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• Russian President Vladimir Putin recounted the post-Cold War history during a speech Tuesday marking Crimea's annexation, accusing the West of cheating Russia and ignoring its interests in the years that followed the Soviet collapse.
• "They have constantly tried to drive us into a corner for our independent stance, for defending it, for calling things by their proper names and not being hypocritical," Putin said. "But there are limits. And in the case of Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed a line. They have behaved rudely, irresponsibly and unprofessionally."
• Few Western observers and students of East-West relations condone Putin's actions in Ukraine -- the military takeover, the hastily organized referendum about Crimean independence or Moscow's equally rushed annexation of the strategic Black Sea peninsula on Tuesday. But there is an understanding that the Ukraine crisis marks a Kremlin decision that more than "20 years of trying to develop a better relationship with the West has been a failure," said Keith Darden, a professor of international service at American University.
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• ATLANTA (AP) -- Democrats in the conservative Deep South are looking to recapture some old political magic in the 2014 elections.
• President Barack Obama's party is running candidates with familiar names, like Carter and Nunn in Georgia, in hopes of rebuilding clout where Republicans rule. Given their recent political struggles in the region, some Democrats say they have nothing to lose.
• "We need known quantities while we continue to build our bench for the future," said Georgia Democratic Chairman DuBose Porter, a failed candidate for governor in 2010. "This gives us a short game and a long game."
• The candidates are carefully managing their family connections and their own political histories -- a tactic that reflects the risk of looking like a party of the past and the sheer difficulty of winning in the face of widespread disdain for Obama and his signature health care law.
• Southern Democratic Party leaders counter that it's still their best shot to restore an old majority coalition: blacks, urban liberals and just enough whites from small towns and rural areas. That would mean remixes and retreads successfully luring voters who have trended Republican or stayed home in recent years while the GOP built a virtual monopoly on statewide offices.
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