The “survivors’ issue” of Charlie Hebdo will also be sold outside France next week because of the massive world attention for the satirical French weekly following the massacre of its top staff — a turnaround for a publication that just one week ago was on the brink of folding.
The remaining employees of the publication are putting out the special edition on Wednesday, which they say will have 1 million copies printed instead of the usual 60,000.
The online solidarity slogan #JeSuisCharlie has now been used more than five million times, according to Twitter France, making it the most-ever shared hashtag for France-related topics.
Photo: AFP
The French company MLP that Charlie Hebdo is using to distribute its much-awaited issue has done deals with several other press distribution groups, notably Naville in Switzerland and SGEL in Spain, to sell the edition, industry sources said. Negotiations are going on with companies in other nations, such as Canada.
Many other nations that have never seen Charlie Hebdo — a comic-heavy newspaper that delights in breaking taboos and testing the boundaries of taste — are also calling for copies to come their way.
All of the companies involved in getting next week’s newspaper to the public have promised to do so for free, and all money from sales of the issue are to go to the families of the 12 people murdered in the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices on Wednesday last week by two Islamic militants.
The massacre wiped out five of the newspaper’s leading cartoonists. The surviving members of the publication have been at work since Friday last week in premises loaned by the newspaper Liberation to produce the new issue.
Chief editor Gerard Biard, who was in London the day of the attack, said the issue will include cartoons from the whole team — including some from the killed cartoonists.
All the surviving staff are working on the issue for free.
The sudden global prominence of Charlie Hebdo, which before typically sold only half of its usual 60,000 printed copies in France, has saved it from imminent bankruptcy.
The newspaper, named after the US comic book character Charlie Brown (“Hebdo” is French slang for weekly), had only in November made a public appeal for donations to keep going.
Back then, of the 1 million euros (US$1.2 million) it was asking for, it had received only 26,000 euros. Closure seemed inevitable.
However, French media have rallied around the title to offer whatever help it needs, and the French government is looking at releasing public funds to bail out Charlie Hebdo.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls even dropped by on Friday last week as the surviving staff started work to lend his official support to the publication — which has in the past lampooned him and other politicians.
Keeping Charlie Hebdo going is now being seen in France as an act of defiance to the Islamic militants who sought to extinguish it, and a testament to free speech.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS