After a string of deadly terror attacks that began with Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo shooting, as many as a million people swarmed the streets of Paris today for a unity rally that also drew more than 40 world leaders, including Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas, the U.K.'s David Cameron and Angela Merkel of Germany.
This afternoon France 2 released video of police storming the kosher supermarket in eastern Paris where Amedy Coulibaly had taken 14 people hostage. The video shows several dozen police firing into the store and tossing flash grenades until Couibaly, who earlier in the week allegedly killed a Paris police officer, runs out. The video pauses before Couibaly is killed, but France 2 reports he was shot 60 times. Seconds later, the video resumes and terrified hostages are seen fleeing the market.
A French official has confirmed to the Associated Press that Cherif and Said Kouachi have holed up inside a printing house in Dammartin-en-Goële, northeast of Paris, and have reportedly taken at least one person hostage. Police and the gunmen, accused of killing 12 people in Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo office massacre, traded fire Friday as helicopters descended on the scene.
Even Ross Douthat came out swinging yesterday in favor of the slain cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo ("The Blasphemy We Need"). Since it is difficult to find even one square inch of common ground between right and left in American politics, this ought to have come as good news. Unfortunately, Douthat's Take is yet another of the many, many exercises in facile hypocrisy we've seen since yesterday.
Terrorism persists because terrorism works. Terrorism works because we let it.
Further raising tensions in Paris amid a manhunt for two suspected shooters in yesterday's Charlie Hebdo office massacre, a police officer was killed and another person injured after an unidentified assailant opened fire early Thursday. French police do not believe there to be connection between this morning's shooting and yesterday's killings.
One of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shooting has reportedly turned himself in to authorities without incident.
The Guardian is reporting that three suspects in this morning's deadly attack at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris have been arrested, though that report is unconfirmed. The suspects have reportedly been identified as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, two brothers in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad.
At least three English-language outlets—the New York Daily News, the London-based Daily Telegraph, and the Associated Press—are either pixelating or completely deleting photos of Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting Mohammad. Members of the satirical magazine’s Paris staff were gunned down this morning by masked attackers. As BuzzFeed points out, other Western outlets such as CNN have taken similar steps in the past when reporting on controversial depictions of the most prominent prophet in Islam.
Mere hours after terrorists mowed down the office of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the world's journalists are on the case, attempting to get an interview with one of the paper's employees, Laurent Leger. One small thing: It is not yet known whether Leger was one of the 10 Charlie employees reportedly killed in the attack, or if he was injured. Still, maybe he has time to catch up? Or even if he is alive, it might be good for him to chat with a random BBC radio journalist about how his co-workers were just shot to death?
At 11:28 a.m. Wednesday local time, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo tweeted a cartoon of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. "Best wishes and good health," the caption read. Minutes after the tweet was published, three armed and masked gunmen stormed the paper's offices and opened fire, killing ten of its staff and two police officers.
Masked gunmen wielding Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher killed at least 12 people and injured 10 more at the Paris offices of satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday before escaping. French president François Hollande called the shooting "unquestionably a terrorist attack."
