SIx In The Morning Sunday December 29

29 December 2013 Last updated at 06:13 GMT

Beirut blast: Ex-minister Mohamad Chatah to be buried

Preparations are under way in Lebanon for the funeral of former minister and opposition figure Mohamad Chatah, who was killed by a car bomb on Friday.

He will be buried in the capital Beirut, where the attack took place.

Mr Chatah, a Sunni Muslim, was a staunch critic of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Lebanon's Shia Hezbollah movement that backs him.

Lebanon has been hit by a wave of attacks linked to heightened Sunni-Shia tensions over the Syrian war.

No-one has claimed responsibility for Friday's bombing, which killed four people and injured at least 50 others.

Here's how data thieves have captured our lives on the internet

It's not just governments. Companies such as Google and Facebook spy on us too. We have clicked through to their 'free' digital services at the cost of sacrificing our privacy. So how do we get out?

• • 
    John Naughton
  • The Observer, Sunday 29 December 2013

Whatever else 2013 will be remembered for, it will be known as the year in which a courageous whistleblower brought home to us the extent to which the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured.

Although Edward Snowden's revelations initially seemed only to document the extent to which the state had exploited internet technology to create a surveillance system of unimaginable comprehensiveness, as the leaks flowed it gradually dawned on us that our naive lust for "free" stuff online had also enabled commercial interests effectively to capture the internet for their own purposes.

And, as if that realisation wasn't traumatic enough, Snowden's revelations demonstrated the extent to which the corporate sector – the Googles, Facebooks, Yahoos and Microsofts of this world – have been, knowingly or unknowingly, complicit in spying on us.

PATRICK COCKBURN

Sunday 29 December 2013

Sunni monarchs back YouTube hate preachers: Anti-Shia propaganda threatens a sectarian civil war which will engulf the entire Muslim world

There is now a pool of jihadis willing to fight and die anywhere

Anti-Shia hate propaganda spread by Sunni religious figures sponsored by, or based in, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, is creating the ingredients for a sectarian civil war engulfing the entire Muslim world. Iraq and Syria have seen the most violence, with the majority of the 766 civilian fatalities in Iraq this month being Shia pilgrims killed by suicide bombers from the al-Qa'ida umbrella group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis). The anti-Shia hostility of this organisation, now operating from Baghdad to Beirut, is so extreme that last month it had to apologise for beheading one of its own wounded fighters in Aleppo – because he was mistakenly believed to have muttered the name of Shia saints as he lay on a stretcher.

At the beginning of December, al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula killed 53 doctors and nurses and wounded 162 in an attack on a hospital in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, which had been threatened for not taking care of wounded militants by a commentator on an extreme Sunni satellite TV station. Days before the attack, he announced that armies and tribes would assault the hospital "to take revenge for our brothers. We say this and, by the grace of Allah, we will do it".

Russian screening of Pussy Riot film blocked by authorities

December 29, 2013 - 4:09PM

Melena Ryzik

Moscow: The first public screening in Russia of a documentary about the activist group Pussy Riot was canceled by the government at the last minute Saturday, organisers said.

The film, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, was to have been screened in Moscow on Sunday afternoon, less than a week after two members of Pussy Riot were released from prison. Their two-year sentence, on charges of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for performing a protest song in a Moscow cathedral, was commuted under an amnesty from the Kremlin on Monday.

But on Saturday, the directors of the Gogol Center, a state-financed theatre, received a call from the authorities threatening their jobs if they screened the documentary, said Maxim Pozdorovkin, who directed the film with Mike Lerner. A letter from the Department of Culture in Moscow formally banning the screening followed.

Hundreds try to flee C. African Republic on emergency flights

BY PAUL-MARIN NGOUPANA

BANGUI

(Reuters) - Hundreds of people tried to flee inter-religious violence in Central African Republic on Saturday aboard emergency flights to neighboring Chad, while nearby countries appealed for help to rescue their citizens from the mounting humanitarian crisis.

Tit-for-tat violence between Muslim Seleka rebels, who seized power in March, and Christian self-defense militias have killed more than 1,000 people this month in the riverside capital Bangui and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

Fighting in the former French colony has surged in recent weeks despite the presence of 1,600 French peacekeepers and nearly 4,000 African Union troops deployed under a U.N. mandate to protect civilians. Bangui was calm on Saturday.

Thousands of South Sudanese seeking refuge on U.N. base remain too afraid to return home

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Sunday, December 29, 10:02 AM E-mail the writer

MALAKAL, South Sudan — The corpses of soldiers, dressed in camouflage fatigues, lay in the streets and ditches. Shop after shop had been plundered, leaving the poor and hungry to scavenge through the remains. Houses burned to the ground still smoldered, the scars of the four days of chaos that tore through this town.

Not even the U.N. peacekeepers’ base was entirely safe. A bullet passed through the stomach of Nyauny Otham, who had sought refuge there with her family and thousands of other terrified civilians. On Saturday, the 6-year-old rested in a hospital bed, a white sheet covering her tiny body.

Fighting among rival soldiers in South Sudan’s army engulfed Malakal on Christmas Eve, uprooting thousands of civilians and trapping scores of foreigners, including Americans.