It was a good old-fashioned Olympic scandal in Sochi, when South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna, known as “the Queen,” lost to a less experienced Russian. The judgment spurred millions of angry Tweets, and a Change.org petition protesting the result was the fastest growing one on site record—reportedly more than 1.2 million signatures in about 12 hours.

The American director of the chilling Indonesian documentary “The Act of Killing” has won dozens of awards so far for the film and could add one of the movie industry’s most coveted honors Sunday at the Oscars. But so far, the director, Joshua Oppenheimer, has not succeeded in accomplishing what he considered a greater goal — jump-starting a debate in Indonesia that will compel the government to finally open a formal inquiry into one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.

It seems like one reason why Russia’s actions in Crimea appear so jarring and brazen is that it’s a form of warfare that was once common but rarely take place anymore. Russia may not formally annex Crimea – it seems more likely that the territory will declare independence under heavy Russian influence – but it has essentially invaded another country to lob off a piece of territory that was, despite longstanding nationalist sentiment, an undisputed part of Ukraine.

Canada’s rush to support democracy in Ukraine has echoes of an earlier time. In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Canada was the first country to recognize Ukraine, following a national referendum in which more than 90 per cent of the country voted for independence. 

The protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine have many aspirations for their country. Their placards called for closer relations with the European Union (EU), an end to Russian intervention in Ukraine’s politics and the establishment of a clean government to replace the kleptocracy of President Viktor Yanukovych.

For a city, there’s nothing quite like the glory of winning an Olympic bid. The highly competitive process starts nine years before the games and involves untold amounts of campaigning and planning. Once selected, fortunate cities have seven years to prepare, updating their infrastructure and building new, impressive facilities. If they pull it off, they get two weeks to show it all off to the entire world.

From the dingy basement of a decaying apartment block on the outskirts of Simferopol, Crimean parliament deputy Sergei Shuvainikov is leading the fight to defend the ethnic Russians of this strategic Black Sea peninsula. In an office festooned with banners showing a map of Crimea overlaid with a World War II medal featuring the communist hammer and sickle and the slogan "In union with Russia," the voluble Shuvainikov spills out a litany of alleged assaults on the Russian language and Russian culture in Ukraine.

Russia is back, or at least that is what you were supposed to think while watching the 2014 Sochi Olympics over the past two weeks. To prove it, Russia spent 51 billion dollars on the first-ever Winter Olympics staged in a subtropical climate zone and took great pains to showcase Russian culture, diversity, wealth, talent, and swagger during nonstop coverage of the Olympic mega-event.