The Korean Peninsula was good for a few modest "boom-boom-booms" this weekend. But nothing got nuked! So far! Right after warning it was mulling over a new kind of nuclear test (AKA bombing Seoul), North Korea casually "allowed" a few live shells to land over its disputed sea border with South Korea during a training exercise. Then South Korea fired some artillery shells over the same sea border. Sleepless nights in Situation Rooms everywhere.

Catastrophic climate change, for all you "skeptics," really is really real, and it's already touched every part of the planet. A chilling new report lays it out like so: Ice caps are melting, water levels are rising, the ocean is acidifying, and melting tundra plains, frozen for millennia, are adding to our own era's industrial spew of greenhouse gases. And it's going to get far worse if we don't change our current political course.

The United Nations condemned Russia's velvet-clad hammer annexation of Crimea—but only after Russia spent its time threatening its presumed friends in Eastern Europe and Africa not to vote. A Russian diplomat, however, kindly disagreed with that word choice: "We never threaten anyone. We just explain the situation."

Japan's slaughter of minke whales, down near the Antarctic, will have to stop. The UN's International Court of Justice sided with Australia in a legal dispute that accused of Japan of hiding a commercial whaling operation behind provisions that allow a limited number of whale kills under the aegis of scientific research.

"They will pay for this." A corruption scandal failed to dislodge Turkey's embattled prime minister in elections this weekend. And now, after banning his critics from using social network sites ahead the election, he's promised vengeance.

Osama bin Laden's capture all those years after his minions took down the World Trade Center wasn't helped one iota by the Bush administration's embrace of torture (waterboarding, sleep deprivation, etc.), according to a fairly contentious new report from the US Senate. The CIA, unsurprisingly, disagrees. And relations between the two bodies have been a bit... tense.

"A worldwide constellation of litigation." Apple is suing Samsung, again, for trampling all over its iPhone patents. Samsung is pressing similar claims against Apple. The long-running court saga resumes this morning.

Albuquerque's police department will face a federal investigation after officers shot James Boyd, a homeless camper, in the back. The department's use of force has been under federal review since 2012. Meanwhile, hundreds of outraged protesters shut down traffic and tangled with riot cops last night—enduring batons and tear gas—while hackers took down the cops' website.

The Affordable Care Act—for all the bullpoop around crappy websites and necessary fax machines and dissembling TV spots and tiresome GOP fanaticism—has still managed something pretty magical: Some 9.5 million people who didn't have health insurance now have it, one of the largest expansions of the safety net in generations.

You guys! This might not be the rainiest March since Portland began tracking shit like rainy Marches.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE OLD MAN (INCREASINGLY, THAT'S ME!) SNORING.