BRUSSELS (AFP) –
Muslims in Belgium hit out at a looming public ban on the full-face Islamic veil, saying claims it was being introduced for security reasons were simply an excuse to crack down.

“I think they’re trying to wind us up,” Souad Barlabi, a young woman wearing a simple veil, said outside the Grand Mosque in Brussels around the time of Friday prayers.

“We feel under attack,” she said, a day after Belgian lawmakers had voted for a nationwide ban on clothes or veils that do not allow the wearer to be fully identified, including the full-face niqab and burqa.

There were two abstentions, but significantly, no one voted against it in the house — a rare sign of unity amid a power-sharing dispute between Belgium’s linguistic communities which seems certain to lead to early elections.

“There are other problems that are more important,” Barlabi noted.

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HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – Some walked with canes, others with limps. Their hair stained with streaks of silver, their faces mapped by years of pressure and deadlines.

At first glance, it could have been any 35th reunion anywhere, but once the drinks and stories started flowing in the former Saigon’s sultry air, this crowd of self-proclaimed ‘Old Hacks’ revealed how they risked their lives every day to tell the world about an ugly guerrilla war fought in the jungles of Vietnam, where they had unfettered access to report.

The aging press corps came together, one more time, on the eve of the day the Vietnam War ended 35 years ago — April 30, 1975 — when communist North Vietnamese forces drove tanks through the former U.S.-backed capital of South Vietnam, smashing through the Presidential Palace gates.

It was a dramatic end to a long, bloody war that killed an estimated 3 million Vietnamese and some 58,000 Americans.

The journalists also gathered Friday morning to watch Vietnam’s formal commemoration of Liberation Day, as it is known here, taking in a parade down the former Reunification Boulevard that featured tank replicas and goose-stepping soldiers in white uniforms. Some 50,000 party cadres, army veterans and laborers gathered for the spectacle, many carrying red and gold Vietnamese flags and portraits of Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnam’s revolution.

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RIO DE JANEIRO – A jury convicted a Brazilian rancher early Saturday of orchestrating the murder of U.S. nun and Amazon defender Dorothy Stang.

Regivaldo Galvao — the last of five defendants to stand trial in the case — was sentenced to 30 years in prison, said Telma Lima, a spokeswoman with the federal court in the jungle city of Belem where the trial was held.

The verdict came two weeks after another rancher, Vitalmiro Moura, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being found guilty of collaborating with Galvao.

Prosecutors say the pair offered to pay a gunman $25,000 to kill the 73-year-old Stang because she blocked their stealing a piece of land that the government had granted to a group of poor farmers supported by the nun.

The trials were seen as a litmus test for Brazil’s ability to begin to end the lawlessness that reigns in the Amazon region — an area the size of the United States west of the Mississippi River. The government has little presence in the area, and illegal activities like deforestation and illegal mining are rampant.

According to the Catholic Land Pastoral, a watchdog group that tracks rural violence in Brazil, more than 1,500 activists, small farmers, judges and others have been killed across Brazil the past 25 years — usually by gunmen paid by powerful ranchers with land claims at stake.

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