U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Ukraine on Monday to reassure its leaders that Washington has not forgotten the country (Moscow Times)

The streets of Kiev were shut down as a security precaution for Biden’s visit. Ordinary Ukrainians, however, were largely indifferent to the vice president’s arrival, and newspapers had little coverage ahead of his visit.

Many observers say the combination of Russia’s base, Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, and Crimea’s mostly Russian-speaking population is a diplomatic tinderbox waiting to explode.

After the St. Petersburg gig, where she played to 15,000 fans at the Ice Palace, Spears immediately left the country, deciding to spend the two nights before her Moscow show in Stockholm instead. A spokesperson in Moscow confirmed that she left the country between gigs.

President Dmitry Medvedev pledged support for South Ossetia’s separatist leadership during a surprise visit Monday that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili condemned as Russia’s 'most immoral and shameful precedent in centuries.'

State television showed thousands of cheering Ossetians thronging the streets to welcome Medvedev, who is seen as a hero after the Russian military repelled Georgia’s attempt to seize the breakaway region by force last August.
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Analysts said the timing of the trip was a slap in the face of U.S. President Barack Obama, who had expressed public support for Georgia during his visit to Moscow last week.
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On Monday, Saakashvili said the timing of Medvedev’s trip was no coincidence.

“I do not know whether it was in response to the Nabucco summit, which is considered by them as their great diplomatic failure, or if it was a response to … Obama’s visit,” he said.

Gia Nodia, a political science professor at Tbilisi University, said Medvedev was certainly making a gesture to the West by visiting Tskhinvali. “Medvedev did not respond the day when Obama sent a clear message on Georgia, but now he is saying, ‘We do not care what Obama says,’” Nodia said by telephone from Tbilisi. (Moscow Times)

More and more Western Europeans, recognizing the threat to their safety and way of life, have turned their backs on the establishment, which has done little or nothing to address these problems, and begun voting for parties—some relatively new, and all considered right-wing—that have dared to speak up about them. One measure of the dimensions of this shift: Owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who 10 years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. (Source: WSJ)

"The local Jewish communities (kehillot), in place when Józewski arrived, funded themselves. The contributions of local Jews were supplemented by donations from Jewish emigrants in the United States. Services provided by the communes supplemented those of the state, most visibly in education. In the 1938-1938 school year, there were seven functioning private Jewish high schools in Volhynia. By comparison, there was one Ukrainian high school, and it was public. Every town in Volhynia had a Jewish library, and the larger towns had Yiddish weeklies."