic Temple member who won the right in court to lead an opening prayer at a Kenai Peninsula Borough (AK) government meeting declared “Hail Satan” during her first invocation, prompting about a dozen officials and attendees to walk out.
• Ten people were killed and dozens of others were wounded in an explosion during Friday prayers at the Shia Muslim Imam Mahdi al-Muntadhar mosque in Baghdad, Iraq.
• The Archdiocese of Indianapolis announced that it would no longer recognize Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School as Catholic because it refuses to fire a teacher who is in a same-sex marriage.
• The Pacific Justice Institute settled a claim filed against the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing on behalf of an eighty-six-year-old woman who had been evicted from her longtime apartment due to her religious activities.
• The United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback condemned Saudi Arabia over its extensive religious freedom abuses at the State Department’s release of the 2018 Report on International Religious Freedom.
  • You can read the full report here.
• A former orchestra teacher at Brownsburg Community Schools (IN) who refused to call transgender students by their preferred names citing his religious beliefs filed a federal lawsuit claiming the school district and several administrators violated his First Amendment rights.
• A New Zealand man who shared a video of the Christchurch mosque shootings that killed fifty-one people was sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to two charges of distributing objectionable material.
• A federal magistrate judge has set a Feb. 10, 2020, trial date for Holden Matthews, a twenty-one-year-old son of a sheriff’s deputy who is accused of setting fire to three predominantly black Baptist churches in St. Landry Parish (LA).
• Forty-eight-year-old Michael Hari, the leader of a white militia group in Clarence (IL) who faces trial for the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque, tried to escape from custody earlier this year.
• The British Court of Protection authorized doctors to perform an abortion on a London woman with learning and mood disorders against the woman’s wishes.
• The Ninth Circuit stayed nationwide injunctions that had blocked new Trump administration rules imposing additional hurdles for women seeking abortions from taking effect.
• The Missouri Department of Health denied a license to the only abortion clinic in the state amid a legal dispute with the state’s Planned Parenthood division over what officials call “troubling” violations at the clinic.
• As of Friday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) has vetoed four abortion bills passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, including bills that would have cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood and prohibited abortions based on the fetus’s race, sex, or disabilities.
• Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo (D) signed into law the Reproductive Privacy Act, which codifies a woman’s right to have an abortion.
• A seventy-nine-year-old woman was wounded outside a Paris synagogue when she was struck by a metal ball hurled at her head, an incident the World Jewish Congress described as “part of a disturbing trend, not just in France but around the world.”
• A former vicar general of the Archdiocese of Birmingham (U.K.) “deliberately misled” the Archdiocese of Los Angeles (CA) into harboring a pedophile priest and helping him escape prosecution for nearly twenty-five years, a recently published report from a child abuse inquiry revealed.
• Nearly 400 claims have been filed against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe (NM) as part of a pending bankruptcy case that stems from the clergy sex abuse scandal.