Four people have been killed in Afghanistan during violent protests over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper.
British troops have been sent to secure the airport in the city of Maymana after police opened fire on a crowd that attacked a Nato base with guns and grenades. Four people died and 18 others were wounded.
A French court today threw out a law suit by five Muslim organisations aimed at blocking a French newspaper from publishing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed that have led to violent protests worldwide.
The court refused to examine the issues in the case and threw out the suit on purely technical grounds.
The court said the public prosecutor's office, which is always represented in French courts, was not properly notified of the case.
Cases are typically thrown out of court if procedures are not respected, before the issues can be examined.
The satirical weekly Charlie-Hebdo executive editor Philippe Val welcomed the court decision as "good news."
The paper planned to publish the caricatures that have inflamed the Muslim world tomorrow.
Elsewhere, Iranian protesters hurled petrol bombs and stones at the Danish Embassy in Tehran for a second successive day today. Yesterday, several hundred people pelted the Tehran embassy of EU president Austria with petrol bombs and stones.
Iran announced it had cut all trade ties with Denmark because of the cartoons and hundreds of protesters hurled rocks and fire bombs at the Danish embassy last night.
A Danish newspaper first published the cartoons in September, and newspapers in Norway and a dozen other countries reprinted them last month.
Iran's best-selling newspaper has launched a competition to find the best cartoon about the Holocaust in retaliation for the publication of the caricatures of Muhammad.
The daily paper Hamshahrisaid the contest was designed to test the boundaries of free speech - the reason given by many European newspapers for publishing the cartoons of the Prophet.
Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He also dismissed the Holocaust as a myth.
Fresh protests erupted across Asia and the Middle East yesterday over the cartoons, despite calls by world leaders for calm after Danish diplomatic missions were set ablaze in Lebanon and Syria.
A 14-year-old boy was shot dead by police during a protest in northeastern Somalia yesterday. In Afghanistan, one protester was killed in clashes with police. Another person died at the weekend when flames forced him to jump from the burning Danish consulate in Beirut.
Denmark has been the focus of Muslim rage as the images, one showing the prophet with a turban resembling a bomb, first appeared in a Danish daily, and Gulf Muslims have stepped up a boycott of Danish goods.
The furore has developed into a clash between press freedom and religious respect. Depicting the prophet is prohibited by Islam but moderate Muslims, while condemning the cartoons, have expressed fear about radicals hijacking the affair.
Ukraine became the latest country where papers published the cartoons, joining Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, the United States, Japan, Norway, Malaysia and Australia, Jordan and Yemen.
In Britain, thousands of copies of a university student newspaper have been withdrawn and shredded after it published one of the cartoons. A spokeswoman for Cardiff University Students Union said all but a handful of the 10,000 copies of its weekly free newspaper, Gair Rhyd, which means "Free Word" in Welsh, had been destroyed shortly after being distributed on Saturday.
"The newspaper's editor and three other students have been suspended from the union pending investigations," Students' Union spokeswoman Sally Jaques said.
Meanwhile, a French court refused to order the confiscation of a magazine today which local Muslim organisations tried to prevent from publishing the controversial cartoons. The satirical weekly Charlie-Hebdo was due to publish 12 of the cartoons tomorrow.
The court did not rule on the contents of the claim but rejected it on a technicality, saying the plaintiffs had failed to follow several points of procedure in filing their suit.
In Britain, moderate Muslim groups have distanced themselves from a student who was sent back to prison after dressing as a suicide bomber during a demonstration against the Mohammed cartoons.
Omar Khayam, 22, was photographed outside the Danish embassy in London at the weekend wearing an imitation suicide bombing outfit to denounce the caricatures satirising the Prophet of Islam.
In 2002, the student was given six years in prison for possessing crack cocaine with intent to supply and had been on licence after being released last year halfway through his sentence.
But this morning, at the request of the Home Office, police arrested Khayam in Bedford for breaching the terms of his parole and he was taken back to jail.
Muslim groups were swift to condemn demonstrators in London at the weekend who threatened violence over the cartoons, first published in a Danish paper in September.
Thousands of moderate Muslims are expected to attend a rally in Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday afternoon to protest at both the cartoons and the response of Islamic extremists.