Gotan Project - Diferente

...cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance...

Royksopp - Remind Me

Van Halen - Jump

Michael Sembello - Maniac

Ah Suki...

Re-Flex - The Politics of Dancing

Bobby Brown - On Our Own

Depeche Mode - Everything Counts

Fine Young Cannibals - Johnny Come Home

As Ukraine and Russia Battle Over Orthodoxy, Schism Looms

By Andrew Higgins
Dec. 31, 2018

CHERNYTSYA, Ukraine — Ukraine is on the verge of opening the biggest schism in Christianity in centuries, as it breaks from the authority of a Moscow-based patriarch and this week expects to formally gain recognition for its own church, taking tens of millions of followers.

Intensifying a millennium-old religious struggle freighted with 21st-century geopolitical baggage, Ukraine’s security services have in recent weeks interrogated priests loyal to Moscow, searched church properties and enraged their Russian rivals.

“They just want to frighten us,” said the Rev. Vasily Nachev, one of more than a dozen priests loyal to the Moscow patriarch who were called in for questioning.

The new Ukrainian church is expected to be granted legitimacy on Jan. 6, the eve of the Orthodox Christmas, when its newly elected head, Metropolitan Epiphanius, travels to Istanbul to receive an official charter from the Constantinople patriarchate, a longtime rival power center to Moscow.

The prospect of a new and entirely autonomous church in Ukraine has sent Russia’s political and religious leaders into fits of indignation, even raising fears that Moscow will try to sabotage the project by force.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/world/europe/ukraine-russia-orthodox-church-schism.html

'Wow': NASA startles with invitation to sanctioned Russian

'Wow': NASA startles with invitation to sanctioned Russian

Dmitry Rogozin is no typical rocket-science technocrat. He is an ultranationalist politician with a record of stark racism and homophobia who is under American sanctions.

By BEN SCHRECKINGER 01/01/2019 08:06 AM EST

A Trump administration official’s plan to host a sanctioned Russian nationalist in the U.S. in the coming months is raising alarms among Russia hawks in Washington.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine extended an October invitation for his counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, to visit NASA headquarters in Houston in early 2019. U.S.-Russia space cooperation is nothing new. But Rogozin is no typical rocket-science technocrat. He is an ultranationalist politician with a record of stark racism and homophobia who is under American sanctions, which typically bar him from entering the U.S. over his 2014 role, as deputy prime minister, in Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

Bridenstine, a former three-term Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told the Russian state news agency TASS in mid-October that he had succeeded in temporarily waiving sanctions on Rogozin so that he could visit Houston and speak at Rice University, Bridenstine’s alma mater, sometime after the new year. The U.S. and Russia cooperate extensively on space exploration and, according to the TASS report, Bridenstine stressed the need for a “strong working relationship” with his counterpart.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/01/nasa-sanctioned-russian-nationalist-1076621