Prophet Muhammad on new Charlie Hebdo cover |
French magazine releases front page of what it calls the 'survivors' issue, featuring Prophet Muhammad on the cover.
Last updated: 13 Jan 2015 04:03
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The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is due to publish a cartoon of the Islam's Prophet Muhammad on the cover of its first issue since assailants killed 12 people at its offices.
The newspaper Liberation hosted Charlie Hebdo's staff as they prepared the new issue. More than three million copies of its latest edition will be printed, which is 50 times more than usual.
Liberation published the Charlie Hebdo cover online late on Monday night, showing a man in a white turban holding a sign reading "Je suis Charlie."
Charlie Hebdo's past caricatures of the prophet appear to have prompted last week's attacks, which left a total of 17 people dead.
Can’t make a Spaniard without cracking a few eggs
Applicants vetted and asked questions by a judge, who then decides if they qualify
What does it mean to be Spanish? It’s a question that tens of thousands of immigrants ask themselves each year, as they prepare to prove that they deserve Spanish nationality.
Applicants are vetted and asked a series of questions by a judge, who then decides if they qualify. Historical questions, such as “Who won the civil war?” are common, as are those related to the Spanish language for none-native speakers. But other magistrates favour more offbeat questions, which have raised doubts about the objectivity of the “Spanish test” and prompted the government to alter how it handles naturalisation requests.
“How do you make a Spanish omelette?” is one such example. “Which bullfighter is dating a TV celebrity?” is another. The interview can also be bewilderingly generalised: “How are fiestas celebrated in Spain?” There are even trick questions: “What is the name of the river that joins Madrid and Barcelona? (Answer: there isn’t one.)
Arab cartoonists walk a fine, dangerous, line
For most satirists, poking fun at politicians is part of the job. But in some Arab countries, mocking leaders or religion comes with a risk. Arab cartoonists often fear legal action, intimidation and physical attacks.
A militant from terror group "Islamic State" (IS) gets into a taxi. He's angry, and orders the taxi driver to turn off the radio - radios didn't exist in the time of the Prophet. And the air conditioning shouldn't be on either, because there's also no mention of it in the Koran. The taxi driver asks his passenger whether there were taxis in those days. Of course not, his guest answers, at which point the driver slams on the breaks and throws him out onto the street. The driver explains that he's just showing his commitment to early Islam.
This sketch, which featured on the "Ktir Salbe Show," was broadcast on Lebanese television. It's a program that, like many others aired in Arab countries, makes fun of IS fighters and their crude fundamentalism. It can be dangerous - especially in Syria, where IS controls a significant amount of territory. Actors who ridicule IS in their skits often prefer to have their faces covered when appearing in front of the camera. They fear retribution from the terrorist group, which isn't known for having a particularly strong sense of humor.
Boko Haram attacks: France can help itself, but Nigeria needs support
Paul McGeough
Chief foreign correspondent
Washington: Good luck with that, Your Grace.
Ignatius Kaigama, a Catholic archbishop whose Jos diocese is in central Nigeria, wants the world to respond to the obscene levels of brutality confronting the towns and villages of the north-east of his country with the same spirit and resolve it has shown in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.
The bishop has a point. On the same day that 12 journalists and policemen were gunned down in the French capital, forces of the fundamentalist Boko Haram annihilated as many as 2000 villagers, and looted and torched their lakeside communities in what is being billed as the most brutal rampage by the African twin of the so-called Islamic State, which now controls swathes of Syria and Iraq.
He didn't spell it out, but the bishop might well have thought that world leaders were in the wrong place on Sunday, when 40-odd of them linked arms at the head of a solidarity rally by millions of Parisians, because while the French have the societal fortitude and security resources to pick themselves up, and to confront their homegrown and foreign terrorist threats, Nigeria doesn't.
Olympia LePoint showed courage on her path from poverty to rocket scientist
How do you get from a tough childhood in South Central Los Angeles to mission control? By taking fear out of the equation.
The room was cold and dark, but Olympia LePoint felt sweaty, wired, excited.
She and 12 colleagues were in the Rocketdyne Operations Support Center in Canoga Park, Calif., where they had been monitoring every millimeter of the space shuttle’s three enormous main engines for more than 12 hours. To her right was a big overhead monitor with live video from the launch pad across the country in Florida. On her left she kept track of data rolling by on screens, also glancing at information on consoles in front of her, while a loud voice from NASA’s launch control counted down, “10, 9, 8 …”
She’d painstakingly checked the status of every line and weld in the engines, measured the fluid, pressures, temperatures, and more, all to calculate the probability of catastrophic explosion. Mere seconds remained, and it was time to give the go-ahead for launch: “Pressure is good,” LePoint said. “Vibrations are nominal. No hydrogen leaks. Valve timing is good. Liquid hydrogen flow, unobstructed. We are go for launch.”
The Lankan transition resets Indian Ocean politics (I)
Rebound as a normal country
The defeat of the incumbent Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential election on Thursday was neither completely unexpected nor was inevitable, as the narrow victory of his opponent Maithripala Sirisena testifies. But its significance is nonetheless far-reaching.
What happened may not have the look of a classic ‘regime change’ – ‘color revolution’ as in Georgia or a coup as in Ukraine – because the transition adhered to democratic principles, but without doubt outside powers had got involved discreetly (without being visible) and choreographed the rebound of party politics in Sri Lanka.
The success of that unspoken enterprise will ultimately need to be measured in terms of the policies (and their sustainability) that the Sirisena government is likely to pursue in the coming period. Given that country’s complex external environment, the contradictions in its political economy and of course Sri Lanka’s robust democratic traditions, the best-laid plots by outsiders can go awry
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