News Round-up in this Spring Equinox that seems committed to resist any thaw!

The MH370 is still missing, although glimmers of clues have allegedly emerged somewhere 2500 kilometers off the west coast of Australia.
The Malay government is under fire for keeping their reporting on the missing plane so secretive and restricting access to the search process for too many important days. We have a long way to go to equip the whole world with state of the art radar and monitoring technology so that people travelling anywhere on the planet will have the confidence that the multitude of national "air systems" are both well supplied and co-ordinated in their shared responsibility for flight safety and security.
The Russian government is under fire for endorsing Putin's coup by stealth in Crimea, with more grabbing of territory to come, "to protect Russian people" living in cities in the eastern part of Ukraine. Angela Merkel declares "there is no G8" in the current political climate, thereby suspending both the joint actions of the group and its scheduled meeting in June, to have been hosted by Putin himself.
Stephen Harper, current Prime Minister of Canada, attempting to "punch above our weight", will be the first G7 leader to visit Kiev, offering a spate of support in loans, grants and the obvious theatrical symbol of his physical presence, as the first western leader to risk whatever is happening in Kiev (excepting Secretary of State, John Kerry who walked the streets of Kiev to demonstrate the safety and security of those streets and of the people gathering there, to counter Russian claims of the opposite).
Ban Ki-Moon travels to Moscow to attempt to inject some heat into the ice-veins of Putin, while Kerry is lectured by Russian  Foreign Minister, Lavrov, that the take-over of Crimea is complete and should not be opposed by the west.
Neighbours of the Russian federation, fearful that they too live under the covetous eye of Putin and the Russian Duma, given the absence of western appetite for military conflict, and an open playing field for aggrandizing the Russian dictator and his puppets, many of whom have allegedly grown extremely rich under the current regime. John McCain, senior Senator from Arizona, now named on the tit-for-tat Russian sanctions list, declares, "Russia is a gas station trying to act like a country!"
Starvation, bombing and the river of refugees pouring out of Syria all continue unabated, under another Putin puppet, supported openly and seemingly with resistance from the west, Assad, who is now reported to be "in the ascendancy" and "could likely win re-election," according to some reports from that country, in which people say, now that they have seen the face of the Islamic terrorist rebels, would prefer a return to the Alawite Assad.
Boko Haram remains very active in Africa with reports continue to paint a picture of the ravages of their terror on innocent women and children, all in the name of Allah.
Israel continues to demand, through her Prime Minister, that the Palestinians declare publicly their support for Israel as the home of the Jewish people, although three attempts inside the Kenesset to define what that phrase means have failed to come to a vote. One of the members of his cabinet tours North America declaring his opposition to the "two-state" solution, offering instead a commercial model of building trust and reciprocity between Palestinians and Jews which he hopes will lead to a more lasting and sustainable peace between the arch-enemies.
Iran, with its political foot-on-the-peddle to acquire enriched uranium for the alleged purpose of providing energy (not a nuclear bomb) continues to resist closure of one of its reactors, pleading the innocence of its operation. The world remains highly sceptical of their claim.
Toyota agrees to pay $1.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury the largest settlement of any car company in history for lying to the public about the safety of their cars for many years, prior to finally succumbing to the pressure of death, injury and public pressure. :In this case the price of lying is very high.
Sad, that the price of lying, in Putin's case, is so low, and there is not a regulatory body to impose a similar sanction on the political process generally. Lying to the public, in any country, ought to be an action for which there is more immediate and more definitive punishment that simply a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, dissembling is one of the "core competencies" of the political class, developed and sustained over centuries of practice, under the umbrella that different perceptions constitute different realities, and that no reality embraces the whole panoply of information about any situation.
BP, having just leased more territory in the Gulf of Mexico, would do well to examine the Toyota case, in the unwelcome likelihood that another of their rigs blows up and contaminates the Gulf ecosystem a second time, because of the complicity and cover-up of regulators and monitors paid off by the energy companies to "give too much slack" to the behemoth energy corporations, from whose hoses our of our vehicles drink voraciously.
One wonder if Charles Dickens would see such a round-up as "these were the best of times; these were the worst of times" or whether the first half of the famous phrase would have to be deleted, were he to revisit our 'world community'.