Voltaire's gift

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Tom Holland knows what it’s like to have freedom of speech challenged. He endured multiple death threats after making a documentary about Islam. And he notes that in France, freedom of speech is the subject of something approaching veneration. Voltaire is its patron saint. The 18th Century philosopher said: "Superstition sets the whole world in flames." So after the Charlie Hebdo murders, Holland tweeted the magazine’s cartoon of Muhammad. “The right to draw Muhammad without being shot is quite as precious to many of us in the West as Islam presumably is to the Charlie Hebdo killers.” The battle for freedom of speech

The title of the world’s biggest cargo ship is a ferocious sort of contest these days. The Globe, recently docked in the UK, started its reign on 3 December. But it will hold the title for only 53 days before being superseded. It holds a mere 19,100 shipping containers. In the SI unit of length measurement of big things, football pitches, it measures four. Its engine is the largest (although not the most powerful) ever constructed. It’s pretty powerful though, the equivalent of 38,000 vacuum cleaners worth of power. And its successor? You can call it Oscar. The world's biggest ship - for 53 days

Ever printed out an email and instantly regretted it? No doubt you saw that everybody in the chain had inadvertently added a disclaimer to the bottom, creating an agonising volume of irrelevance. You can almost hear beautiful trees crashing to the ground as it prints. So should we ban the disclaimer? The ultimate disclaimer

Elsewhere... The dog that taught Oliver The subversion of a hashtag Finland pub quiz crackdown That's it from us today. See you tomorrow.