The U.S. Supreme Court made it much tougher for prosecutors to chase corporate executives accused of fraud; House and Senate negotiators reached a deal on a bill to increase regulation of Wall Street. Alaska officials decided a legal defense fund set up for former Gov. Sarah Palin was illegal; she’ll have to return about $390,000. SCOTUS also ruled that people who sign petitions on divisive public issues (see “Marriage, gay”) don’t have a right to keep their identities hidden.
Michael Jackson‘s older brother Jermaine, one year after the pop icon’s death, says Islam would have saved his brother. NPR looks at a new documentary on the “Sons of Perdition,” the young boys who escape (or are exiled from) Warren Jeff‘s polygamous compound. The pastor of a Memphis Baptist church is defending his decision to ban a coach from a softball team because she’s a lesbian.
ReligionClause has a roundup of views, pro and con, on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan‘s religious freedom record. Thomas Farr, the first director of the State Department’s religious freedom office, blasts the Obama administration for dragging its feet and sidelining religious freedom concerns in its international portfolio.
Washington’s infamous C Street House (home to a number of philandering GOP politicians) is now being linked to more than $100,000 in free international trips for members of Congress. The governors of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas have named Sunday a day of prayer for the Gulf Coast oil spill.
The NYT assesses the first year of New York City’s first Hebrew-language public charter school (an Idaho Bible-based charter school didn’t fare so well) and the WSJ assesses the God-and-gowns controversy of high school graduation ceremonies held inside churches.Atheists in North Carolina have erected a patriotic billboard on — gasp! — Bily Graham Parkway.
A Florida law firm is trying to bring 52 Buddhist monks and nuns from Vietnam after they claimed they were forced out of their monastery by government troops. The Vatican filed a motion to dismiss a request to subpoena Pope Benedict XVI to testify in a Kentucky sex abuse case. Religion Dispatches celebrates the 50th anniversary (sort of) of feminist theology.
Pakistani telecomm officials will monitor seven major websites, including Google, Yahoo and YouTube, for content that is potentially offensive to Muslims, but stopped short of shutting the sites down. Indonesian police foiled a plot to bomb the Danish embassy, apparently fueled by anger over the Muhammad cartoons made infamous by a Copenhagen newspaper. A new study says Muslim women who fast during Ramadan put their babies’ health at risk.
And this, because its Friday: England’s top Catholic bishop, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, doesn’t want to see — or hear — any vuvuzelas during the pope’s scheduled trip to Britain in September. “I have had enough of them already,” says the Archbishop of Westminster. “I hope they stay in South Africa.”
