LIVE: Hostages taken in northeast Paris after car chase, say police

2.00 pm: 

1.24 pm: The Kouachi brothers, 32-year-old Cherif and 34-year-old Said, emerged as the subject of a huge manhunt after the precision attack Wednesday that killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo, were on US no-fly list.

12.54 pm: Four leading French imams and the Vatican have issued a joint statement denouncing the Paris newspaper massacre, warning that the world is a dangerous place without freedom of expression but urging the media to be respectful of religion.

12.29 pm: The new government elected in Sri Lanka should implement the 13th amendment in “letter and spirit” and the aspirations of the ethnic Tamils there must be met, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said here today.

11.50 am:  PROFILE —  Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka’s President-elect, was a low-profile cabinet colleague of longtime president Mahinda Rajapaksa until he switched sides to become joint opposition candidate and emerge as the proverbial dark horse in the presidential polls.

#Express5

We recommend that you start your day by reading these five special Express stories.

We recommend that you start your day by reading these five special Express stories.

1. Charlie Hebdo attack

Things will never be the same in France. The calculated murder of 10 journalists and two policemen at the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday shocked a nation struggling to contain internal social unrest.

READ: France is broken, things won’t ever be same… they can only get worse as written by Igor Mladenovic

2. Indians in the Gulf

The Gulf nations have the highest number of Indians who are jailed abroad, and many of them are blue-collar workers.

READ: Searching for jobs, and then freedom in the Gulf as reported by Zeeshan Shaikh

3. Public distribution system

Thefts from the public distribution system (PDS) are consistently rising and, according to the latest data for FY12, were a little over Rs 48,000 crore — or roughly the same as the median loss estimated by the CAG for the telecom scam of 2008.

READ: ‘Rising PDS theft reached Rs 48,000 cr in FY12’ by Sunil Jain

4. Opinion

Georges Wolinski, the 80-year-old cartoonist shot dead on January 7, would have been well up on the oeuvre of 19th century Parisian satirist Honore Daumier — over 4,000 lithographs and a thousand drawings, some not even sparing the law courts.

READ: We are all cartoonists as written by E P Unny

5. Sports

After watching his ward Lokesh Rahul’s nightmarish international debut during the Boxing Day Test at MCG on television, Mangalore-based Samuel Jayraj thought that the family function planned in the evening would take his mind away from cricket.

READ: ‘Lokesh Rahul read criticism on Facebook, Twitter and ignored it’ by Nihal Koshie