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Internationally acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie seems to be getting better with age much like fine wine. The ladies seem to agree. His divorce from his fourth wife, the very sexy Padma Lakshmi got over not long ago. Then he was seen close to Scarlet Johansson as well as with B-Town's very own Riya Sen. The latest buzz is that he's in a relationship with the long-limbed strikingly beautiful Pia Glenn who's 29 years his junior. The 32-year-old, six-feet-tall beauty from Harlem plays Condoleezza Rice in Will Ferrell's Broadway show, 'You're Welcome, America: A Final Night With George W. Bush.' At...

Four failed marriages and a string of link-ups later, Salman Rushdie may have finally found his perfect match. The Booker-winning novelist is currently believed to be happy in the company of athlete-model Aimee Mullins, 28 years younger and at least two inches taller than him. The two were seen at a Manhattan party earlier this month, where guests said they looked more than just friends — as the two would have liked others to believe. “Aimee said, ‘We’re good friends, we are close friends’. They certainly looked like they were on a date. They arrived together, left together and were...

LONDON: Controversial India-born author Salman Rushdie has revealed that his wife Padma Lakshmi's decision to divorce him had a crippling effect on him. Speaking for the first time of his "emotionally violent" split last year from the Chennai-born model and actress who is 23 years his junior, 60-year-old Rushdie told Tatler magazine "it provoked a crippling bout of writer's block which threatened to end my literary career." The Booker prize winning author said "I got very worried that I'd lost it because the break-up of my marriage suddenly intervened in an extremely emotionally violent way and there were two months...

MUMBAI: An Islamic group in India is asking Muslims to boycott products of a top Indian business group if its owner does not apologise for hosting author Salman Rushdie on a brief holiday this week. Rushdie stayed at the bungalow of the Godrej family while visiting Mumbai, where he was born and spent many of his early years. The author is a personal friend of the Godrejs, who are one of the big business families in India. The fact that Rushdie was invited by the Godrejs has angered the All-India Ulema Council - a national grouping of Muslim organisations -...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani lawmakers passed a government-backed resolution Monday demanding Britain withdraw the knighthood awarded to author Salman Rushdie, condemning the honour as an insult to the religious sentiments of Muslims. In the eastern city of Multan, hard-line Muslim students burned effigies of Queen Elizabeth II and Rushdie. About 100 students carrying banners condemning the author also chanted, "Kill him! Kill him!" On Saturday, Britain announced the knighthood for the author of "The Satanic Verses" in an honours list timed for the official celebration of the queen's 81st birthday. The resolution in the lower house of parliament on...

CALIPARI: A 'KIDNAPPERS' TRAP' KILLED HIM? (AGI) - Rome, 29 March - Could it have been a 'trap' of the journalist Giuliana Sgrena's kidnappers that killed the secret service man Nicola Calipari, who was in the car hit at a US checkpoint on 4 March last year, while travelling to Baghdad airport. This, according to Corriere della Sera this morning, is the version offered by a terrorist, Mustafa Mohammed Salman, currently imprisoned in Iraq, according to whom it was the Imam of the Sunnite mosque, the sheik Hussein (who Sgrena was supposed to meet with the day she was...

Opponents of the war say the only Al Qaeda elements in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion were those in Kurdish areas not controlled by Saddam. This simply is not so, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. And if so, would not the U.S. – as a critical front in the global war on terror – have to invade those areas to shut down the Al Qaeda cells? Of course. And that in itself would have been a far more dangerous “limited war” with Iraq involving a direct ground confrontation with Saddam’s army anyway.

The man who is very likely the most famous novelist in the world made it clear last week that he has not changed his favorable opinion of two decades ago about the former Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua. In an on-line response to a query from HUMAN EVENTS' John Gizzi, Salman Rushdie--best known for the $5 million bounty placed on his head by the Ayatollah Khomeni in 1989--wrote that "I haven't changed my mind about the Sandanistas of those days, the mid-1980's." From his London home, Rushdie went on to denounce the Reagan Administration's efforts to upend the regime of President...

When Sir Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, admitted that "our own children" had perpetrated the July 7 London bombings, it was the first time in my memory that a British Muslim had accepted his community's responsibility for outrages committed by its members. Instead of blaming U.S. foreign policy or "Islamophobia," Sacranie described the bombings as a "profound challenge" for the Muslim community. However, this is the same Sacranie who, in 1989, said that "Death is perhaps too easy" for the author of "The Satanic Verses." Tony Blair's decision to knight him and treat him as the...

Concerning the "paralysis of modern Muslims" in the face of Muslim extremist terror, which fellow TCSer Arnold Kling wrote on recently, I would suggest that a big reason for Muslim silence is, simply, terror. Steven Schwartz in a recent TCS article points to a type of spiritual renewal and reinforcement of traditional Muslim principles sans the "bloody stain" cast upon them by the Islamic terrorists. But the state of fear in which many Muslims find themselves is a formidable barrier to such a transformation. Americans and Britons have mainly shown anger and contempt for the Islamofascist terrorists. The Spanish? Well,...

Tell Me That It Isn't True ...12/12/2004 09:31:51 amOne hopes that the implosion of Bernard Kerik's nomination does not signal the beginning of a trend where those endorsed by Right Wing Bob go belly-up. I think not. However, now we need a new Secretary of Homeland Security, and with my favorite candidate out of the running, there's an opportunity to promote someone whom common sense and good taste had previously restrained me from suggesting. Well, enough of that.Who could be better for the position of protecting America from Islamist terrorists than a man who has successfully, and single-handedly, defied the...

Saudi Wealth Fuels Global Jihadism Posted Oct. 27, 2003 By Kenneth R. Timmerman Generations of Muslims in the Middle East have been raised on the anti-Western, anti-Semitic theologies of Ayatollah Khomeini and in the Saudi Wahhabi system of madrassas (religious schools). This foundation set the stage for the rise of Osama bin Laden. Doaa 'Amer is a professional TV anchor who hosts Muslim Woman Magazine on IQRAA TV, a satellite channel broadcasting throughout the Arab world. As she tells it, her job is to educate the next generation of children to be "true Muslims." Readers accustomed to hearing Islam described...