On the lam

The cartoonist whose drawings of Muhammad (why must I call him the prophet?) continue to spark worlwide outrage from Muslim extremists refuses to cower, despite having a $1 million bounty on his head.

The cartoonist at the heart of the row, who conducted his interview with the Glasgow Herald newspaper via written questions, said he had not expected such controversy but did not regret the drawings - the most controversial of which depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban - or their publication.

He defended it as 'a protest against the fact that we perhaps are going to have double standards (in Denmark and Western Europe) for freedom of expression and freedom of the press'. The inspiration for it was, he said, 'terrorism - which gets its spiritual ammunition from Islam.'