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He added that the front-page of the Wednesday edition would be released tonight.

Cathy Ola, the manager of Gateway Newstands in Toronto says she ordered 80 copies of this week’s Charlie Hebdo magazine, but the distributor, LMPI, could only provide her with 50. Ola says the magazine should come in on Friday.

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I’m not here to pile on; I’ve no high horse to ride. The National Postprinted the Charlie Hebdocovers; but back in 2006 (before my time) it did not print the Jyllands-Postencartoons, which played precisely the same role in the story. The glory of a free press is that no outlet — no privately held one, anyway — has any obligation to print anything, or indeed to explain itself. If the subscribers don’t like it, they have easy and obvious recourse.

Indeed, if outlets like CBC, The New York Timesand The Globe and Mailhad just kept schtum, I don’t think I’d have a lot to say about it. I was disappointed and genuinely surprised: I thought most in the Western media saw the Danish cartoons episode as a bit of an embarrassment, best not repeated. But it wasn’t the end of the world.

They didn’t keep schtum, though. They tried to explain. And in some cases they did an alarmingly bad job of it.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, told Politico’s Dylan Byers that it was “pretty simple”: “We don’t run things that are designed to gratuitously offend.” It’s a highly debatable policy in theory. And in practice, the Internet quickly set to work cataloguing all the things the Timeshad run over the years that were designed to gratuitously offend — an Iranian cartoon in which a Jewish man draws fake outlines of dead bodies while two others hold up a banner reading “holocaust,” for example.