Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, presenter Jim Naughtie said: "I've got a letter here that was sent out by OUP to an author doing something for young people. Among the things prohibited in the text that was commissioned by OUP was the following: Pigs plus sausages, or anything else which could be perceived as pork.

"Now, if a respectable publisher, tied to an academic institution, is saying you've got to write a book in which you cannot mention pigs because some people might be offended, it’s just ludicrous. It is just a joke." Muslim Labour MP Khalid Mahmood said: "I absolutely agree. That’s absolute utter nonsense. And when people go too far, that brings the whole discussion into disrepute."

“Let’s get one thing clear: This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses,” writes Clifton. Indeed, the numbers are striking. Contrary to the oft-cited 26 million businesses in America figure, Clifton says 20 million of these so-called “businesses” are merely companies on paper with zero workers, profits, customers, or sales.

In reality, America has just 6 million businesses with one or more employers – 3.8 million of which have four or fewer employees. In total, these 6 million U.S. companies provide jobs for more than 100 million people in America. The Gallup CEO says the numbers paint an ominous portrait of America in a dire state of decline. “I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, but when small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they’re being born, so is free enterprise,” says Clifton. “And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it.”

“There’s plenty of people out there saying: ‘give us all the data you’ve got and we can tell you what we can do with it’,” he told the Financial Times on the sidelines of the Detroit motor show, adding that this included “Silicon Valley” companies, as well as advertising groups. “And we’re saying: ‘No thank you’.”

About two-thirds of today’s new cars have sensors and communications systems that send and receive data, offering potential for carmakers to find out more about how drivers use their vehicles. But the systems could also provide insurers and advertisers with personal information about customers. BMW said it had a firewall in place to protect crucial data about the internal running of the car. But any transmission of data raises concerns about who might access that information — and what they might do with it.

Adam Jonas, analyst at Morgan Stanley, said it was a “major issue” for carmakers, which “unanimously want to create a barrier on this information”. He said: “They don’t want to be the first one to let [their] guard down on information privacy or to become the first company to have a car hacked with bad consequences and image.”

Ford was forced into an embarrassing retraction at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas after Jim Farley, then head of marketing at the US carmaker, said: “We know everyone who breaks the law. We know exactly when you do it because we have a GPS sensor in your car.” He added: “By the way, we don’t supply that data to anyone.” Mr Farley later clarified that the company did not track anyone without their permission.

Many mainstream Muslim organizations also reacted by saying that the mere depiction of the prophet is a sacrilege: Egypt's Islamic body Dar al-Ifta branded the publication "an unjustified provocation against the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslims," AFP reported.

"This edition will result in a new wave of hatred in French and Western society. What the magazine is doing does not serve coexistence and the cultural dialogue Muslims aspire to," Dar al-Ifta said in a statement. Sunni Islam's most renowned center of learning, Al-Azhar in Cairo, said that the cartoons "stir up hatred" and "do not serve the peaceful coexistence between peoples."

Tabnak, a conservative online outlet in Iran, wrote that "Charlie Hebdo has again insulted the Prophet." Charlie Hebdo’s front cover Wednesday shows the Prophet Muhammad shedding a tear while holding a "Je Suis Charlie" sign. The headline reads: “Tout est pardonné” (All is forgiven).

The Ukip leader was interviewed yesterday by presenter Sean Hannity on the causes of the Paris massacre, following his comments last week in which he blamed a ‘fifth column’ and ‘gross multiculturalism’ for the attacks. In yesterday’s interview, Mr Hannity asked why Britain and other countries had allowed ‘people to come to the country, not assimilate, separate, take their land ostensibly and then risk even being at war with them’.

Mr Farage said: ‘I agreed with your sentiments entirely’. He added: ‘So wherever you look you see this blind eye being turned and you see the growth of ghettos where the police and all the normal agents of the law have withdrawn and that is where Sharia Law has come in.’ Mr Farage said the imposition of Sharia law meant there had been no prosecutions for the ‘tens of thousands’ of female genital mutilations carried out in Britain. He said ‘moral cowardice’ was to blame for the police not trying to catch Muslim men involved in child abuse in parts of Northern England. Mr Farage said: ‘We’ve been turning a blind eye to preachers of hate that have been coming here from the Middle East and saying things for which the rest of us would be arrested.’

Baron Evans of Weardale, who as Jonathan Evans worked for the Security Service for 33 years, also warned that the world faced a build-up of trained terrorists not seen since al-Qaeda ran training camps in Afghanistan before 9/11. He spoke in a House of Lords debate as police forces prepared to deploy officers at newsagents selling a special issue of Charlie Hebdo depicting the Prophet Mohammed after extremists said it would “definitely” provoke fresh terrorist attacks.

Around 2,000 copies of the controversial magazine are being sent to Britain, where they will be sold by a small number of independent retailers after major names including WH Smith decided not to stock them. On a day when the head of Europol told MPs that up to 5,000 Europeans pose a terrorist threat after going to Syria to fight, Lord Evans said the “hesitancy” of the Government to “engage with the religious dimension of the threat we face” was making it harder to prevent young men becoming radicalised.

Meanwhile Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, accused British public bodies of showing “moral cowardice” in failing to tackle problems associated with multiculturalism, allowing “big ghettos” to develop and turning a “blind eye” to hate preachers.

According to France Info, he was sentenced to four years behind bars. All over France judges are putting France’s recently approved Anti-Terror Act to use, a law spearheaded by Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and geared primarily at stopping terrorists and their sympathizers from condoning barbaric acts and attracting new recruits to their cause on the internet.

In Toulouse, southern France, three men between the ages of 20 and 25 received ten-month jail terms after they applauded the murder of 17 people during last week’s attacks. Dubbed the “French Patriot Act” by its opponents, the bill received the support of a majority of lawmakers in the Senate but was deemed “anti-democratic” by civil rights groups and some political parties who were wary of the extended powers it granted the government.

Among its most controversial clauses are a travel ban on suspected would-be terrorists and the power to block websites thought to be promoting terrorist acts, without a prior court order. With tensions running high in a France desperate to avoid further attacks, the lines between genuine terror speech and offensive rhetoric could become blurred. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls laid down the law this week, simply saying "racism, anti-Semitism and the glorification of terrorism (apologie du terrorisme) are crimes."

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, indicated to the House of Representatives armed services committee that the strength of Isis relative to the Iraqi army may be such that he would recommend abandoning Obama’s oft-repeated pledge against returning US ground troops to combat in Iraq.

Retaking the critical city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, and re-establishing the border between Iraq and Syria that Isis has erased “will be fairly complex terrain” for the Iraqi security forces that the US is once again supporting, Dempsey acknowledged. “I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by US forces, but we’re certainly considering it,” he said.

US military planners take this threat so seriously that when the president goes overseas, one of the doomsday planes always follows. It needs to be nearby at all times, as does the military aide within a few yards of the president carrying nuclear launch codes and communications gear. Similar provisions have been made in Russia, which maintains most of its intercontinental ballistic missiles on a high state of alert for fear of losing them in an American first strike.

The reason you may have missed the story is that almost nobody besides InsideDefense.com reported it. National media were too busy covering more weighty matters like the efforts of North Korean agents to suppress a Sony film farce that insults the Dear Leader, and the attack on a French satirical magazine by a motley crew of extremists. How could nuclear Armageddon compete with that?

When a conventional munition is exploded, it heats the immediate vicinity by a few thousand degrees. The heat of a nuclear blast at its center is more akin to tens of millions of degrees. So if one of those 500-kiloton warheads is exploded a mile above Boston or Dallas, everything within a one-mile radius is destroyed, heavy damage extends to three miles, and fires will be widespread out to five miles. Not that it will matter to most of the people near ground zero — they will be killed immediately by blast effects or a wind-spread firestorm that expands faster than they can escape (initial wind speed: 700 miles per hour).

People further away will linger longer before succumbing to the effects of prompt and delayed radiation. Electronic devices will be shut down for a hundred miles in every direction due to the electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast. And that’s just the effects from one nuclear warhead. Russia has over 2,000 nuclear warheads capable of reaching America.