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Hello and welcome to the last Monday show of 2013. Luckily for you we're not going to
do some sort of best bits show. Instead we're going to update you on the most important
news from over the weekend including; the second suicide attack on the Russian city
of Volgograd in two days and also from Russia new guidelines on what constitutes online
gay propaganda, an update from Glenn Greenwald on what more we can expect from the NSA files
and NASA reports that the sun has flipped upside down. Plus we have as always your comments.
Earlier today, that's the 30th December for those of you watching in the future, at least
14 people were killed in a suicide bombing of a trolley bus in the Russian city of Volgograd
with dozens more reported injured including a one-year-old child who is in a critical
condition. The
attack came less than 24 hours after another suicide bombing at the city's main train station
and a third bombing attack was carried out on a bus in the city on the 21st October.
Security experts have linked the attacks to a pledge by the Chechen jihadist leader Doku
Umarov to disrupt the Winter Olympic Games which are due to start in the Russian city
of Sochi in six weeks time. Volgograd is a few hundred miles from the north Caucasian
region where Umarov and his followers want to carve out an Islamic state.
And now for your comments.
In our Alternative Christmas Message video we asked you to let us know what you thought
were the biggest stories of 2013 and Kenneth West said this. "Mr. Kalashnikov, the creator
of the AK-47 dies at the age of 94," and on the same video nickwoo2 left this comment
which was giving a lot of love, "As a blacksmith, I would love coal for Christmas!" And last
but not least on our explainer video about the conflict in South Sudan KironVB said this,
"Socialist websites saw this coming from ages ago. Has the news finally forgotten Neo-Colonization
of Africa? America sending in troops? South Sudan is of extreme geopolitical importance
to China who have been heavily investing. The cold war never ended."
Now we're not sure which socialist websites KironVB is talking about but he or she is
definitely correct that China is heavily invested in South Sudan so much so that on the 27th
December China announced that it was sending its special envoy from Africa to the country
to push for peace talks. And in other news from Russia, according to the Global Voices
news website government sensors have released revised guidelines for recognising information
online that supposedly endangers minors including guidelines for what the censors reportedly
call "gay propaganda". Apparently these revised guidelines appeared on the internet at some
point before the 2nd December but Russian bloggers have only just picked up on them.
The list is, unsurprisingly, far too long for us to go into in detail so we'll link
the full article from Global Voices in the description below.
But highlights or lowlights depending on how you look at it include depicting gay people
as role models, instructions on how to experiment with *** and using so-called intense emotional
images to discredit traditional family models and propagate alternative family models. According
to Global Voices this seems to include any attempt to portray heterosexual relationships
negatively and homosexual relationships favourably and 2013 would not be complete without a 2014
NSA teaser from Glenn Greenwald. In a video addressed to the Chaos Communication Congress
in Hamburg on the 27th December the journalist and privacy activist said that there are a
lot more revelations on the United States National Security Agency to come.
It is now nearly seven months since Greenwald first began publishing parts of the NSA documents
leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. He explained the time delay by saying "it's
important that we understand what it is we're publishing so that what we say about them
is accurate."
And finally we were warned that this was coming a few weeks ago but now NASA has confirmed
that the sun has officially flipped upside down, sort of. What's actually happened is
that the sun's magnetic field has reversed its polarity which essentially means that
the suns north pole has now become its south pole and vice versa. We'll leave you with
this handy little video from NASA which helps to visualise the process.