International

The decision by Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (Centre) to issue an apology for the appearance on a Finnish website of the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad was Vanhanen's own. In his statement, issued on Tuesday while the Prime Minister was attending the Winter Olympics in Torino, Vanhanen used stronger language than many Foreign Ministry civil servants would have considered sensible...

STRASBOURG, France, Feb. 15 – In the face of attacks against foreigners in the Muslim world by violent critics of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the European Union's chief executive said Wednesday that Europe had to fight for its core European values, including freedom of speech. "We have to stick very much to these values," said José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission....

A GERMAN newspaper has published a cartoon depicting the Iranian football team dressed as suicide bombers, opening up a new front in the row over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Denmark. The Iranian embassy immediately demanded an apology from Der Tagesspiegel. The German cartoon showed four Iranian players at this year's World Cup in Germany with explosives attached to their...

A Queensland newspaper has entered a Holocaust cartoon in an Iranian newspaper competition to test the notion of free speech, it says. The Rockhampton-based Weekend Choice has emailed a copy of its cartoon to Iran's biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri. It depicts a Western man holding a Muslim man by the throat as he is about to deliver the punchline on an old joke about how many Jews you can fit...

JERUSALEM, Feb 16 (Reuters) - An Israeli cartoonist has launched an "anti-Semitic cartoon contest" to poke fun at fellow Jews in response to furore among Muslims over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. Cartoonist Amitai Sandy said he was inspired by violent Muslim protests and the launching of a Holocaust cartoon competition by an Iranian daily that said it wanted to test the...

MALMO, Sweden (Reuters) - Muslims in Scandinavia have suffered arson attacks on mosques, discrimination in the job market and been demonised in the media, but say they still want to make a future for themselves here and reject extremism. "They make me out to be a Taliban, but they don't say any positive things like the fact that my kids go to Swedish schools and my wife doesn't cover her face,"...

MADISON (AP)–The University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor says a campus paper was justified in reprinting a cartoon depicting a Muslim religious figure, but he called upon the paper to address the indignation of Muslim students on campus concerning the matter. The cartoon, which depicts Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse, was among several images of the prophet...

In the interest of improving The Badger Herald as a source of quality journalism, the position of ombudsman was established last semester to act as a kind of public editor – an editor whose role is both critic of the publication and advocate for the reader. In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, including one that shows him wearing...

Moscow, February 16, Interfax - The Russian Union of Journalists regards as inappropriate recent remarks and steps by certain government officials and institutions regarding the publication of a cartoon in the Volgograd-based newspaper Gorodskiye vesti. "These statements and steps violate two fundamental constitutional principles: freedom of the press and the secular nature of our state," the...

Newspapers are in the business of reporting on and analyzing the news. They are not supposed to make the news. The First Amendment to our Constitution guarantees the right to free speech and expression. In this spirit, newspapers operate to inform readers and further the public discourse with thought provoking opinions and editorial analyses on current events and issues. The responsibilities...