Western diplomats may at last have woken up and smelled the coffee in the continued stand-off over Ukraine. After failing to appreciate the geopolitics of the Ukrainian issue and insisting on bureaucratic pettifoggery the first time around, let’s hope Europe’s foreign policy makers have finally learned their lesson and come to play hardball.

A group of nine students is heading to court to challenge California’s laws regarding the hiring and firing of teachers, arguing that that the state’s laws put teachers’ interests ahead of those of their students. This is morally right, but will it hold up in court?

A new energy deal between Pakistan and Qatar suggests that Gulf Arabs are moving closer to Pakistan in an attempt to balance a rising Iran.

Abortion rates have fallen steeply since 2008 all across the United States—and not just in states with the toughest new laws. The public appears to be getting increasingly queasy about the practice.

Good evening, readers! We hope you’ve had a restful weekend. Take a break from your Super Bowl preparations to read what you may have missed over the past week:

Wonkblog reports on a new study of wait times in 15 big US cities, which found the average waiting time across five different specialities was 18.5 days. In some areas of the country it’s even higher—in Boston, the average wait time for a first time patient to see a family doctor is 66 days.

Louisiana placed near the top in yet another education report card measuring charter school policies. The state has staked out a place at the front of the reform movement; the question now is whether these reforms actually work.

Every man, woman and child in Chicago is carrying $18,596 in pension debt, the largest per-person liability in the nation and nearly that of Puerto Rico and New York City combined.

According to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, half of American Sports fans “see some aspect of the supernatural at play in sports,” meaning that they either pray to God to help their team, have thought their team was cursed at some point in time, or believe that God plays a role in determining the outcome of sporting events.

The Detroit bankruptcy is giving some Wall Street firms a splitting headache. The embattled city’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr is pursuing a lawsuit that would let the city stop making payments on a $144 billion pension deal centering on what the city’s lawyers are now calling “sham” contracts.