Dressed to the nines and trailing media helicopters, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at last paid a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It was not his first visit there but it was the first by a sitting prime minister since 2006. The shrine, a monument to Japan’s fallen soldiers, is considered a symbol of Japanese wartime aggression by China and South Korea. Abe has repeatedly spoken of his desire to pay his respects at the shrine while in office, and Japan’s most conservative and hawkish prime minister in years finally got his wish today, only days after his government announced hefty upgrades to the country’s armed forces.

It’s been a roller coaster year for MOOCs, but despite some major setbacks over the past few months, the technology is still one of the hottest things going in higher-ed at the moment. In honor of MOOCs’ big year, EdSurge is taking a look at a number of statistics from the past few years which illustrate just how quickly MOOCs have grown.

The situation in South Sudan seems to be going from bad to worse as a proper civil war seems to be in the offing in the world’s newest country. Yet these problems of ethnic identity are far from unique to South Sudan alone.

According to the Centre for Economic and Business Research, the UK will surpass both France and Germany to become the largest economy in Europe in the next 20 years, second only to the United States in the West. It’s an unspeakably horrible thought for some, but the dread Anglo-Saxon capitalism may still have a few things to teach the rest of the world.

We have been playing around with the idea of doing a semi-regular link aggregation feature for the site—highlighting articles that are either relevant to themes we regularly cover, or interesting, or just plain amusing to us, but that also don’t require much extra commentary. Here’s our first attempt as we wind down for Chirstmas:

1. Coming soon: clinical trials on the fountain of youth.

2. “Run, she is trying to kill you.”

3. Pope Francis the Radical?

4. What could possibly go wrong…

5. Pakistan’s persecuted Christians.

Readers are encouraged to share their own links in the comments, with our standard decency rules applying: if you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing the link with Grandma Mead, please don’t bother sharing it with the community here. Let us know what you’re reading.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finds his cabinet in disarray after a police corruption probe resulted in the arrests of high-profile officials and their family members. Erdoğan responded swiftly last week by firing top police officials—at least 70 at last count—but it wasn’t enough to quell anger over government corruption. The political crisis deepened over the weekend as protests broke out and the police intervened with water cannons and tear gas. In response, Erdoğan went on the offensive.

We may one day be growing our oil. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are pioneering a process that produces oil from algae in just one hour. Wet algae goes in, heat and pressure is applied, and crude oil comes out.

In an effort to cope with the student loan crisis, Senate Democrats have unveiled a plan to reduce the rate of student defaults by giving colleges more “skin in the game.” Essentially, the plan penalized universities with a large number of student defaults by forcing them to pay a fine to the feds. Giving colleges more accountability is a good thing, but this plan gives the federal government far more control over the market than we’re comfortable with.

Egypt’s military dealt a heavy blow to the liberal democracy movement that played a big role in toppling the Mubarak regime back in 2011. Three activist leaders—Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel and Ahmed Douma—were convicted of participating in recent protests and sentenced to three years in prison and fined thousands of dollars. “It is time to shut up, to stay quiet,” the director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information told the New York Times. “There is only one choice — to support the military or to be in jail.”

Brent crude hit a new two-week high at $112 a barrel as South Sudan’s troubles turned attention to Africa as an important pain point for the global oil trade. Combined with the losses in output in Nigeria and Libya, the shortfall in African oil is exceeding whatever extra oil was coming to market due to the US shale boom.