No, this is not a joke:

Saudi Arabia’s religious police have announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets, or walking them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes…

At the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum discusses last week’s Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom report on Saudi textbooks. The report also provides a glimpse into the multiple choice tests given to Saudi school children based on those textbooks.

A fourth-grade Saudi textbook titled…

A story in the New York Times today details a case where government prosecutors in New York attempted to determine the identities of anonymous posters on a political blog:

A grand jury subpoena sent by prosecutors in the Bronx earlier this year…

An incredible story out of Iraq’s Anbar province from the New York Sun: “Iraqi Sheik Offers To Take Fight to Bin Laden”:

The leader of the tribal confederation that has fought to expel Al Qaeda from most of Iraq’s Anbar province is offering his…