Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Ex Input:
What freedom of speech? The photos of 40 of the world's government leaders marching arm-in-arm along a Paris boulevard on Sunday with the president of the United States not among them was a provocative image that has fomented much debate . The march was, of course, in direct response to the murderous attacks on workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by a pair of brothers named Kouachi, and on shoppers at a Paris kosher supermarket by one of the brothers' comrades . The debate has been about whether President Obama should have been at the march . The march was billed as a defense of freedom of speech in the West ; yet it hardly could have been held in a less free speech-friendly Western environment , and the debate over Obama's absence misses the point . In the post-World War II era, French governments have adopted a policy advanced upon them nearly 100 years ago by Woodrow Wilson . He pioneered the modern idea that countries' constitutions don't limit governments; they unleash them . Thus , even though the French Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, French governments treat speech as a gift from the government, not as a natural right of all persons , as our Constitution does . The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal . When the predecessor magazine to Charlie Hebdo once mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle, the French government shut it down -- permanently . The theory of anti-hate speech laws is that hate speech often leads to violence, and violence demands police and thus the expenditure of public resources, and so the government can make it illegal to spout hatred in order to conserve its resources . This attitude presumes, as Wilson did when he prosecuted folks for publicly singing German songs during World War I, that the government is the origin of free speech and can lawfully limit the speech it hates and fears . It also presumes that all ideas are equal, and none is worthy of hatred . When the massacres occurred last week in Paris, all three of the murderers knew that the police would be unarmed and so would be their victims . It was as if they were shooting fish in a barrel . Why is that? The answer lies in the same mentality that believes it can eradicate hate by regulating speech . That mentality demands that government have a monopoly on violence, even violence against evil . So, to those who embrace this dreadful theory, the great loss in Paris last week was not human life, which is a gift from God ; it was free speech, which is a gift from the state . Hence the French government, which seems not to care about innocent life, instead of addressing these massacres as crimes against innocent people, proclaimed the massacres crimes against the freedom of speech . Would the French government have reacted similarly if the murderers had killed workers at an ammunition factory, instead of at a satirical magazine? And how hypocritical was it of the French government to claim it defends free speech! In France, you can go to jail if you publicly express hatred for a group whose members may be defined generally by characteristics of birth, such as gender, age, race, place of origin or religion . You can also go to jail for using speech to defy the government . This past weekend, millions of folks in France wore buttons and headbands that proclaimed in French:"I am Charlie Hebdo." Those whose buttons proclaimed"I am not Charlie Hebdo" were asked by the police to remove them . Those who wore buttons that proclaimed, either satirically or hatefully,"I am Kouachi" were arrested . Arrested for speech at a march in support of free speech? Yes . What's going on here? What's going on in France, and what might be the future in America, is the government defending the speech with which it agrees and punishing the speech with which it disagrees . What's going on is the assault by some in radical Islam not on speech, but on vulnerable innocents in their everyday lives in order to intimidate their governments . What's going on is the deployment of 90,000 French troops to catch and kill three murderers because the government does not trust the local police to use guns to keep the streets safe or private persons to use guns to defend their own lives . Why do some in radical Islam kill innocents in the West in order to affect the policies of Western governments? Might it be because the fruitless Western invasion of Iraq killed 650,000 persons, most of whom were innocent civilians? Might it be because that invasion brought al-Qaida to the region and spawned ISIS? Might it be because Obama has killed more innocent civilians in the Middle East with his drones than were killed by the planes in the U.S  on 9/11? Might it be because our spies are listening to us, rather than to those who pose real dangers? What does all this have to do with freedom of speech? Nothing -- unless you believe the French government .

Ex Output:
The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal


Ex Input:
Obama hands Cuba's Castros a major victory, but Congress can still stop it. Establishing ties with Cuba has been on President Obama's bucket list for some time . Health care -- done . Amnesty for illegal immigrants  -- done . Cuba -- next . This last one also has the added bonus point that it puts him right with the international left , which lionizes Castro . And the president will go on picking off the next items on the bucket list for the next two years of his term unless Congress decides to stop him . Should they work up the gumption , lawmakers will find they can do many things to stand up for the prerogatives of the legislative branch . Obviously, the release of the 65-year-old American hostage Alan Gross should be welcome . His "crime" was to bring computers to Jews on the island . For the last five years, he has been a victim of Cuba's state terrorism , just as 11 million Cubans have been held hostage by their government for the past five decades . Exchanging three hardened Cuban spies for Gross, however ,  establishes an insulting moral and legal equivalency . The spies actions led to the death of an American in the 1990s , and they were duly convicted . Their release in exchange for Gross creates an incentive for rogue regimes and individual actors to kidnap Americans all over the world . Not only does President Obama's action fail to advance freedom in Cuba , it throws a lifeline to Cuba's dictators , whose current supplier of funds, Venezuela, is on the ropes because of plunging oil prices . It surrenders to the demands for normalization that the Castros have been making for decades . So what can Congress do? Right off the bat, Congress must make it crystal clear to President Obama that he lacks the authority to lift the embargo on Cuba, allow trade to take place between the two nations, let tourists to go to Cuba to bail out the regime or give Cuba have access to capital markets . U.S  law--the Helms-Burton Act of 1996--gives the Congress power to override any action taken by the executive to lift the embargo . In order to lift the embargo, the Cuban government would have to give the Cuban people a number of rights--of association, speech, political activity, etc  -- that President Obama obviously failed to secure in his 45-minute conversation with Cuban dictator Raul Castro Tuesday . Congress can also make clear to the president that there are statutory criteria that must be met before his administration can take Cuba off the State Department list of terrorism sponsors . The president must inform Congress that there has been a change of leadership and policies of the Cuban government and that Castro has given assurances that it will no longer support terrorist acts . Can President Obama do any of that? Senators should also make clear that they will put a hold on any ambassador that Mr  Obama nominates to serve in Cuba unless he can guarantee that the Cuban government is no longer a threat to the United States and has decided to grant freedom to people in Cuba . Sen  Marco Rubio, R-Fla , has already said he plans to do that . Additionally ,  Congress can look into the possibility of using policy riders in the upcoming DHS appropriations debate in February and the Fiscal Year 2016 appropriations process to deny the president funds for setting up relations . Congress must act because President Obama has been completely feckless in his entire approach to Cuba . He received nothing in exchange for many substantial concessions made to the Communist regime . After five years of "negotiations" President Obama ended exactly where Raul Castro's demands began five years ago . As Senator Marco Rubio said, President "Obama is the worst negotiator since Carter." Mr  Obama's statement was filled with Havana's communist talking points, such as affirming that Cubans are poor and unfree because of the embargo, or that Cuba was a U.S  colony . None of that is true , and yet Mr  Obama said it . Congress must act to limit the damage inherent in this Havana Giveaway . Left unchecked , Obama will simply move on to the next misguided item on his bucket list .

Ex Output:
Establishing ties with Cuba has been on President Obama's bucket list for some time


Ex Input:
If je ne suis pas Charlie, am I a bad person? Nuance gets lost in groupthink. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris last week, many people in France and elsewhere have declared, Je suis Charlie ("I am Charlie") after heavily armed gunmen broke into the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, and killed eight staff members, two police officers, a building maintenance worker and wounded several others . On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people including a number of world leaders such as Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and David Cameron gathered in Paris for a unity rally, to stand in mourning, in defiance . There were cries of Je suis Charlie, Je suis Ahmed(I am Ahmed, the Muslim police officer who lost his life in the attack), Je suis juif(I am a Jew) . These declarations were a display of solidarity with those who lost their lives and those who survived . They allowed people to try and place themselves in the lives of others by using the power of language . We have seen this kind of remembrance before in the face of tragedy : I am Troy Davis ; I am Mike Brown ; I am Eric Garner ; I am Renisha McBride . But we are none of these people . We can and do empathize with the plights of the dead, the survivors and their loved ones . We can and do empathize with how fragile we all are, and with how we cannot be ruled by terror, but why the rhetorical urge to take the place of the fallen? What does it bring them? I, too, have ached since hearing the news of what happened in Paris but je ne suis pas Charlie et je ne suis pas Ahmed et je ne suis pas juif . There are times when silence equals consent, but is the loss of someone else's life really such an instance? Is it reasonable to assume that if je ne suis pas Charlie, I tacitly endorse terrorism? I believe in the freedom of expression, unequivocally - though , as I have written before , I wish more people would understand that freedom of expression is not freedom from consequence . I find some of the work of Charlie Hebdo distasteful , because there is a preponderance of bigotry of all kinds in many of their cartoons' sentiments . Still ,  my distaste should not dictate the work the magazine produces or anything else . The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo - and writers and artists everywhere - should be able to express themselves and challenge authority without being murdered . Murder is not an acceptable consequence for anything . Yet it is also an exercise of freedom of expression to express offense at the way satire like Charlie Hebdo's characterizes something you hold dear - like your faith, your personhood, your gender, your sexuality, your race or ethnicity . Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink , making it difficult to express nuance . It puts the terms of our understanding of the situation in black and white - you are either with us or against us - instead of allowing people to mourn and be angry while also being sympathetic to complexities that are being overlooked . It has been disheartening to see calls for the Muslim community to denounce terrorism . It has been disheartening to see journalists highlighting the stories of "good" Muslims , as if goodness is the exception to the rule of an entire people . We will continue to see discussions of satire, the freedom of expression and its limits . We will see speculations as to how such a tragedy can be avoided because it is easier to speculate than it is to accept that we cannot prevent terrorism . We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong . Life moves quickly but , sometimes, consideration does not . And yet ,  we insist that people provide an immediate response, or immediate agreement, a universal, immediate me-too  - as though we don't want people to pause at all, to consider what they are weighing in on . We don't want to complicate our sorrow or outrage when it is easier to experience these emotions in their simplest, purest states . The older(and hopefully wiser) I get, the more I want to pause . I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel . I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption . The demand for response from all of us through the means available to us, most often our social networks, rises in part because we can feel so impotent in our day-to-day lives . We are people with jobs and families and our quotidian concerns . It is easy to feel impotent in the face of terrorism in Paris or hundreds of girls being kidnapped in Nigeria or a bombing at an NAACP building in Colorado or an unarmed black man being killed by a police officer . Within our social networks, we can feel less alone . We can feel less impotent . We can make these gestures of solidarity . Je suis Charlie . We can change our avatars . We can share our anger, our fear, or devastation without having to face that we may not be able to do much more . But we still feel impotent and we still feel inadequate . When we see people not participating in our expressions of solidarity-- not showing their awareness of their own impotence-- we see something we can possibly change . That is why we demand allegiance .

Ex Output:

These declarations were a display of solidarity with those who lost their lives and those who survived In the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris last week, many people in France and elsewhere have declared, Je suis Charlie