(Continued from page 29)

lenges, including a Muslim Brotherhood boycott of parliamentary elections, increasing opposition from his traditional Bedouin allies and an inability to keep the Syrian civil war from spilling over the border.
• So far, Abdullah has largely maintained control, partly by relinquishing some of his powers to parliament and amending the country's 60-year-old constitution. His

Western-trained security forces have been able to keep protests from getting out of hand. And most in the opposition remain loyal to the king, pressing for reforms but not his removal.
• ___

• PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) -- The former black marketeer has read it. So

has the beautiful young librarian, and the aging philosophy professor who has spent his life teaching the ruling doctrine of this isolated outpost of totalitarian socialism. At times it seems as if everyone in Pyongyang, a city full of monuments to its own mythology, has read the book.
• In it they found a tortured love story, or a parable of bourgeois decline. Many found heroes. They lost themselves in the story of a nation divided by war, its defeated cities reduced to smolder and ruins, its humbled aristocrats reduced to starvation.
• The book is "Gone With the Wind."
• To come across Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Civil War epic in North Korea is to stumble over the unlikeliest of American cultural touchstones in the unlikeliest of places.
• What does antebellum plantation life have to do with North Korea, where three generations of rulers -- grandfather, father and now the young son, Kim Jong Un -- have been worshipped as omniscient? What appeal does Scarlett O'Hara's high-society ruthlessness hold for people only a few years past a horrific famine?
• ___

• KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) -- Jamaicans hunkered down at home as the front edge of Tropical Storm Sandy buffeted the Caribbean island with pelting rain and

(Continued on page 31)