Lawmakers in Crimea, the autonomous peninsula in Ukraine currently hosting a large amount of Russian troops, unanimously approved a March 16 referendum on whether the Russian-leaning province should switch countries. They claim it's an answer to "lawlessness" in Kiev, Ukraine's capital. The vote comes amid a European Union summit on Ukraine and what to do about it, and a move by the White House to impose visa restrictions on Russian officials.

Funny fact! Crimea was a part of Russia for all but the last 60 years, when Nikita Kruschev rather bureaucratically transferred it to Ukraine. It looms large in Russian history and in its cultural memories. Crimea's largest city, Sevastopol, was a Russian naval port for 200 hundred years. The unrest in Kiev cave Crimean partisans their chance to rewrite the past.

NATO forces, working with Afghan soldiers, killed five of them in a horrific "friendly-fire" airstrike.

The CIA spied on Congress? The spy agency's inspector general is investigating claims its operatives searched Senate intelligence committee computers to see who was reading up on what was supposed to be an internal review of the CIA's interrogation policy. The CIA's director has angrily denounced the claims as "spurious."

A journalist facing several (intimidating) federal charges after he republished a hyperlink containing hacked email addresses and other data from a government security contractor saw many of his more serious charges mysteriously dropped yesterday.

Someone found the fellow who pretty much invented Bitcoin. But he really didn't want to talk about it.

In Massachusetts, the state's supreme court ruled, it's currently legal to take nonconsensual upskirt photos on public transit or in other public places that have surveillance.

The people behind the SAT have put forward a sweeping overhaul of the near-ubiquitous college application test—realizing that, maybe, you know, it's not been as useful for helping low-income kids.

It's been harder and harder getting the kids interested in Japanese organized crime these days. Yakuza membership is reputedly at an all-time low.

Three third-graders caught smoking pot in their California elementary school's bathroom somehow scored their very own pot pipe.

Justin Bieber's penis will be blurred out of a Miami Beach jail video before it's made public under Florida's public records law (which is way better than Oregon's).

THE ICE CAPS REALLY ARE MELTING. AND TINY TIM IS A GODDAMNED PROPHET.