US tested new weapon, no meteor in Chelyabinsk

The firebrand Russian Liberal Democrat leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky claims that no meteor fell in the Urals on Friday, but rather the US was testing a new weapon. “You’re like some primitive tribe. What meteorite?” he said, arguing that space is a “universe that has its own laws.”

Zhirinovsky, more known for clownish political outrage rather than his actual political platform, added: “When something falls – it’s man-made. People are warmongers and provocateurs.”

Earlier in the week, US Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly tried and failed to reach Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov by telephone for two consecutive days. The State Department said that Kerry wanted to discuss the recent North Korean nuclear test, as well as the conflict in Syria. However, Zhirinovsky claimed that the top US diplomat “wanted to warn Lavrov about the plot and that it may affect Russia,” RIA Novosti reported.

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Is the Russia Prison System Working Pussy Riot Member to Death?

An incarcerated member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot has been hospitalized for illnesses related to prison work , reports the Associated Press . Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has reportedly been suffering severe headaches since last spring, when the 23-year-old began serving her two-year sentence on hooliganism charges.

Fellow band member Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was released on appeal in October, told the independent Russian news service Rain TV, "They don't allow [Tolokonnikova] to have any rest; she works nearly round the clock … She said she feels tired, extremely tired.”

Tolokonnikova’s conditions offer a window into Russia’s brutal modern prison system, which have been described as “ Gulag lite ,” referring to the notorious labor camps of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

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'Woolly mammoth' spotted in Siberia

A beast lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all.

The mammoth – thought to have mostly died out roughly 4,000 years ago – was apparently filmed wading through a river in the freezing wilds of Siberia. The jaw-dropping footage was caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed.

Video on The Sun