The surrender is on. Ukraine's talking about "quickly and efficiently" pulling its troops from the Crimean Peninsula, coincidentally while Russian forces—under the guise of an annexation vote and new treaty—have been "quickly and efficiently" seizing all of Ukraine's military bases in the region. The President of America, meanwhile, announced another round of economic sanctions against Russia, this time aimed at any person or business who gives the place "material" support.

But before inveighing against the Cossacks, Barry Obama hung out with the White House AV nerds and made a video valentine for the Iranian people, asking them to go along and get along on a comprehensive nuclear arms deal.

Australia has found what might be pieces of that lost Malaysian airliner whose mysterious vanishing act has been cause for global obsession. But no one's gotten a close look, so no one really knows. The Indian Ocean is famously full of strange flotsam tossed off the side of shipping vessels.

Tech companies freaked out when news broke last summer about the National Security Agency's breathtaking ability to harvest internet data—issuing denunciations and denying they had any knowledge about such an arrangement. The NSA's lawyer has come out and said that's all a bunch of bull—they knew all along.

Osama bin Laden's son, in court, recalled being summoned to his father's mountain hideout after September 11 and said his father thought he was too "pessimistic" after warning that the United States would never let up in its hunt for vengeance.

In tenuously related news, a teenager managed to find a hole in the construction fence—slipping past a hapless guard—and climb to the roof of the nearly completed replacement World Trade Center monolith. The kid was arrested. The guard was fired.

California, after months and months and months and months of a drought, has already begun barbecuing itself in one wildfire after another.

Scientists found the so-called "chicken from hell" in a dinosaur fossil bed, which is much better than finding it in a takeout meal that kept someone up all night with the trots.

Someone made the luckiest guess on one of the most witless game shows in American history. (Which I'm allowed to say.)

And the sun almost murdered our TVs, power plants, computers, phones, and cars last year, after disgorging a fantastic magnetic plume through the earth's orbit. Okay, not quite. But it's a helluva "what if" story.

THIS PROVES IT: TALKING TO DRUNK NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON WOULD BE BETTER THAN TALKING TO DRUNK ANYBODY ELSE.