UNITED STATES: Tens of thousands of books are being banned or restricted by the country’s prisons, a new report from PEN America said today. 

“The common concept underpinning the censorship we’re seeing is that certain ideas and information are a threat,” says co-author Moira Marquis, a senior manager in the prison and justice writing department at PEN.

Michigan's “restricted” list includes Elmore Leonard’s thriller Cuba Libre, set just before the 1898 Spanish-US war, and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, about a professional assassin’s attempt to murder French president Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. 

Both novels were cited as a “threat to the order/security of the institution.”

GERMANY: A man with a previous conviction for membership of the Islamic State group has been arrested on suspicion of agreeing to attack a pro-Israel demonstration, prosecutors said today.

The suspect, whose identity was not released in keeping with German privacy rules, was detained on Tuesday at his flat in the western city of Duisburg.

MYANMAR: Relatives of victims of alleged war crimes committed by the ruling military filed a criminal complaint in the Philippines today as they increasingly seek to hold the generals accountable in courts outside the violence-wracked country.

Human rights lawyers representing five Myanma nationals, who filed the joint complaint with the Department of Justice, argue that 2009 law requires the Philippines to prosecute war crimes committed abroad.

CHINA: The government has replaced defence minister General Li Shangfu, who has been out of public view for almost two months, state media reported on Tuesday. 

No further information was given.