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12 people were murdered, apparently for doing the very thing The Onion does - satire. I admit it scares me. This is radical ideology taken to an abhorrent new low. An attack, ultimately, on what? An idea?You can't kill an idea by murdering innocent people, though you can nudge it toward suicide.

Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, the need for a court jester was understood, the one guy allowed to tell the truth through laughter. It is, in many ways, the most powerful form of free speech because it is aimed at those in power or those who spread hate. Satire is the canary in the coal mine, a cultural thermometer. It has to push, push, push the boundaries of society to see how much it's grown

In America, free speech is so important, the men who wrote the Bill of Rights put it first, but they followed it up with our right to bear arms. To me, that's always been a pretty strong message. But in this state of widespread social change, we need to make sure that the ideal of the Second Amendment never, ever trumps the power of the first.

At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew

Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story.

“[If I left the show,] I would do what I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?”

“Brazilians will only be free when the last Bolsonaro is strangled with the entrails of the last pastor from the Universal Church,” Mr. Cuenca wrote on Twitter, riffing on an oft-cited 18th century quote about the fates that should befall kings and priests.

Leticia Kleim, a legal expert at the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, said, “We’re seeing the justice system become a means to censure and impede the work of journalists.”

Mr. Cuenca said he didn’t deem his tweet particularly offensive given the state of political discourse in Brazil.After all, the country is governed by a president who supports torture, once told a female lawmaker she was too ugly to rape, said he would rather his son die in an accident than be gay, and in 2018 was criminally charged with inciting hatred against Black people, women and Indigenous people.

Ben Carson Says He Has No Memory of Running for President

Appearing on the Fox News Channel, Dr. Carson responded to host Sean Hannity’s question about his ten-month-long candidacy by saying, “I do not recall any of that occurring.”

“Someone is trying to mess with my mind,” he said. “And when I find out who is doing that I will make them pay dearly.”

The killing of a dozen people in Wednesday’s attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted an outpouring of tributes from cartoonists around the world, who have flooded the Internet with images ranging from the elegiac to the scabrously rude.

But amid all the “I Am Charlie” marches and declarations on social media, some in the cartooning world are also debating a delicate question: Were the victims free-speech martyrs, full stop, or provocateurs whose aggressive mockery of Islam sometimes amounted to xenophobia and racism?

uch debates unfold differently in different countries. But the conversation could be especially acute in the United States, where sensitivities to racially tinged caricatures may run higher than in places like France, where historically tighter restrictions on speech have given rise to a strong desire to flout the rules.

My colleagues here in the US, even as they are reeling from the stumbling response of the Donald Trump administration to the crisis, assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire – an example of the wry humour for which the country is famed. But they are all too real.

The stated aim has been to achieve “herd immunity” in order to manage the outbreak and prevent a catastrophic “second wave” next winter

the reasoning goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting the population as a whole.

the Times is nixing “tip of the spear” single-panel cartoons — a form of pointed critique that in American newspapers dates back to the 19th-century work of the legendary Thomas Nast

In the insane world we live in, the art of visual commentary is needed more than ever. And so is humor.”

Chappatte speculated Monday that his decades of work have been “undone” by the Trump/Netanyahu cartoon. “I’m afraid this is not just about cartoons, but about journalism and opinion in general,” wrote Chappatte, who is in his early 50s. “We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow.”

President Trump’s personal lawyer has become caught up in Sacha Baron Cohen’s new “Borat” satire after he was shown with an actress in an edited scene.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Giuliani called into WABC radio in New York to say that he had been tucking in his shirt after removing microphone wires. He chalked the scene’s early release up to a scheme to discredit his recent attempts to push corruption accusations against Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden.

“The Borat video is a complete fabrication,” Mr. Giuliani, 76, tweeted after he got off the air. “At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.”

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them

What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.

“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.

The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story.

Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what’s true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories.

Much-dreaded “sharia law,” or something resembling it, may well be coming to the United States.

the religiously motivated laws creeping into public policymaking aren’t based on the Koran, and they aren’t coming from mythical hard-line Islamists in, say, Dearborn, Mich. They’re coming from the White House, which wants to make it easier for hard-line Christians to impose their beliefs and practices on the rest of us.

He vowed to help blur the line between church and state by repealing the Johnson Amendment.

Stewart and his writers do two things that make them unique on popular television. First, they cover — and yes, I would say “cover,” not just satirize or mock — a wide range of religions. If you watched only The Daily Show, you would nonetheless learn, in time, about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and a whole spectrum of smaller faiths, a category that I would argue includes atheism. And second, they pay attention to points of theology that more traditional news and talk shows skip over. Using chunks of time that would be unthinkable on a network newscast — six minutes for a segment on Mormonism! — The Daily Show teaches the finer points of belief, mining them for humor but at the same time serving a real educational function. 

The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.

There is no apparent ideology, either religious or skeptical, animating Stewart’s treatment of religion. More than anything, he and his writers have the scrupulosity of objective journalists. They win laughs without deforming, or even exaggerating, the religion’s actual beliefs. This is an extraordinary feat. Most religious humor, especially on television or in the movies, depends on stereotypes, which are by definition crude and reductive. Stewart’s writers, by contrast, find humor in the specifics of each faith.

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who is cited in “The Triple Package,” hadn’t yet read the book, but said he hoped that Chua and Rubenfeld were aware that they’re flirting with a Typhoid Mary. “I’m all for culture,” Patterson said, but “culture is a tricky concept. It has tripped up a lot of anthropologists and sociologists.”

“The Triple Package” is full of qualifications, earnest settings-of-the-terms, explicit attempts to head off misinterpretations at the pass. “This point is so important we’re going to repeat it,” they write in a section about Appalachian poverty, which they argue was caused by geography and industrial decline, rather than by any lack of triple-package values.

Chua remained optimistic.“I feel like it should be a book that if you approach it with an open mind, it actually shouldn’t be controversial. It should be thought-provoking.”

The attack on the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo in January was the most devastating terrorist incident in France since the Algerian War more than five decades ago

In the aftermath, there has been considerable debate in France about the extent of radicalization among the country’s nearly 5 million Muslim

attitudes toward Muslims have become slightly more positive over the past year

Malek Layouni was not thinking about her Muslim faith, or her head scarf, as she took her excited 9-year-old son to an amusement site near Paris. But, as it turned out, it was all that mattered.

Mrs. Layouni still blushes with humiliation at being turned away in front of friends and neighbors, and at having no answer for her son, who kept asking her, “What did we do wrong?”

10 years after France passed its first anti-veil law restricting young girls from wearing veils in public schools, the head coverings of observant Muslim women, from colorful silk scarves to black chadors, have become one of the most potent flash points in the nation’s tense relations with its vibrant and growing Muslim population.

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Moreover, provocateurs and ridiculers expose the stupidity of the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are people who take everything literally. They are incapable of multiple viewpoints.