UK - The true cost of divorce and family breakdown in Britain goes “far higher” and “far deeper” than the multi-billion pound benefits bill, a welfare minister has warned. Lord Freud said that the current £9 billion cost to the taxpayer of lone parent benefits amounts to just the tip of the iceberg when the full social cost of separation is taken into account. He also called for marriage to be “put back into its rightful place” after a surge in the number of children being brought up by unmarried parents who he said were four times more likely to separate than those who tie the knot. The Coalition should make “no apology” for saying that it has a “clear duty” to strengthen the family, he said. The peer’s comments, in an article for The Telegraph, came as he acknowledged that family breakdown could be costing the country up to £46 billion a year.

RUSSIA - Russia could reduce to zero its economic dependency on the United States if Washington agreed sanctions against Moscow over Ukraine, a Kremlin aide said on Tuesday, warning that the American financial system faced a “crash” if this happened. “We would find a way not just to reduce our dependency on the United States to zero but to emerge from those sanctions with great benefits for ourselves,” said Kremlin economic aide Sergei Glazyev. He told the RIA Novosti news agency Russia could stop using dollars for international transactions and create its own payment system using its “wonderful trade and economic relations with our partners in the East and South.”

RUSSIA - Russia said it had successfully test-fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) on Tuesday, with tensions running high over its military intervention in Ukraine's Crimea region. The Strategic Rocket Forces launched an RS-12M Topol missile from the southerly Astrakhan region and the dummy warhead hit its target at a proving ground in Kazakhstan, Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Yegorov told state-run news agency RIA. Russia conducts test launches of its ICBMs fairly frequently and often announces the results, a practice seen as intended to remind the West of Moscow's nuclear might and reassure Russians that President Vladimir Putin will protect them.

CHINA - President Xi Jinping urges severe punishment for perpetrators of violence at crowded train station that left 29 people dead and 130 injured. China's president, Xi Jinping, has called for "all-out efforts" to bring to justice the black-clad assailants who killed 29 people with knives and machetes in a bloody terrorist attack in the south-western city of Kunming on Saturday night. Authorities have yet to reveal the identities of those captured, shot dead or on the run, or give evidence of their motivation. "They are holding that back and I think they are doing that because of the danger of stoking Han nationalism and resentment. This fear and hatred runs quite deep," said James Leibold, senior lecturer in politics and Asian studies at La Trobe University. "The default position of the government has always been to blame foreigners and never admit that ethnic relations in China might have serious problems."

USA - "After years of fiscal and economic mismanagement, the president has offered perhaps his most irresponsible budget yet," House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday, after President Obama released his $3.9 trillion election-year budget. The fiscal year 2015 spending proposal raises taxes on the wealthy and spends more on preschool, infrastructure, and job training, the Associated Press reported. But as Boehner indicated, Republicans won't accept it. "American families looking for jobs and opportunity will find only more government in this plan," Boehner said. "Spending too much, borrowing too much, and taxing too much, it would hurt our economy and cost jobs." Boehner said Obama's vision for the nation's future does not include a balanced budget - ever.

USA - According to the New York Times, “The United States and the European Union have embraced the revolution here as another flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former Soviet space.” “Flowering Democracy, Revolution”? The grim realities are otherwise. What is at stake is a US-EU-NATO sponsored coup d’Etat in blatant violation of international law.

GERMANY - As the Crimean crisis escalates, the German Navy is dispatching one of its spy ships to the Mediterranean. The "Alster," which had already been carrying out espionage on the Syrian war zone, is reported to have sailed from its homeport. Whether it will pursue a route through the Mediterranean to the Black Sea remains the Bundeswehr's secret.

EUROPE - Over the past few months, one or two regular correspondents have laughed off the idea that the ultimate aim of the EU is a federal union of European states, despite expressing their support for the UK’s membership of the EU.

RUSSIA - I've already explained why meaningful trade and financial sanctions against Russia are a non starter – everyone would lose from such action. Europe would be pushed back into recession, Russia into financial meltdown. This is not the sort of self harm Europe is prepared to contemplate right now. Indeed, thanks to the indiscretion of a UK official, who was snapped going into Downing Street with his briefing documents on display for all the world to see, we know this to be the case. Trade and financial sanctions have already been ruled out. This doesn't seem to have stopped the Russians threatening retaliatory action against the threat of the non sanctions. One possibility, says the Kremlin economics aid Sergei Glazyev, is for Russia to abandon the US dollar as a reserve currency, or to figure out a way to use a new payments system that was not reliant on US dollars for international transactions.

USA - If Daniel Nadler is right, a generation of college graduates with well-paid positions as junior researchers and analysts in the banking industry should be worried about their jobs. Very worried. Mr Nadler’s start-up, staffed with ex-Google engineers and backed partly by money from Google’s venture capital arm, is trying to put them out of work. Its algorithms assess how different securities are likely to react after the release of a market-moving piece of information, such as a monthly employment report. That is the kind of work usually done by well-educated junior analysts, who pull data from terminals, fill in spreadsheets and crunch numbers. “There are several hundred thousand people employed in that capacity. We do it with machines,” says Mr Nadler. “We’re not competing with other [tech] providers. We’re competing with people.”

RUSSIA - Russia has said China is largely "in agreement" over Ukraine, after other world powers condemned Moscow for sending troops into the country. Hundreds of Russian soldiers have surrounded a military base in Crimea, preventing Ukrainian soldiers from going in or out. Russian troops are also reported to have taken control of a ferry terminal in the city of Kerch on the eastern tip of Crimea, which has a majority Russian-speaking population.

COLOMBIA - Fewer crop species are feeding the world than 50 years ago - raising concerns about the resilience of the global food system, a study has shown. The authors warned a loss of diversity meant more people were dependent on key crops, leaving them more exposed to harvest failures. Higher consumption of energy-dense crops could also contribute to a global rise in heart disease and diabetes, they added. "As the global population rises and the pressure increases on our global food system, so does our dependence on the global crops and production system that feeds us. The price of failure of any of these crops will become very high," he warned.

USA - US intelligence agencies recently confirmed China’s development of a new intermediate-range nuclear missile (IRBM) called the Dongfeng-26C (DF-26C), US officials said. The new missile is estimated to have a range of at least 2,200 miles — enough for Chinese military forces to conduct attacks on US military facilities in Guam, a major hub for the Pentagon’s shift of US forces to Asia Pacific. As part of the force posture changes, several thousand Marines now based in Okinawa will be moved to Guam as part of the Asia pivot. In April, the Pentagon announced it is deploying one of its newest anti-missile systems, the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to Guam because of growing missile threats to the US island, located in the South Pacific some 1,600 miles southeast of Japan and 4,000 miles from Hawaii.

USA - For the second time in what has been a frigid winter in the Northeastern United States, Niagara Falls has come to an icy halt as the six million cubic feet of water that typically flow over the falls every minute has frozen over. The flow of water over the falls typically can withstand icy temperatures like those that have frozen much of the country this winter, but Monday's high of 9 degrees Fahrenheit brought Niagara Falls to a standstill. In January, another record-breaking cold front managed to freeze the mighty falls in a 'polar vortex' that turned the cascading water to ice - and affected about 240 million people in the US and southern Canada. No thaw is expected anytime soon, as temperatures at the western New York tourist attraction will dip below 0 degrees Fahrenheit Monday night through Tuesday morning.

EUROPE - There will never be a United States of Europe, according to the newly-crowned top Socialist candidate for the European elections. European Parliament President Martin Schulz was endorsed by the Party of European Socialists (PES) at a congress in Rome on 1 March. He will be the PES’ election frontrunner and its first-ever official candidate for the presidency of the European Commission. “Speaking from my experience of 20 years in the European Parliament, I know that we will never have a United States of Europe,” Schulz said on the eve of his nomination, at a meeting with young voters organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. He also lashed out at EU regulatory overreach, singling out last year’s botched attempt by the EU commission to ban refillable olive oil bottles from restaurant tables.