This is our new Friday Digest! Every Friday, this weekly news round-up gives us the occasion to share with you news from various topics: politics to arts, entertainment, media, science, sports, fun and less fun news…

This digest is a list of news published this week on the Internet (Friday to Friday), selected by the Sama Team, and it is by no means exhaustive. If you want to suggest a news to be added in the next Friday Digest, contact us.

Myanmar cuts sentences for many prisoners
Myanmar’s government announced Monday that it is reducing the sentences of many prisoners in a clemency that fell short of the general amnesty many people were expecting. State television and radio said President Thein Sein signed a clemency order to mark the country’s 64th anniversary of independence. They said death sentences will be commuted to life imprisonment and some prisoners serving more…

Israeli Protest’s Invocation of Holocaust Is Condemned
With public fury over some ultra-Orthodox groups mounting, Israeli leaders on Sunday denounced ultra-Orthodox protesters who took to the streets of Jerusalem on Saturday night and put young boys on display wearing yellow stars and striped prison camp uniforms reminiscent of the Holocaust. Organizers of the demonstration said they had been protesting what they called growing incitement against their community…

Presidential Proclamation, National Slavery, Human Trafficking Prevention Month
The United States was founded on the principle that all people are born with an unalienable right to freedom — an ideal that has driven the engine of American progress throughout our history. As a Nation, we have known moments of great darkness and greater light; and dim years of chattel slavery illuminated and brought to an end by President Lincoln’s actions and a painful Civil War…

Phobos-Ground, Russia’s Mars Probe, Falling To Earth In January
Fragments of a failed Russian space probe are now expected to fall to Earth on Jan. 15, officials said Wednesday. The unmanned Phobos-Ground probe was launched Nov. 9 on what was supposed to have been a 2 1/2-year mission to the Mars moon of Phobus to take soil samples and fly them back to Earth, but it became stuck in Earth’s orbit and attempts to send commands that could propel it toward the Mars moon…

Myanmar approves Suu Kyi’s party for election
Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said Myanmar’s government on Thursday approved her National League for Democracy to run in upcoming by-elections. Suu Kyi declined to say yet if she herself will stand in the election when pressed on the issue, but party spokesman Nyan Win said Suu Kyi intends to run. The highly anticipated by-election set for April 1 will return Suu Kyi’s party to mainstream politics…

Accounts Emerge in South Sudan of 3,000 Deaths in Ethnic Violence
More than 3,000 villagers were massacred in the recent burst of communal violence in South Sudan, local officials said Thursday, with the fledging South Sudanese government, which just won its independence six months ago, seemingly unable to stem the bloodshed. If the death toll is confirmed — United Nations officials and South Sudanese Army officers have yet to do that, saying they were still collecting…

Haiti faces mix of problems 2 years after quake
Almost two years after a massive earthquake rocked Haiti, about half of the rubble has been cleared, aid groups are giving 1.1 million children daily midday meals and the number of Haitians in camps for displaced people is a third of what it was after the quake. But cholera is endemic, nearly half the population can’t count on eating regularly and the country still relies on non-governmental organizations (NGOs)…

French reporters say expelled from Sudan
A French freelance reporter who wrote that eastern Sudan is “a volcano waiting to erupt” says he was ordered expelled by the Khartoum government but that his departure was blocked because he had no exit visa. Mathieu Galtier, 29, said his colleague Maryline Dumas, 25, also a freelance correspondent, must also leave Sudan. “The official reason is because our visa is finishing,” Galtier told AFP…