In New York City, where you can't go to your neighborhood pizza joint without being reminded of early childhood educational trauma and potential contamination, letter grades are in and casual dining with rodents is out. In a new move proposed by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., putting a letter grade on salons of all styles is potentially also in our future.

The restaurant grading system, which ranks establishments on an A, B, or C scale, was put into place for all NYC restaurants in 2010. In the front window of any eatery, the restaurant's grade (awarded from on high by the Department of Health) must be prominently displayed for all discerning diners to see. Diaz Jr. would like the same for nail salons, barbershops, and hair salons.

Via the AP:

Salons and barbershops are regulated by the New York Department of State, which has just 27 inspectors for the entire state. The department's Division of Licensing Services received 180 complaints against "appearance enhancement establishments" in 2014, spokesman Laz Benitez said. The most common complaint was unlicensed operators.

Officials at the division had no comment on the proposed letter grade system.

While other cities such as Los Angeles assign A, B and C grades to restaurants, Diaz said he is unaware of any jurisdiction that does the same for salons and barbershops. "We believe that we're setting the stage for this concept to happen statewide and certainly nationwide," he said.

The bill that was introduced on Wednesday would require the state to give permission for New York City to regulate and grade its barbershops, nail salons, and hair salons. The fear on part of the business owners is that this grading system will enforce regulations that small businesses may not be able to afford.

As Javiel Rodriguez from the Knockout Barber Shop in the Bronx told the AP, "A lot of barbershops look like garbage cans. It's a good idea to go there and give them a grade."

Me? I don't care. I like not knowing the shit I'm getting myself into.

[Image via AP]

Unlike some other pop stars, here's one who actually has the goods.

(You have seen his dick, right?)

Update: Chris Brown deleted this from his Instagram. Weird. Nothing to be ashamed of there, Chris!

David Petraeus is one step closer to facing felony charges for sharing classified information with his mistress while he was director of the C.I.A. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have recommended that charges be sought; it's up to Attorney General Eric Holder whether to go forward with an indictment.

You're never going to get me to say anything bad about Tommy Craggs. The guy once sent me to Panama for a story and said nothing as I blew several deadlines in a row for it. He knew I fucked up, I knew I fucked up, and he knew that I knew that he knew I fucked up, and he said nothing, presumably in the knowledge that getting on me about it would just make me more anxious and that even if it took forever, I'd eventually write something that was worth sending me out there for. He's a great editor and a great guy and I'm proud to call him a friend.

He's also a god damn communist. If you've been reading Deadspin for a while, you've probably noticed that over the past few years it's gone from being the dirtbag website you go to if you want to see what your favorite ballplayer's cock looks like to being the dirtbag website you go to if you want to see what your favorite ballplayer's cock looks like or read a sanctimonious 9,000-word essay on how the fact that Auburn's offensive line isn't paid in cash is emblematic of the broad moral failures of capitalism. That's because Tommy Craggs is a god damn communist.

When this site runs stories about the ways in which bad football writing is indicative of the systemic racism that affects every aspect of American life, or about how the use of language in sports broadcasting illuminates the hard-wired class and gender inequities that make the idea of American meritocracy a sick joke, or about the ways in which baseball is best viewed as a metaphor for American imperialism, it invariably attracts complaints that Deadspin is just using sports as an excuse to run leftist propaganda; that the people who run the site are more concerned with their political agenda than with anything else; and that this agenda involves the downfall of capitalism. As someone who's worked closely with Craggs, I can tell you this is all literally true. He doesn't dislike sports—he has curiously strong opinions on Illinois basketball and the Oakland A's and is always up to gush over Steph Curry—but his principal concern, as long as I've worked with him, has been using sportswriting as a pretext for convincing the public that organizing society around the pursuit of individual advantage regardless of its effect on others is wrong. In private conversation, he openly talks about this, using words like "propaganda" approvingly and talking about who among his enemies will be first against the wall. The means are those at hand; the end is the destruction of the American way of life. That's because Tommy Craggs is a god damn communist.

Photo via Getty

Today Dean Baquet called a U.S.C. professor an “asshole” on Facebook after that professor criticized Baquet’s decision, as executive editor of The New York Times, not to publish any of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting Mohammad. Full transcript after the jump.

Some background: The professor in question is Marc Cooper, who teaches at U.S.C.’s Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism in Los Angeles. Earlier today, in a Facebook post linking to Margaret Sullivan’s discussion of Baquet’s decision, Cooper wrote:

A question for NYTimes editor Dean Baquet. Exactly how many people have to be shot in cold blood before your paper rules that you can show us what provoked the killers? Apparently 23 shot including 11 dead is not enough. What absolute cowardice. These MSM managers act is if they are running insurance companies, not news organizations.

Baquet, for some reason, responded over two comments:

Dear Marc, appreciate the self righteous second guessing without even considering there might be another point of view. Hope your students are more open minded. Asshole

That’s the point. Those are the cartoons one would have to show. Marc my pompous friend where would you run this one?

At first Cooper replied (to a commenter questioning whether the Facebook user claiming to be Dean Baquet was in fact Baquet):

Yeah that is really Dean Baquet. A compelling argument:l) BTW, Dean, of course there is a second view. The one stated in M. Sullivean's note in which you are amply quoted on your point of view. You just happen to be wrong. man. I call you that instead of your word "asshole" as I try to meet long standing standards we have here of decency and refrain from insulting, as you put it.

And to another commenter:

Forgive Dean. He’s under a lot of pressure right now deciding what news fits in the paper. It’s a tough job deciding for all the rest of us.

Back to Baquet:

Of course there is a second view. And I welcome it. But your note was thoughtless and arrogant. It didn’t invite argument. It invites so what you got. And no insurance didn’t even enter the discussion.

I welcome vigorous debate. Not righteous cheap shots

In turn, Cooper wrote:

Well, I will keep that in mind next time a post comment on Facebook., There’s nothing righteous about what I said. There is just a simple underlying truth. There is no good reason to not publish the pictures and your argument was underwhelming, I know that my 4,000 followers on puts me de facto in a position of arrogance vis a vis the humble editor of the paper of record, but it is a professional risk I must take Now, don’t make me go and delete all those nice columns I wrote about when you were defending the LATimes staff against the cuts. I only wish that sort of spirit would have infused this decision.

And Baquet:

Understand you disagree. But there was a thoughtful discussion to be had. Next time I promise we will have it. But I bristle at arguments like those of fauchier who think it was a question of courage. It was not. Thanks for the chance to exorcise my demons now. Dean

(“fauchier” refers to a commenter who in the same thread wrote: “tell the fucking truth nothing more and if it's a cartoon a cartoon it is! WTF!”)

Alright, well. Here’s the full thread. Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: YouTube; H/T Romenesko

The tail of AirAsia flight QZ8501 was lifted from the sea bed today, 100 feet below the surface and 20 miles from the passenger jet's last known location, Reuters reports. The black box is still missing.

Divers attached inflatable balloons to the tail section, which was then towed to a nearby rescue vessel. Flight 8501 first went missing two weeks ago. There were 162 people on board; 48 bodies have been recovered so far.

The plane's black box—containing the cockpit voice and flight data recorders—is held near the tail. On Friday, Reuters reports, pings believed to be emitted by the black box were detected about a half-mile away from where the tail was lifted:

"The location where the pings were (detected) has been flagged," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, the head of the search and rescue agency, told reporters. "If tomorrow the currents allow us to confirm it, we will confirm it immediately."

Two teams of divers reportedly began the search again early Saturday morning

[Photo credit: AP Images]

George Zimmerman, America's chosen mascot for the reasonable use of lethal force, was arrested in Florida late Friday night on suspicion of domestic violence and aggravated assault with a weapon, again. At a court hearing Saturday morning, a judge granted Zimmerman a $5,000 bond.

From News 13 Orlando:

According to Don West, Zimmerman's attorney, his client threw a wine bottle during the incident.

Zimmerman is prohibited from contacting the victim, returning to her home or entering Volusia County. He must surrender all firearms by Tuesday and will also wear a GPS monitoring device.

After his acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman was picked up by police for two different domestic incidents in 2013, the second reportedly involving a shotgun, but prosecuted for neither after his alleged victims declined to press charges.

More recently, in September a motorist claimed Zimmerman threatened to kill him, saying, "Do you know who I am?"

[Image via Seminole County Sheriff's Office]

Harry Gleeson, an Irish man hanged in 1941 for the brutal murder of Mary McCarthy the year before, will receive Ireland's first posthumous pardon in the coming weeks, The Irish Times reports.

Gleeson, a farmer, actually was the one to report McCarthy's death to police in the first place. He found her body in a field. McCarthy, an unmarried mother of seven, had been shot in the face twice with a shotgun.

The Griffith College-based Irish Innocence Project—part of the larger, global organization of the same name—and the Justice for Harry Gleeson Group submitted research to Ireland's Department of Justice last year which revealed that the prosecution in Gleeson's trial had withheld information, beat one witness and encouraged several more to falsify statements. According to the Times, a pathologist also verified Gleeson had an alibi using forensic evidence.

The Tipperary Star reports that McCarthy was known as "Foxy Moll" for her "flaming red hair." Apparently, local gossip held that Gleeson was the father of one of McCarthy's children. (Gleeson, a bachelor, denied this.) From the Star:

A social outcast, Mary kept her head high, even boasting to local women about all the men whom she "entertained" in her two-room cottage. Reviled and feared in equal measure, Mary was reputed to keep a list of local men who visited and lusted after her.

This, along with her refusal to adhere by the puritan standards of the time - the parish priest described her as the "Devil's Disciple" - made her a target among those who feared their own names might leak out.

According to RTÉ, one of McCarthy's daughters, 50 years after her mother was killed, told a nurse, "I saw my own mother shot on the kitchen floor, and an innocent man died."

So Harry Gleeson gets his pardon 74 years too late, and we still don't know who killed Mary McCarthy.

[Image via RTÉ/YouTube]

Joseph Gibbons, a filmmaker and former M.I.T. professor, is facing felony robbery charges in two states after after allegedly filmed himself stealing $1,000 from a Manhattan bank on New Year's Eve and $3,000 from a bank in Rhode Island in November, the New York Post reports. Gibbons.

According to the Post, Gibbons told his cellmate Keylan Sherrard he committed the robberies for art. "He was doing research for a film," said Sherrard. "It's not a crime; it's artwork… He's an intellectual."

Gibbons entered a Capital One branch at Bowery and Grand Street in Chinatown around 2 p.m. on New Year's Eve carrying a video camera, the Post reports. He handed the teller a note "demanding a donation for his church."

In an interview with Big RED & Shiny before the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Gibbons discussed the autobiographical elements of his work:

I started out making more abstract films or structural films and it wasn't until I discovered using myself as material that I thought I had something. But I had to keep making more—I needed content. By finding flaws and working on those—that was a goldmine. I just worried if I had enough problems within me that I could exploit. So when I ran of my own—I started creating them.

Bail was set at $50,000.

[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

"Art has to be a kind of confession," James Baldwin said, fifty-four years ago. "If you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too." Baldwin, more than any other American writer, showed us how every sentence contained the possibility of discovery for both writer and reader. Over the course of the ensuing months, I'm going to ask some of the country's most incredible creators to let readers into the crevices of how they do the work of facing and discovering life. Every creator will be asked the same six questions.

Two of the questions focus on memory, love, misogyny, and blackness. Two of the questions place us at 12 years old, the same age Tamir Rice was when we was gunned down by police in Cleveland Ohio; and the same age Davia Garth was, who was killed by her stepfather in the same city. One of the questions asks us imagine two incredibly needed national policy proposals. The final question ponders how black lives can actually matter in 2015.

Our first creator, Mychal Denzel Smith, a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute and a contributing writer at The Nation, has written some of the most consistently brilliant, probing, and unafraid prose I've ever read. No one in my world brings as much passion and precision to the work of discovering as Smith. He is one of the few writers on earth whose love for us refuses to stop when the ink dries.

Laymon: Tell me about the first time you remember your love for black folks being threatened?

Smith: I was in second grade. My teacher had us doing the obligatory Black History Month project where you select a single black person from the approved list of noteworthy negroes and then reduce their life to a couple of highlights. Actually, I don't even think we were going to do anything particular to Black History Month until my mother went to the school and asked about it. Anyway, I remember this project out of all the ones I would later do because, A) it involved some craftsmanship, as the assignment was to build this movie reel-style contraption out of a shoebox and paper towel rolls, and B) because I did mine on Malcolm X. It was the first time I read his autobiography. Keep in mind I was seven years old. I didn't understand everything I was reading, and built the project mostly around other, easier to comprehend for a seven year old, resources, but there were things in his life that were clearly very rich and fascinating that I wanted to share with my classmates.

I was an aggressively shy kid, not one to raise my hand or volunteer to speak in front of the class. But I was excited about this. And my mother came to school to help me with my presentation. Other kids got up and did Jackie Robinson and the like. Then it was my turn. I stood there with my mother, talking about this dude, Malcolm X, that seemed so cool to me. And I'm just talking about his life, and his philosophy, and some white kids started crying. Like, got mad upset. Their parents were there, too, and they wanted me to hurry up and finish my presentation so I wouldn't further upset their children. I didn't understand what was happening. My mother helped me keep rolling my little shoebox movie, skipping over some parts—I guess the ones that may have upset the kids and their parents some more—and I sat down after finishing to the most lukewarm applause.

When you were twelve years old, can you describe for me what a perfect day would look like?

Is it sad or endearing that a perfect day for me at twelve years old is eerily similar to what one would look like for me at twenty-eight? Because all I wanted then, as now, was to eat breakfast food, play basketball, watch cartoons, get some new sneakers, and stay up all night reading and writing. Only difference may be that twelve year-old me would want bacon.

If twelve year old you, could describe the most exciting thing you did last night, what would he say?

Twelve year-old me would've enjoyed last night. That's all.

Can you describe your first memory of misogyny and anti-blackness colliding?

I was at, of all places, a Wu-Tang concert. I missed Wu's heyday by virtue of being a pre-pre-teen when they took over hip-hop. I felt I needed to shore up my hip-hop head bonafides by going to one of their shows 15 years after after 36 Chambers dropped. I went with my girlfriend at the time, and we waited the mandatory two hours after the show was supposed to start for Wu to finally get on stage (sans Method Man and with way too much Cappadonna). The place erupted, in part for excitement to see the Clan perform, but also because everyone had been standing around drinking for a long time and they couldn't contain themselves any longer. Wu-Tang shows are filled with white frat boys. Hip-hop shows in general are filled with white people, but Wu has a particular following among white frat boys that bond with them over the fact that they, too, enjoy marijuana.

So when Wu hit the stage, it turned into a white, frat boy mosh pit. It's the least sexy shit I've ever witnessed. Just a bunch of drunk white boys mashing up against you, with no room to move or enjoy the music, at least what could be made out of it. Anybody violates your personal space for too long, you're bound to get upset, and that's what happened. These white boys acted like me and my girlfriend didn't exist. We weren't there to entertain them, so in many ways, we didn't exist to them. But our elbows did. We weren't on some Dennis Rodman fighting for a rebound shit, but we did what we could to clear out some space for ourselves. One white dude didn't take kindly to that. He got up in my girl's face and told her to watch it. She ain't never been the type to back down, so she told him about himself. I stepped in between them. He told me he was sorry. He apologized to me. Then proceeded to talk over me and tell my girl that he'd get some friends to fuck her up. Then he apologized to me again, after I gave him a few words of my own for that comment. It's amazing how, even though both of us were invisible in that crowd, my black maleness got apologies and her black womanness got physical threats.

If you could concretely propose any two new national policies, what would they be?

One: reparations. I know we kinda talked about the issue last year, but I want reparations for black folks, reparations for the victims of police brutality, reparations for anybody who has been incarcerated due to the War on Drugs, reparations for anyone who ever had the police called on them while in school, reparations for survivors of sexual assault, reparations for anybody who has done years of unpaid domestic work, reparations for anybody saddled with student loans, and reparations for all the folks who have worked a job for minimum wage. There's going to be a lot of overlap, and so be it. Cut them multiple checks.

Two: I know it's not the important agenda item, and not even really a policy, but I'd love to change the national anthem. I want something that's a true affirmation to black self-love. Imagine a whole nation listening to Janelle Monáe's "Q.U.E.E.N." or Kendrick Lamar's "i" before the Super Bowl. How dope would that be?

How can black lives really matter in these United States of America?

They already do. I guess the question is how do we start treat them like they do. And the only answer to that is put an end to white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. That's how we ensure all black lives are treated like they matter. How do we accomplish that? The homie Jesse Myerson and I recently laid out a few concrete policy goals that could assist in that effort over at The Nation. But before that, we have to understand as a society, as a culture, as a democracy, as a country, that true justice won't come without sacrifice. It's not enough to simply understand what privileges we derive from the system. We have to be willing to commit to living without them.

Mychal Denzel Smith is a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, a contributing writer at The Nation, as well as Feministing and Salon. He was recently named to The Root 100 and was a finalist for the National Association of Black Journalist's "Salute to Excellence" Awards. His work on race, politics, social justice, mental health, and black male identity has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Ebony. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

[Photo via AP]

If you'd like to be considered for the Times Six series, please send your thoughtful responses to our questions; email kiese@gawker.com.

On Friday, the final performance of Bill Cosby's three-city Canadian tour was disrupted by the most vocal demonstration against the accused rapist yet, with around 30 protesters marching out of the venue chanting "We believe the women" and another reportedly shouting, "You're a piece of shit. You rapist."

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cosby supporters responded by yelling back "We believe the men" and "We love you Cosby."

Staged just one day after Cosby publicly acknowledged the accusations against him by joking about rape on stage, the comedian urged audience members to remain calm during the protest.

"Whatever happens here tonight if there's some sort of outburst, we just have to remain calm and things will be taken care of. It oughtn't last that long," said Cosby before his stand-up set.

"I want to thank all of you here tonight because you stayed with what you believed in."

[Image via AP Images]

Daniel Donovan, the Staten Island District Attorney who failed to indict the killer of Eric Garner, was selected on Saturday as the GOP nominee for the empty congressional seat left by fellow Republican Michael Grimm, who pled guilty to felony tax fraud last month.

The Guardian reports that French police are searching frantically for Hayat Boumeddiene, the ex-girlfriend of Amedy Coulibaly who was killed last night after taking 14 people hostage at a kosher supermarket. Boumeddiene is believed to be armed and dangerous.

Police suspect Boumeddiene of being Coulibaly's accomplice in the fatal shooting of a female police officer on Thursday.

French special forces shot and killed Chérif and Saïd Kouachi on Friday, the brothers who masterminded the attack on satirical newspaper around the same time that Coulibaly was killed elsewhere.

According to The Guardian, Paris prosecutor said there was "constant and sustained" telephone contact between Boumeddiene and Izzana Hamyd, the wife of Chérif Kouachi—more than 500 calls last year.

Boumeddiene, Coulibaly, and Chérif Kouachi have known each other since at least 2010, the New York Times reports. The three are said to have "frequently visited" with Djamel Beghal, "French-Algerian champion of jihad who had once been imprisoned for planning an attack on the American Embassy in Paris in 2001."

The 26-year-old Boumeddiene is reportedly one of a family of seven children. She and her siblings were placed in foster care after their mother died and their father was unable to care for them. From The Guardian:

A devout Muslim, Boumeddiene lost her job as a supermarket cashier, Le Parisien reported, because she insisted on wearing the full Islamic niqab. In a 2010 police interview obtained by Le Monde, she also told police she was doubtful about the true extent of her partner's faith: "Amedy isn't really very religious. He likes having fun."

850 people were deployed across the greater Paris area searching for Boumeddiene on Saturday, the New York Times reports, as the Defense Ministry announced that it would add another 250 soldiers. The ministry said that it would add another 250 tomorrow.

Meanwhile, as the search intensifies, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared war against radical Islam on Saturday. "It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity," Valls said.http://gawker.com/terrorism-work...

The New York Times also reports that a European intelligence official said that Boumeddiene might have been seen in Turkey on Saturday morning.

Correction, 2:55 p.m. – An earlier version of this post misidentified Coulibaly as one of the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo. Coulibaly had strong ties to the gunmen but did not participate in that attack.

[Image via Getty Images]

A former high school teacher already facing a variety of rape charges related to sex with underage students was arrested in Utah this week after prosecutors say she sexted and had intercourse with a third teen while out on bail.

According to authorities, 35-year-old Brianne Altice maintained a sexual relationship with her latest victim from November 2013 to August 2014 while awaiting trial for having sex with a 16-year-old student.

In October 2014, an additional teen came forward and testified that Altice had had sex with him as well, characterizing their relationship as "a teacher with benefits."

The former English teacher has now been charged with 14 different crimes, including five counts of first-degree felony rape, and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

Altice is—once again—out on bail.

[Image via the Standard-Examiner//h/t Uproxx]

A woman shot her husband, a soldier at Fort Bragg, in the chest yesterday after mistaking him for a home intruder, the Associated Press reports. He'd come back into the house to bring her breakfast in bed.

A police spokesman said Zia Segule had left home Friday morning and returned unannounced with "a bag of breakfast food." His wife Tiffany Segule had fallen back to sleep. According to the AP, she heard someone in the house and, believing it to be an intruder, "armed herself with a handgun and shot through her bedroom door, hitting her husband in the upper chest."

Segule was taken to Cape Fear Valley Medical Center and was released later the same day. ABC 11 in Fayetteville reports that Segule declined to speak with media when he returned home, but simply said, "I'm good."

[Image via Facebook]

According to the Valley News, 64 Dartmouth students have been charged with honor code violations after the school discovered widespread cheating in an ethics course designed to help struggling student-athletes.

Almost a quarter of those enrolled in "Sports, Ethics and Religion" this fall are said to have participated in the scheme, which involved students answering questions for absent classmates on electronic devices designed to record attendance.

"I feel pretty burned by the whole thing," religion professor Randall Balmer told Bloomberg. "I've never faced anything on this scale before."

Rather than flunk the accused students, Balmer ultimately decided dropping their scores by a letter grade was the right thing to do, not that any of them would know it.

Are these videos funny? Yes. Are they cruel? Not really. Do they demonstrate the need for dogs and cats to unite as one and overthrow their human overlords, putting them under the blade or at least in an embarrassing Aladdin costume or two?

Da, comrade.

[h/t Huffington Post/Tastefully Offensive]

Amedy Coulibaly, who took fourteen hostages and killed four in a kosher supermarket before he was shot and killed by French special forces on Friday, pledges allegiance to the Islamic State in a video released today on what is reportedly an official ISIS forum.

The SITE Intelligence Group confirmed the authenticity of the video to the Associated Press. In it, the 32-year-old Coulibaly declares himself to be a "soldier of the Caliphate" and addresses other French Muslims.

"What do you do, my brothers, when the prophet keeps being insulted?" he asks, according to Vocativ's translation. "I have been to a lot of mosques in France, particularly around Paris. They are full of young, fit men. How come so few stand up to defend our people?" Jihadi recruiters work extensively in France's prison system, Reuters reported in 2013, radicalizing young Muslim men jailed for minor offenses.

Coulibaly also explains his relationship with Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. "We did a few things together and a few things separately to maximize the impact," Coulibaly said. "I helped them by giving them a few thousand euros to buy what they needed." A source within Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula yesterday provided The Intercept with a statement taking responsibility for the Kouachi brother's attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

The Associated Press reported today that a French prosecutor issued a brief statement announcing that ballistics tests had connected Coulibaly to the shooting of a jogger in a Paris suburb on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack. The jogger was badly injured.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement declaring that all of the Jewish hostages who were killed in the kosher supermarket on Friday would be buried in Israel.

[Image via Vidme]

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.

"Paris is the capital of the world today," said French president Francois Hollande on Sunday. "The whole country will rise up."

According to the BBC, crowds at Paris's Place de la Republique expressed solidarity by singing the French national anthem and chanting "Liberte! Liberte! Charlie! Charlie!" before the march.

Below is RT's live stream of the rally, which began at 3 p.m. local time:

UPDATE: French officials estimate 1.3 million people came to today's rally, more than celebrated the Liberation of Paris in 1944, reportedly making it the largest demonstration in France's history.

[Image via AP Images]

The AP reports arsonists attacked the offices of a German newspaper that reprinted Charlie Hebdo's Muhammad cartoons on Sunday, throwing a Molotov cocktail through a basement window. No one was injured and the fire was quickly extinguished. Police have detained two men suspected of the crime.