Magazine awarded top honour

PARIS has made the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo an “honorary citizen” as part of support to the weekly, which lost its main cartoonists in a deadly shooting this week.

In an extraordinary meeting of the city council on Friday, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said the status of “honorary citizen”, rarely awarded, was given to “the most iconic defenders of human rights around the world to honour great resistance against dictatorship and barbarism”.

The magazine will publish a million copies this week as French media and journalists vowed to ensure it is printed. The French newspaper Le Monde quoted Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, as saying a million copies of the next edition of the magazine are due to be published on Wednesday. Its weekly circulation is believed to be around 45 000.

#JeSuisCharlie has become one of the most popular hashtags in the history of Twitter as people around the world showed their solidarity for the victims of the Paris shooting. At its height, the tag was tweeted at a rate of 6 500 times a minute and featured in 3.4 million tweets in just one 24-hour period.

Albert Uderzo, the 87-year-old creator of the classic French comic series Asterix, also came out of retirement to draw a cartoon featuring his hero punching an assailant in to the air and shouting “Moi aussi je suis un

Charlie” (I too am a Charlie). —