JORDAN
King endorses media law
King Abdullah II has endorsed controversial amendments to a press and publication law seen by online journalists as a threat to freedom of expression. The king on Monday night issued a decree approving the law in its new form, after parliament passed the amendments that require the country’s 220 news Web sites to obtain licences from the government, which can censor content and hold journalists liable for posted comments. The amendments also stipulate that Web site chief editors must be members of the Jordan Press Association. Journalists and rights activists had urged the king to reject the law. “We refuse to be terrorized,” read a banner carried by journalists during a sit-in on Saturday.
UNITED STATES
Rushdie dismisses threat
Author Salman Rushdie is dismissing the latest threat against his life as just talk. The author of the novel The Satanic Verses says the threat “was essentially one priest in Iran looking for a headline.” Rushdie spoke on Tuesday to about 400 people at a New York Barnes & Noble book store about his newly published memoir, Joseph Anton. The memoir tells of his years in hiding after Iran’s now deceased leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 declared The Satanic Verses blasphemous and called for his death. A semi-official Iranian religious foundation headed by Ayatollah Hassan Saneii has raised the bounty for Rushdie from US$2.8 million to US$3.3 million after recent protests against an anti-Islamic film.
UNITED STATES
System failing black males
More than half the young black men who graduated from high schools in 2010 earned their diploma in four years, an improved graduation rate that still lagged behind that of their white counterparts, according to an education group’s report released yesterday. The Schott Foundation for Public Education, which has tracked graduation rates of black males from US public schools since 2004, said 52 percent of black males who entered high school in the 2006 to 2007 school year graduated in four years. That compared with 78 percent of white, non-Latino males and 58 percent of Latino males.
Venezuela
Group decry use of song
The pop group Los Amigos Invisibles says it is the latest victim of socialist President Hugo Chavez’s wave of expropriations. Local media say the band is demanding a state-owned radio station yank a publicity spot remixing its song Majunche as a re-election campaign plug for Chavez, who is known for his frequent and often uncompensated nationalizations of businesses. The 2004 tune is mostly an instrumental jam in which the singers occasionally shout majunche, which roughly translates as “loser.” Chavez, up for re-election on Oct. 7, uses the epithet to describe opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.
UNITED STATES
Burger poll beefs up election
With burgers as ballots, a restaurant in the capital is conducting its own gourmet straw poll in the run-up to national elections on Nov. 6. BLT Steak is giving patrons a choice of hamburgers named after President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Republican challenger Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan. Voting ends on Oct. 2, just over a month before polling day. The Obama burger is the most expensive at US$28 because “he’s the president” and deserves the best, manager Adam Sanders said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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