Malaysia has banned 11 books for giving a false portrayal of Islam, such as by linking the religion to terrorism and the mistreatment of women, an official said Wednesday.
The government ordered the books--most of them released by US publishers--to be blacklisted earlier this month “because they are not in line with what we call the Malaysian version of Islam“, said Che Din Yusoh, an official with the Internal Security Ministry’s publications control unit, AP reported.
“Some of them ridicule Islam as a religion, or the facts are wrong about Islam, like associating Islam with terrorism ... or saying Islam mistreats women,“ he said. “Once you mention something which is not correct, it’s not proper.“
The banned books include eight English-language ones. There are also three books written in the local Malay language.
It was not immediately clear whether the books have ever been on sale in Malaysia, but government authorities regularly review the contents of books and publications that could have sensitive material, mostly regarding religion and sex, Che Din said.
About 60 percent of Malaysia’s 27 million people are Muslims.

Regional Indian authors hoping for more readers are abandoning their mother tongues to write in English--a trend that threatens the country’s rich polyglot literary tradition, experts say.
The only way authors--especially new ones--can be encouraged to keep writing in their own languages is if there is more translation of their works into English and other globally spoken languages, they say, reported AFP.
Translation of works written in local languages is needed as “an act of literary preservation,“ said Namita Gokhale, a well-known Indian novelist and organizer of a literature festival in the northern city of Jaipur.
The country of 1.1 billion people “has a rich history of Indian literature that needs to be conserved“, Gokhale said at the week-long festival aimed at highlighting India’s hot literary scene. “We’re going to lose it“ without more translation,“ she said.
With India a rising economic power, its literature has been propelled into the global spotlight and its English-language writers are stars, courted by publishers worldwide.
As a consequence, books in India’s vernacular languages are often ignored.
“The rest of the world thinks of Indian literature as being in English,“ said Neeta Gupta, who publishes books in Hindi. “But there’s a vast array of regional literature out there and it’s not getting the same attention.“
Some 350 million Indians--and the number is growing continually as India aims to become the business back office to the world--are estimated to speak English as a first language or one of sometimes several tongues.
But India has 22 official languages recognized in its constitution, not counting English which has “associate“ official status and is used for administration and in the courts.
These include the main official language Hindi, which counts 422 million mother-tongue speakers, and others such as Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Manipuri, Telegu and Urdu.
There are also 100 other “mother tongues“ spoken by 10,000 or more people, according to census data, and tens of thousands of dialects.

A view of Vienna State Opera

State-funded opera houses and theaters are frequently slammed as elitist establishments that guzzle millions of euros of valuable public money each year.
But a just-published study has found that Vienna’s cultural crown jewels--such as its State Opera or Burgtheater--are not just invaluable assets in terms of Austria’s cultural identity. They also bring a real boost in concrete economic terms.
A specially commissioned study by the IHS institute of higher studies showed that Vienna’s three main stages--the State Opera, the Burgtheater and the Volksoper--generate 494 million euros ($723 million) in added value for the economy each year, AFP reported.
The figure represents spending by the houses themselves, as well as the total spending by Vienna’s tourists, who come to Austria to enjoy the capital’s cultural highlights.
And some full-time 8,000 jobs, both inside and outside Austria, have been created, not just in the theatre sector, but in other related sectors such as hotels, restaurants and tourism, the study found.
On the bottom line, the so-called “net purchasing power effect“ of all three theaters for the whole of Austria amounted to a total 111 million euros each year, it said.
The 133.6 million euros in annual subsidies provided the three houses more than paid off, with the state pocketing a total 214.3 million euros, indirectly and directly, from tax revenues and social welfare payments, IHS calculated.
The Vienna State Opera is one of the world’s leading opera houses, alongside Covent Garden in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Its performances are 97-percent sold out during the season.

A team of US archaeologists has discovered the ruins of a city dating back to the period of the first farmers 7,000 years ago in Egypt’s Fayyum oasis, AFP quoted the supreme council of antiquities as saying on Tuesday.
“An electromagnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period,“ the council’s chief Zahi Hawwas said.
The remnants of the city are “still buried beneath the sand and the details of this discovery will be revealed in due course“, Hawwas said. “The artifacts consist of the remains of walls and houses in terracotta or dressed limestone as well as a large quantity of pottery and the foundations of ovens and grain stores,“ he added.
The remains date back to the Neolithic period between 5,200 and 4,500 BC.
The local director of antiquities, Ahmed Abdel Alim, said the site was just seven kilometers (four miles) from Fayyum lake and would probably have lain at the water’s edge at the time it was inhabited.

An artist designing a carpet in Arak, Markazi province (Photo by Amir Qaderi)

A man reads a comic book at the International Comics Festival in Angouleme, southern France on Jan. 24.

Booksellers, publishers, artists and script-writers join tens of thousands of avid fans every year in a small town in western France which over a long weekend in January becomes the world’s cartoon capital.
With its mediaeval ramparts overlooking the river Charente and soft rural hinterland, Angouleme looks more cut out for a life of provincial obscurity, but the boom in sales of comic strips has turned its annual festival into a global industry mecca, reported AFP.
Founded in 1974 by a group of local enthusiasts, the Angouleme Festival of “Bande Dessinee“ (or BD--literally, drawn strip) has grown like Topsy to become the international reference for lovers of the so-called “ninth art“.
“In Japan there are bigger conventions, but they’re really promotional events for fans. And the US has an annual fair at San Diego. But this is the one that really counts,“ says Marco Lupoi, licensing director at Italian publishing house Panini.
Overall more than 1,350 authors produce books in a wide variety of genres--comic, children’s, fantasy, history and crime.
The success of BDs is adduced by many as France’s strongest case in the row that broke out recently over whether the nation’s culture is in decline. An article in Time magazine opened the war of words, claiming that French art and literature were inward-looking and had lost their clout.

Picture shows the thousand-year-old Javanese artifact in Hawick, Scotland.

Indonesia is negotiating the return of an ancient Javanese stone that was first taken by a British colonialist in the 1800s and is now held by a family trust in Scotland.
The Sangguran stone, a column dated 928 AD and inscribed with ancient Javanese characters, was taken from its site near the modern-day town of Malang in East Java in 1812, said Hadi Untoro Drajat of the culture ministry, AFP reported.
The stone, which weighs almost four tons and was installed to mark the ancient Sangguran village as a reserve area, is now being held by the Minto Trust, a family trust in Scotland, Drajat said.
“We are in negotiations to return the Sangguran stone to Indonesia,“ Drajat said at a press conference.
The artifact was removed from East Java by British colonialist Stamford Raffles during his 1811 to 1816 rule over Java and parts of Sumatra island, Drajat said.
Raffles gave the stone to his superior Lord Minto, the governor general of India, who then brought it back to his home in Scotland where it still stands.
An Indonesian businessman who claims he unwittingly bought stolen antiquities last year is helping the government negotiate the stone’s return.
Last November, police found four ancient statues stolen from a Central Java museum at Djojohadikusomo’s Jakarta home. Four people, including the museum’s curator, were arrested in the case, but Djojohadikusumo has not been named a suspect.
Theft of ancient artifacts is rife in Indonesia, home to ruins of Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms that flourished from the seventh century onward.

Marine archeologists will begin work in June to uncover the sand-buried hull of a 2,300-year-old ship from the coast of Cyprus, researchers said last week.
The ship, dating from the fourth century BC, is one of only a few to have been found so well-preserved, and it may shed light on the nautical and economic history of the period in the east Mediterranean, said Stella Demesticha, a University of Cyprus visiting marine archeologist, AP reported.
Underwater photographs from initial surveying dives in November show dozens of amphorae--large terra-cotta vases used in antiquity to transport liquids and solid foodstuffs--lying on the seabed in the shape of the ship.
Demesticha said researchers believe the vessel’s wooden hull may be preserved under tons of sand. Archaeologists have not released the pictures, as research is still at a preliminary stage.
Demesticha said the wreck, which rests on the seabed 144 feet below the sea surface, is also unique because it lies at a depth that divers can easily reach, unlike similar discoveries made in deeper waters.

Archeologists in northeast Syria have unearthed a 3rd century cemetery in the shape of a cross, the country’s official news agency reported.
Ten skeletons, along with pottery and coins, were found at the site in Hassaka, 441 miles northeast of the capital Damascus, SANA wrote.
Some of the artifacts contained inscriptions in the ancient Aramaic language, it said.
The recent find came a day after SANA reported that archeologists had found a Roman-era cemetery in Latakia, northwest of Damascus. That cemetery was believed to date back about 1,000 years.
Also according to the report, this finding is not the same as that of another cemetery, of the same era and on the same location, announced last November.
That Roman-era cemetery in this history-rich country where archeological discoveries are common, was also in the shape of a cross. It was not immediately clear how far from each other the two cemeteries are.