STORY: After the knife attack, Salman Rushdie is still in a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania. His condition is said to have improved there. His agent announced on Sunday that Rushdie no longer needed mechanical ventilation. The recovery will take a long time, but his condition is going in the right direction. One of Rushdie’s sons tweeted Sunday that his father was able to speak a few words. His injuries are severe and life-changing, but his well-known, perceptive and defiant sense of humor is intact, Zafar Rushdie wrote. The 75-year-old was delivering a lecture on the importance of the United States as a sanctuary for artists in distress when a 24-year-old man rushed onto the stage and stabbed him multiple times. Writers and politicians around the world have condemned the attack. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said a man with a knife can’t silence a man with a pen. Iran, meanwhile, blamed Rushdie himself and his supporters for the attack. Freedom of expression does not justify Rushdie’s insults to religion in his works, said a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry. Rushdie, who was born in India, was criticized in the Islamic world primarily for alleged blasphemy in his book The Satanic Verses. In 1988 the book was banned in many Islamic countries.