Tuesday, December 08, 2009 MARSEILLE: A French court on Tuesday banned France's anti-immigrant National Front party from giving out leaflets attacking plans to build a giant mosque because they used pictures of it without permission.The ruling was to protect the architects' intellectual property, but also came at a sensitive time after a ban on minarets in neighbouring Switzerland stoked debate about Islam in France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority.The Marseille court ordered the far-right party to destroy all leaflets on which it had reproduced designs for the planned Grand Mosque in the southern city, alongside the slogan "No to the mosque."It also ordered the National Front to pay 1,500 euros (2,210 dollars) in costs, according to a copy of the judgement.The architects' lawyer Armelle Bouty told the court that they had also been attacked on the party's website and the use of their intellectual property on the leaflets was "the last straw.""In the extremely political and polemical context, that was intolerable," she said.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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