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When Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, he left a trove of documents at his estate; many were thrown into a large reservoir. Journalists called divers and spent the weekend going over soggy papers in a house they had long been forbidden from entering. With the help of volunteers, more than 20,000 pages are now online.

Before they came to the expansive estate last week, reporters "had only been allowed to the front door to receive cakes on journalism day," as Drew Sullivan writes for the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Within hours of the president fleeing this past weekend, anti-Yanukovych activists from the Maidan group occupied his opulent estate, called Mezhyhirya. The images that emerged from that site depict excess, with gilded surfaces and expensive fittings.

Despite feelings of anger toward the former leader and resentment at his lifestyle, his estate hasn't been ransacked.

From the AP:

"The protesters' self-defense units were deployed inside the compound to maintain order and prevent any looting or damage to the property. One of them, a middle-aged man, could not hide his anger: 'Look how he lived, son of a bitch.'"

Cut to 1942, when Russians are sneaking across the Volga to strike German positions. To stop them, German Col. Peter Kahn (Thomas Kretschmann) manages to blow up a fuel dump, setting many of the attackers afire. In a deliriously impossible scene, blazing Russian soldiers continue their offensive, killing Germans as their own bodies char.

This brutal sequence is as sweeping as anything in Enemy at the Gates, the 2001 English-language Stalingrad epic. But then the movie shifts to a more intimate (and affordable) scale. A few survivors of the onslaught take shelter in a bombed-out apartment house. For most of the rest of story, they hold their position against the much larger German contingent outside. Eventually, only five Russian fighters remain, each waiting for a chance to demonstrate his noble spirit of self-sacrifice.

Just one tenant has survived the fighting: Katya (Maria Smolnikova), who's almost 19. To the Russian soldiers, she's everything they're fighting for — country, sisters, mothers, wives. Radio operator Sergey (Sergey Bondarchuk Jr.) is particularly taken with the girl. When not battling the Germans hand-to-hand in kung fu-style brawls, the men plan Katya's birthday party.

To balance this sentimental tale, there's a harsher one about another woman: Masha (Yana Studilina), who's reluctantly under Kahn's protection. Compared to his abominable commanding officer, the Colonel is almost a nice guy; he bristles at his fellow Germans' brutality toward civilians, but intervenes to help only Masha, a blonde beauty who reminds him of his late wife. The fate of one of these women will ultimately be revealed on the movie's concluding trip to Japan, which is just as disorienting as the first one.

This is the first Russian production to be presented in IMAX 3-D, technology that doesn't add much to the film but does distinguish it from the 1989 Russian Stalingrad (which starred Fedor Bondarchuk) and the 1993 German Stalingrad (which starred Thomas Kretschmann).

The spectacle, literally amplified by Angelo Badalamenti's strident score, helped make Bondarchuk's movie a hit not just in Russia but also in China. It faces much dicier prospects in the United States, whose filmgoers didn't grow up on the heroic national legend of Stalingrad — and lately haven't shown much taste for gory war sagas unless they feature aliens, superheroes or the undead. Indeed, for all of Stalingrad's curious developments and bewildering gestures, the strangest thing about the movie may be that it's even being released in the U.S.

There has been no talk of compensating people for their loss, the priest says. "So how can we talk about forgiveness and reconciliation where there is no justice?"

Now for the past few months, Muslim civilians have been hunted down in the Central African Republic. This is usually explained as a collective spasm of Christian-led revenge. But Mbarta says there is a deeper reason.

Later that afternoon, he meets me behind the closed door of my hotel room. He's brought with him a scruffy-looking guy named Joseph Baba, who wears a thick coat despite the equatorial heat. From the pocket of that coat emerges a square of pink tissue paper. Unfolded, it reveals six uncut diamonds.

The Central African Republic, the priest says, is awash in diamonds and gold. For various historical and cultural reasons, most of the traders of those jewels have been Muslim. Over the decades since independence, he says, there's been growing resentment of the middleman traders by the mostly Christian miners. Even the priest isn't immune to it: His father was one of those villagers who eked out a living by panning gold from the rivers.

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On a sunny Friday in August last year, Judah Abughorab paddled a small, flat boat over the blue Mediterranean Sea about 100 yards off the Gaza Strip's sandy shore.

He doesn't really like to eat fish, but catching them is the unemployed construction worker's favorite pastime.

That day, he netted a half a dozen. Then, through the clear water, he spotted something that made him look again.

"It looked like a person," he says. "Eyes, a face, hands, fingers."

Abughorab says he was scared, but dove five yards down to have a closer look. One touch told him the human form was made of metal.

"I realized it was a statue," he says. "I tried to move it, but it was so heavy I thought it was tied to the bottom."