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• AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Hundreds of young Arabs joyfully screamed out obscenities, encouraged by the handsome, gay Lebanese lead singer at the concert in Jordan's capital. Police looked on worriedly. People outside asked what was going on.
• It was a performance by the band Mashrou Leila, which uses a hybrid of velvety Lebanese slang and European instruments to address difficult, sometimes taboo issues of Middle Eastern societies. Lyrics of love and angst are intertwined with more difficult, sometimes taboo issues, with issues like poverty, premarital sex and homosexuality in this deeply homophobic region.
• The success of the band, whose name is translated as "Night Project," appears to be another outgrowth of the Arab Spring uprisings that swept through the Mideast last year. Led by lead singer and song writer Hamed Sinno, a 24-year-old Freddy Mercury doppelganger and openly gay man, the band has been soundly embraced by Arab youth who see the music as part of a cultural and social revolution.
• "They are about secularism, gay love, social problems that we don't talk about, that we don't accept, that we are afraid to discuss," said 19-year-old student Jalal Elias, of the northern Israeli city of Haifa, which has a large Arab-Palestinian population. "The kind of people who make this music -- they made the Arab Spring."
• On a recent Friday, some 3,000 fans attended Mashrou Leila's concert in Amman's ancient Roman auditorium. Young men and women wore tight jeans, thick-

framed glasses, and disheveled haircuts. Other women wore headscarves and modest Muslim dress.
• ___

• SEATTLE (AP) -- Edwin Wilson set up front companies abroad for the CIA, made millions in the arms trade and entertained generals and congressmen at his sprawling Virginia farm.
• His high-powered, jet-setting life in the 1970s and early 1980s followed a career in the CIA. But it came crashing down when he was branded a traitor and convicted in 1983 for shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya.
• After two decades in prison, Wilson finally got the conviction overturned, convincing a judge that he had continued to work informally for the agency.

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