Friends and fellow authors spoke out on Salman Rushdie's behalf during a rally on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, one week after he was attacked onstage in the western part of the state and hospitalized with stab wounds.

Rushdie's condition has improved, and, according to his literary agent, he has been removed from a ventilator.

President Joe Biden will host a conference on combating racist, anti-democratic and other extremist threats in September, less than two months before tense midterm elections, the White House said Friday.

Tehran's contemporary art museum has issued an apology and temporarily closed to handle a pest infestation, raising concerns after footage of insects scuttling across world-famous work spread widely on social media.

Insects, which may attack and eat away at paintings, pose a serious threat to the American and European minimalist masterpieces now for the first time on display at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since the 1979 Islamic Revolution ousted Iran's Western-backed monarchy.

Only ever found in incomplete, clandestine translations in Arabic, "The Satanic Verses" could have gone largely unnoticed in the Arab world, were it not for the Iranian religious edict against its author Salman Rushdie.

Then supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, issued on February 14, 1989, struck a nerve with Arab authors, themselves often in danger of ruffling authoritarian feathers and "offending moral values".

To Enas Taleb, the headline felt like a spiteful punch line.

"Why women are fatter than men in the Arab world," it read in bold, above a photograph of the Iraqi actress waving onstage at an arts festival.

Afghan university students will have to attend more compulsory Islamic studies classes, education officials said Tuesday while giving little sign that secondary schools for girls would reopen. 

Many conservative Afghan clerics in the hardline Islamist Taliban, which swept back into power a year ago, are skeptical of modern education.

A mural that was painted in a Vermont synagogue more than 100 years ago by a Lithuanian immigrant — and hidden behind a wall for years— has been termed a rare piece of art and has been painstakingly moved and restored.

The large colorful triptych painted by sign painter Ben Zion Black in 1910 shows the Ten Commandments with a lion on both sides, the sun beaming down, and columns and rich curtains at the borders. Now known as the "Lost Mural," it's a rare representation of a kind of art that graced wooden synagogues in Europe that were largely destroyed during the Holocaust, experts say.

Stargazers gathered to watch the Perseid meteor shower among ancient statues atop Mount Nemrut in southeastern Turkey.

Hundreds spent the night at the UNESCO World Heritage Site for the annual meteor show that stretches along the orbit of the comet Swift–Tuttle.

An Iranian government official denied on Monday that Tehran was involved in the assault on author Salman Rushdie, in remarks that were the country's first public comments on the attack.

The comments by Nasser Kanaani, the spokesman of Iran's Foreign Ministry, come over two days after the attack on Rushdie in New York.

Salman Rushdie is "on the road to recovery," his agent has confirmed, two days after the author of "The Satanic Verses" suffered serious injuries in a stabbing at a lecture in New York.

The announcement followed news that the lauded writer was removed from a ventilator Saturday and able to talk. Literary agent Andrew Wylie cautioned that although Rushdie's "condition is headed in the right direction," his recovery would be long. Rushdie, 75, suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and in an eye that he was likely to lose, Wylie had previously said.