Names and faces

LITTLE ROCK — Lindsay Lohan was arrested in New York early Wednesday on charges that she clipped a pedestrian with her car and did notstop driving, but her publicist said he expects the allegations to be proven false. The 26-year-old actress was arrested at2:25 a.m. as she left a nightclub at the Dream Hotel in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, police said. They said no alcohol was involved. Lohan was charged with leaving the scene of an accident and causing injury. She was ticketed and scheduled to appear in court Oct. 23. Police said Lohan was slowly driving a black Porsche through an alley between the Dream Hotel and the Maritime Hotel on 16th Street when the accident occurred. The victim called 911. He was treated at a hospital for a knee injury and released. “We are confident this matter will be cleared up in the coming weeks and the claims being made against Lindsay will be proven untrue,” Lohan’s publicist Steve Honig wrote in an e-mail. It was the latest car accident involving Lohan. On June 8, Lohan was involved in a crash in California that sent her and her assistant to a hospital. The accident remains under investigation; police have said they are trying to determine who was driving when Lohan’s Porsche collided with a dump truck. The Mean Girls actress was cleared in May of allegations that she struck a Hollywood nightclub manager with her car. Los Angeles prosecutors refused to file charges.

Salman Rushdie dismissed the latest threat against his life as just talk. “This was essentially one priest in Iran looking for a headline,” the author ofThe Satanic Verses said Tu e s d a y night as he spoke at a New York City Barnes & Noble. Rushdie was there to discusshis memoir about the fatwa, Joseph Anton, which has just been published to strong reviews and encouraging sales. In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was blasphemous and called for his death. Iran’s government has long since distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment remains. A semi-official Iranian religious foundation headed by Ayatollah Hassan Saneii has raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million after recent protests against an anti-Islamic film. But Rushdie, 65, who called the movie “the worst video on YouTube,” said Saneii has long offered a bounty and few people have taken him seriously.