Poland’s environment minister says laboratory tests following a mass fish die-off have detected high salinity levels but no mercury in the Oder River. That means the mystery is continuing as to what killed tons of fish in Central Europe.
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Acclaimed author Salman Rushdie remained hospitalized on Saturday with serious injuries a day after he was repeatedly stabbed at a public appearance in New York state, while police sought to determine the motive behind an attack that drew international condemnation.
Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, was arraigned late Friday, accused of attempted murder in the second degree and assault in the second degree, the county’s district attorney, Jason Schmidt, said in a statement. Matar entered a not guilty plea at a court appearance on Saturday, his court-appointed lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, told Reuters.
Rushdie, 75, was set to deliver a lecture on artistic freedom at Chautauqua Institution in western New York when police say Matar rushed the stage and stabbed the Indian-born writer, who has lived with a bounty on his head since his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” prompted Iran to urge Muslims to kill him.
Following hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak as of Friday evening, according to his agent, Andrew Wylie. The novelist was likely to lose an eye and had nerve damage in his arm and wounds to his liver, Wylie said in an email.
The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on freedom of expression. In a statement on Saturday, President Joe Biden commended the “universal ideals” that Rushdie and his work embody.
“Truth. Courage. Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear,” Biden said. “These are the building blocks of any free and open society.”
Police seek a motive
Police said on Friday they had not established a motive for the attack.
An initial law enforcement review of Matar’s social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shiite extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although no definitive links had been found, according to NBC New York.
The IRGC is a powerful faction that controls a business empire as well as elite armed and intelligence forces that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign.
Asked to comment on the case, Matar’s lawyer Barone said, “In cases like this, I think the important thing to remember is people need to keep an open mind. They need to look at everything. They can’t just assume something happened for why they think something happened.”
A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for Friday, he said.
Suspect born, raised in U.S.
Matar was born in California and recently moved to New Jersey, the NBC New York report said, adding that he had a fake driver’s license on him. He was arrested at the scene by a state trooper after being wrestled to the ground by audience members.
Witnesses said he did not speak as he attacked the author. Rushdie was stabbed 10 times, prosecutors said during Matar’s arraignment, according to The New York Times.
FBI officials went to Matar’s last listed address, in Fairview, a Bergen County borough just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, on Friday evening, NBC New York reported.
Police in New York declined to comment on the report. New Jersey police did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
There was no visible police presence on Saturday at the house, a two-story brick-and-mortar home in a largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood. A woman who entered the house declined to speak to reporters gathered outside.
Bounty on his head
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, before moving to Britain, has long faced death threats for “The Satanic Verses,” viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations.
In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill the author and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was stabbed to death in 1991 in a case that remains unsolved.
There has been no official government reaction in Iran to the attack on Rushdie, but several hardline Iranian newspapers praised his assailant.
Iranian organizations, some linked to the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s killing. Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”
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Idaho’s top court on Friday refused to stop a Republican-backed state law criminalizing nearly all abortions from taking effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade that had recognized a constitutional right to the procedure.
In a 3-2 ruling, the Idaho Supreme Court rejected a bid by a Planned Parenthood affiliate to prevent a ban from taking effect on Aug. 25 that the abortion provider argued would violate Idahoans’ privacy and equal protection rights under the state’s constitution. The measure allows for abortions only in cases of rape, incest or to prevent a pregnant woman’s death.
The court also lifted an earlier order that it issued in April blocking a separate Idaho law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy enforced through private lawsuits by citizens, allowing it to take effect immediately.
Justice Robyn Brody, writing for the court, said given the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision, Planned Parenthood was not entitled to the “drastic” relief it sought, noting that abortion was illegal in Idaho before the Roe decision.
“Moreover, what Petitioners are asking this Court to ultimately do is to declare a right to abortion under the Idaho Constitution when – on its face – there is none,” Brody added.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in a statement called the ruling “horrific and cruel.”
Idaho state officials did not respond to requests for comment.
About half of the U.S. states have or are expected to seek to ban or curtail abortions following the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court’s June 24 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which legalized the procedure nationwide.
Those states include Idaho, which like 12 others adopted “trigger” laws banning abortion upon such a decision.
Louisiana’s top court earlier on Friday rejected an appeal by abortion rights supporters seeking to block a similar ban.
The Idaho court did not decide on the merits of Planned Parenthood’s challenge to the ban and instead said it would hear arguments on Sept. 29.
Justice John Stegner in a dissenting opinion said the court should have proceeded more cautiously and blocked the ban in the interim, saying that “never in our nation’s history has a fundamental right once granted to her citizens been revoked.”
The U.S. Justice Department on Aug. 2 separately sued in a bid to block the Idaho ban, saying it conflicts with a federal law requiring hospitals to provide abortion in medical emergencies if necessary. That lawsuit, to be argued on Aug. 22, was the first action by the federal government challenging state abortion laws after Roe was reversed.
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Iranians reacted with praise and worry Saturday over the attack on novelist Salman Rushdie, the target of a decades-old fatwa by the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for his death.
It remains unclear why Rushdie’s attacker, identified by police as Hadi Mattar of Fairview, New Jersey, stabbed the author as he prepared to speak at an event Friday in western New York. Iran’s theocratic government and its state-run media have assigned no motive to the assault.
But in Tehran, some willing to speak to The Associated Press offered praise for an attack targeting a writer they believe tarnished the Islamic faith with his 1988 book The Satanic Verses. In the streets of Iran’s capital, images of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini still peer down at passers-by.
“I don’t know Salman Rushdie, but I am happy to hear that he was attacked since he insulted Islam,” said Reza Amiri, a 27-year-old deliveryman. “This is the fate for anybody who insults sanctities.”
Others, however, worried aloud that Iran could become even more cut off from the world as tensions remain high over its tattered nuclear deal.
“I feel those who did it are trying to isolate Iran,” said Mahshid Barati, a 39-year-old geography teacher. “This will negatively affect relations with many — even Russia and China.”
Khomeini, in poor health in the last year of his life after the grinding, stalemate 1980s Iran-Iraq war decimated the country’s economy, issued the fatwa on Rushdie in 1989. The Islamic edict came amid a violent uproar in the Muslim world over the novel, which some viewed as blasphemously making suggestions about the Prophet Muhammad’s life.
“I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled ‘Satanic Verses’ … as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, are hereby sentenced to death,” Khomeini said in February 1989, according to Tehran Radio.
He added: “Whoever is killed doing this will be regarded as a martyr and will go directly to heaven.”
Early on Saturday, Iranian state media made a point to note one man identified as being killed while trying to carry out the fatwa. Lebanese national Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh died when a book bomb he had prematurely exploded in a London hotel on Aug. 3, 1989, just over 33 years ago.
At newsstands Saturday, front-page headlines offered their own takes on the attack. The hardline Vatan-e Emrouz’s main story covered what it described as: “A knife in the neck of Salman Rushdie.” The reformist newspaper Etemad’s headline asked: “Salman Rushdie in neighborhood of death?”
But the 15th Khordad Foundation — which put the over $3 million bounty on Rushdie — remained quiet at the start of the working week. Staffers there declined to immediately comment to the AP, referring questions to an official not in the office.
The foundation, whose name refers to the 1963 protests against Iran’s former shah by Khomeini’s supporters, typically focuses on providing aid to the disabled and others affected by war. But it, like other foundations known as “bonyads” in Iran funded in part by confiscated assets from the shah’s time, often serve the political interests of the country’s hardliners.
Reformists in Iran, those who want to slowly liberalize the country’s Shiite theocracy from inside and have better relations with the West, have sought to distance the country’s government from the edict. Notably, reformist President Mohammad Khatami’s foreign minister in 1998 said that the “government disassociates itself from any reward which has been offered in this regard and does not support it.”
Rushdie slowly began to reemerge into public life around that time. But some in Iran have never forgotten the fatwa against him.
On Saturday, Mohammad Mahdi Movaghar, a 34-year-old Tehran resident, described having a “good feeling” after seeing Rushdie attacked.
“This is pleasing and shows those who insult the sacred things of we Muslims, in addition to punishment in the hereafter, will get punished in this world too at the hands of people,” he said.
Others, however, worried the attack — regardless of why it was carried out — could hurt Iran as it tries to negotiate over its nuclear deal with world powers.
Since then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, Tehran has seen its rial currency plummet and its economy crater. Meanwhile, Tehran enriches uranium now closer than ever to weapons-grade levels amid a series of attacks across the Mideast.
“It will make Iran more isolated,” warned former Iranian diplomat Mashallah Sefatzadeh.
While fatwas can be revised or revoked, Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who took over after Khomeini has never done so.
“The decision made about Salman Rushdie is still valid,” Khamenei said in 1989. “As I have already said, this is a bullet for which there is a target. It has been shot. It will one day sooner or later hit the target.”
As recently as February 2017, Khamenei tersely answered this question posed to him: “Is the fatwa on the apostasy of the cursed liar Salman Rushdie still in effect? What is a Muslim’s duty in this regard?”
Khamenei responded: “The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued.”
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A painter in orange overalls touches up the image of a hand holding a rifle while an artist perched on scaffolding painstakingly places bits of colorful ceramic in a mosaic of a guerrilla fighter.
The artists aren’t just decorating a wall: Together, they are helping to revive muralism, a movement that put Mexico at the vanguard of art a century ago.
Just as their famous predecessors did shortly after the Mexican Revolution, teachers and students of the Siqueiros School of Muralism are on a mission to keep alive the practice of using visual imagery to share messages of social and political importance.
The mural in progress is on three walls of a municipal building in San Salvador, a small town of about 29,000 people north of Mexico City in Hidalgo state. The Siqueiros School is based in a converted elementary school in the nearby hamlet of Poxindeje, and one of its co-founders is Jesús Rodríguez Arévalo, a pupil of disciples of Mexico’s three muralism masters: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco.
“The school is small, a humble space, but it is very serious, and it is professional,” Rodríguez said.
One hundred years ago, Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco also started out at a colonial-era school-turned art laboratory. It was 1922, and they were charged with fulfilling the then-Mexican education minister’s mission to take art out of the galleries and into public spaces. The plan, part of a national literacy campaign sponsored by the national government, transformed Mexico and permeated the entire continent.
The artists’ manifesto was to make “ideological propaganda for the good of the people” and give art “a purpose of beauty, of education and combat for all.”
They identified with the agrarian and proletarian revolutions and mingled with European artists who fled to Mexico from both world wars. Sponsored by the government, they had access to the country’s most majestic buildings and the necessary resources to experiment with new techniques. Eventually, they began to paint in other nations: Argentina, Chile, Cuba and the United States among them.
Despite the backing of Mexican political leaders, their work turned out to be too provocative in some places outside the country: A mural Rivera painted in New York’s Rockefeller Center was censured and then demolished because it glorified communism.
“We are a bit more cowardly,” said Ernesto Ríos Rocha, 53, a muralist who is currently trying to found Mexico’s first muralism university in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa. “We talk more about peace.”
The murals being created in San Salvador and other small towns today still have much in common with those created in the early 20th century, however: They encapsulate themes of war, injustice and oppression — as well as 21st century issues such as climate change and violence against women.
But Rodríguez and his students don’t anticipate monumental reverberations from their work. Their aspirations are lower and their income more modest, coming mostly from local governments that commission them to paint murals and support from community members who donate meals and house foreign students.
The Poxindeje school bets on recycling and reusing discarded materials donated by glassmakers or flooring manufacturers, said Janet Calderón, who co-founded the Siqueiros School with Rodríguez five years ago. They’re even making murals from garbage.
Luz Asturizaga, a 36-year-old sculptor from Bolivia, has enjoyed every moment of her stay in the iconic home of muralism. She wasn’t able to learn much about the art form in her own country, where she said professional artists’ circles are very closed. In Mexico, “they give you opportunity, they teach you,” she said.
Few students have completed training at the school — about 40 since it opened five years ago — but all leave with clear ideas instilled by their instructors: “Go to the communities, teach, carry out a comprehensive work of historic themes, of social content, of criticism of everything that oppresses man,” Rodríguez said.
The first step for the artists is to decide what elements they want to include, what metaphors to lay out. Then they build a sort of collage of portraits and photographs of historical figures whom they want to immortalize.
Composition and perspective are key. Dressed in paint-splotched jeans, his black hair tied back in a ponytail, the 54-year-old Rodríguez closes one eye in front of the mural in progress in San Salvador, and with the other glances through a transparent sheet of paper containing sketches of figures intended for the wall. The goal is to calculate the right scale, taking into account from where and what distance people will be viewing the work.
“You have to know local history and then begin with the sketches,” said Luis Manuel Vélez, 52, a worker for Mexico’s national oil company who spends his weekends painting murals.
Sometimes models for the work come from the neighborhood. A 6-year-old girl passing by the mural in San Salvador pointed and smiled before exclaiming: “That’s me and my grandpa.”
Purists have long lamented that starting in the late 20th century, muralism was replaced by urban art or short-lived graffiti.
Ríos Rocha agrees but is still optimistic.
“Muralism is in intensive care, but it is not going to die,” he said.
Historian David Martínez Bourget is a researcher at the 88-year-old Bellas Artes Museum, a palatial art nouveau performing arts center in Mexico City whose interior walls are graced with famous murals by Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco.
Martínez Bourget said the art movement that the fathers of muralism began in the 20th century is over, but its spirit remains — not just in Poxindeje and San Salvador — but also in marginalized Chicano communities in the western United States and in Zapatista villages in southern Mexico. In both places, public art displays capture the communities’ history and rebellion, he noted.
As long as people are fighting for social justice, this kind of artistic expression will exist, Martínez Bourget says, because in difficult moments “art is politicized.”
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