FINANCIAL TIMES: The temperature outside is minus 12 degrees and the winter sun glints off the snow. But in an ex-military tent in the centre of what is normally Kiev’s four-lane main avenue Khreshchatyk, a 25-year-old anti-government protester named Andriy, from Lviv in western Ukraine, is tucking into borscht, meat cutlets and pasta… The motley […]

NEW YORK TIMES Column: N recent years Americans have begun to wise up to the idea that our overstuffed prisons are a shameful waste of lives and money. Lawmakers have recoiled from the high price of mass incarceration (the annual per-inmate cost of prison approaches the tuition at a good college) and some have recognized […]

NEW YORK TIMES: Federal prosecutors are trying to thwart the easy access that predatory lenders and dubious online merchants have to Americans’ bank accounts by going after banks that fail to meet their obligations as gatekeepers to the United States financial system… In the new initiative, called “Operation Choke Point,” the agency is scrutinizing banks […]

DAILY BEAST: …if your community believes that ‘informing’ on other community members is unthinkable, pedophiles are left free to continue preying on kids. In fact, pedophiles flourish in insular communities. And there are few communities more insular than Williamsburg’s rapidly-growing population of Hasidim, a branch of Orthodox Judaism whose name signifies piety. “Boys used to […]

NEWSMAX: An American historian said on Sunday he was returning an award he received from the Hungarian state in protest at what he called the government’s attempt to erase Hungary’s role in the Holocaust. Romanian-born Randolph Braham, who settled in the United States after World War Two, received Hungary’s Order of Merit in 2011 for […]

USA TODAY: Almost one child or teen an hour is injured by a firearm seriously enough to require hospitalization, a new analysis finds. Six percent of the 7,391 hospitalizations analyzed resulted in a death, says the study in February’s Pediatrics, released today. The damage caused by gun-related injuries rarely gets the same attention as fatalities, […]

NEW YORK TIMES: KIEV, Ukraine — After President Viktor F. Yanukovych failed to defuse Ukraine’s political crisis by offering concessions to opposition leaders, antigovernment protests spread on Sunday into southern and eastern Ukraine, the heart of the embattled president’s political base.

NEWSMAX: Two Princeton University doctoral students have written a study that predicts Facebook will follow MySpace into oblivion, Time reports. Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, who are studying in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, developed a theoretical model that compares the social media site to an infectious disease… The two scholars used a […]

PA INDEPENDENT: The [Independent Fiscal Office] which serves a number-crunching function similar to the federal Congressional Budget Office – now expects Pennsylvania to finish the year about $150 million short of expectations, with modest job gains and slow wage growth primarily to blame for the sluggish tax collections. “Things are just a bit weaker on […]