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Tensions continue to rise in Ukraine. Thursday's news includes word that:

— "Dozens of heavily armed gunmen seized control of local government buildings in Ukraine's Crimea region early Thursday and raised the Russian flag, mirroring the three-month protest movement that drove Ukraine's pro-Russian president into hiding last week." (The Associated Press) There were no reports of injuries at the sites in Simferopol, the local capital. Ukrainian security forces established a security perimeter around the area.

As the Parallels blog has written, Crimea "is an autonomous part of Ukraine, [that has] strong emotional ties to Russia and [where] a majority of people identify themselves as Russian.

Crimean lawmakers were reported to be preparing to enter the government buildings, possibly to vote on whether to seek to split from Ukraine and seek a union with Russia.

In July of last year, a man named Sidney Sealine went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris.

The idea was to spend some time with the picture, see for himself the special spark that made the painting so famous.

But Sealine couldn't even get close.

In his video of the visit, you see people of every race and nationality crowded around the barricades that separate them from the painting. They're holding cameras over their heads and snapping pictures like paparazzi at a movie opening while the Mona Lisa gazes out at them.

A surprisingly small portrait, it is separated from the crazed crowd by a series of wooden railings and an enormous slab of darkly tinted bulletproof glass.

It's a painting so successful it requires constant protection from the public, and so it can hardly be seen.

Why Is The Mona Lisa – Or Any Piece Of Art – Successful?

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because people believe that there is something profoundly special about it, some quality so distinguishing that it deserves to be as famous as it is.

But is that true?

Several years ago, Princeton professor Matthew Salganik started thinking about success, specifically about how much of success should be attributed to the inherent qualities of the successful thing itself, and how much was just chance. For some essentially random reason, a group of people decided that the thing in question was really good and their attention attracted more attention until there was a herd of people who believed it was special mostly because all the other people believed that it was, but the successful thing wasn't in fact that special.

“ It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn't is essentially a matter of chance.

Just three years after protesters and the Egyptian military drove Hosni Mubarak from power, the revolution hasn't delivered what many Egyptians expected, and hopes are fading that it ever will.

Military commander Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is widely expected to announce his candidacy for president any day now. The charismatic strongman would be the frontrunner and his candidacy would be a landmark in the ongoing military crackdown now restricting many of the freedoms Egyptians hoped for when toppling Mubarak.

To recap: The Tahrir Square revolution captivated world attention and eventually prompted the military to escort Mubarak from office on Feb. 11, 2011. A year later, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi became the first freely elected Egyptian president. But his term quickly soured with accusations that his government was an economic failure and that it tried to monopolize power for an Islamist agenda. Protesters prompted a military coup last July 3.

The military then decided to lead from behind — appointing a president, prime minister and cabinet. Parliament remains dissolved.

The violence has been worse than any time during Mubarak's rule. The security forces say they are engage in a battle with terrorists and more than 1,400 people have been killed since last summer. But a majority appear to be demonstrators and victims of what Amnesty International calls "excessive" force.

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This year we decided to observe Black History Month by hearing from a wide variety of people with roots in Africa, who are changing the world, all over the world.

The series was produced by Tell Me More's Freddie Boswell. She joins us now to help us close the series, along with our Executive Producer Carline Watson.