As always, please consider helping out with a donation to the Red Cross as they assist our friends and neighbors affected by the New South Wales bushfires.  Meanwhile, Russia tries lesser charges against Greenpeace activists – The Pope reels in the Bishop of Bling – Egyptian cops are charged with killing Muslim protesters – And you’d think some things would be apparent in the year 2013.

Russia is reducing charges against the “Arctic 30” Greenpeace protesters.  Instead of being accused of “piracy” with a possible sentence of 15 years in prison if convicted, the environmentalists will be charged with “hooliganism”, which could land each of them in a Russia prison cell for seven years.  Greenpeace rejected the ploy, and called for the immediate release of all the crewmembers from the Arctic Sunrise ship, which commandos seized after the activists attempted a protest of Russian oil drilling in the pristine arctic.

Pope Francis has suspended the free-spending German Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, whom some derisively refer to as “The Bishop of Bling”.  The Vatican called the bishop in to explain the sumptuous renovation of his church-owned residence in the city of Limburg, including a A$20,000 bathtub, a million-dollar garden, hundreds of thousands of dollars in artwork.  In all, the bishop’s pad costs more than A$44 million – under a papacy led by a guy who took public transportation to work at his last gig.  It is highly unlikely Tebartz-van Elst will ever live in the palace he built for himself.

A court is ordering former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to stand trial for allegedly bribing a senator with more than A$4 million to defect to his party and bring down the government back in 2006.   Former Senator Sergio De Gregorio already agreed to serve 20 months in prison in a plea bargain deal, and says Italy could get rid of “a lot of dirt” if Berlusconi would just leave the political scene.  Berlusconi’s lawyers deny any wrongdoing.  He’s already convicted of tax evasion and child prostitution charges.

Four Egyptian police officers will be tried for the deaths of 37 Muslim Brotherhood detainees during the unrest in August.  They died when cops fired tear gas into the back of a vehicle transporting them to a prison outside Cairo.  Police initially tried to claim the detainees were trying to escape, but investigators found no evidence to back that up.

Tunisia's President Moncef Marzouki says his country will observe three days of national mourning for eight officers killed by suspected militants.  Two militants were also killed in the clash in the south part of the country, which is apparently revenge for security forces killing 10 militants days earlier.

Cuba is getting rid of its two-currency system.  Foreign tourists used one form of Peso linked to the US Dollar, Cubans were stuck being paid with a much lower-valued currency.  President Raul Castro is dumping the system, which was resented by the Cuban people who couldn’t afford the level of goods available to the tourists.  The conversion is expected to take 18 months.

The Internet is getting four new domains, to go along with “.com”, “.org”, et cetera.  But you might now see them unless you seek out web addresses in Arabic, Chinese, or Russian, because the new domains will use characters from those languages.  It’s the first time generic top-level domains – or , “gTLDS” as they are known – will use non-Latin characters.

A Korean cigarette company has pulled a series of ads critics called “racist”.  KT&G’s new “Africa” brand was promoted on posters showing monkeys and apes roasting and smoking tobacco.  Yeah, pretty incredible that it could happen in 2013.  The only way it might have been more offensive would be if the company threw an African-themed party and people showed up in offensive costumes.. but no one could be that dense, right?  Well anyway, the African Tobacco Control Alliance said that “Mocking Africa to sell a product that causes death and disease is unacceptable,” and that it was “at a minimum culturally insensitive.”