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The latest crop of 300 new North Korean slogans to mark North Korea's 70th anniversary has just been released. Stand back as they "cascade down and their sweet aroma [fills] the air":

— Thoroughly get rid of abuse of authority and bureaucratism!

— Let us raise a strong wind of studying the great Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism!

— Fire an opening salvo of an ideological campaign and make our fire concentrated, regular and accurate!

You get the idea.

Agence France-Presse describes the "exclamation-mark peppered list" of slogans published Thursday in translation by the the official KCNA news agency, as running the gambut from praise for dutiful wives to an exhortation to "make mushroom cultivation scientific!"

Even allowing that they probably come off more melodious in their original Korean, some of the commandments are so awkward that it's hard to imagine them sounding right in any language.

To wit: "Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland by the joint operation of the army and people!" or "Let this socialist country resound with Song of Big Fish Haul and be permeated with the fragrant smell of fish and other seafoods!" Then there's the simple "Grow vegetables extensively in greenhouses!"

Some of them are entirely lost in translation. Take the edict to "Play sports games in an offensive way!"

Reuters reports: "The slogans, which ran to more than 7,000 words in translation and spanned two pages of the party's broadsheet newspaper, called for a wide range of improvements including 'more stylish school uniforms' and 'organic farming on an extensive scale.'"

The BBC says: "Propaganda in the form of slogans, posters, stamps and books has played an important role in the country since the state was founded in 1948 so the appearance of a new batch of exhortations is not surprising."

James Grayson, an emeritus professor of modern Korean studies at Sheffield University tells the BBC that the new slogans are "typical of most totalitarian states."

He says they are reminiscent of China's Cultural Revolution and after the establishment of the Communist regime. "[If] you think of the Nazis and Italian fascism it's not an unusual thing... It's the strength and the quantity of the North Korean ones that is unusual," he tells the news agency.

Grayson, however, notes a theme that marks most of the slogans: "A lot of this has to do with very practical things to do with the economy, especially food."

The "enemy" United States, was not spared, of course: "Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man!"

AFP quotes defector Lee Min-Bok, who fled North Korea 14 years ago and now lives in the South as saying "We were permanently buried by an avalanche of slogans.

"We had to memorize a lot of them to show our loyalty, but they slowly lost any meaning for anyone, especially after the famine in the 90s," said Lee, 57.

"That greenhouse one has been around for decades. The problem is nobody had any plastic sheets of glass to build them, or fuel to heat them," he added.

North Korea

Movie musicals used to be box-office poison, but lately they've found ways to sing to a wider crowd. The onscreen Les Miz did away with lip-synching, Annie went multi-cultural, Into the Woods belted out revisionist fairy-tales — and combined, those three movies have taken in almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Now — just in time for Valentine's Day — comes The Last Five Years, a virtually sung-through musical romance with another central gimmick and twists, tricks, and quirks enough to make me want to sing its praises despite a flaw or two.

The plot is entirely concerned with a supremely adorable NY couple — Cathy (Anna Kendrick) and Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) — who appear both cute and made for each other. He's a budding novelist, she's an aspiring actress. They fall in love, they marry, they fall apart, all in five years ... and yes, I know that sounds like a spoiler.

But it's not, because Cathy's first bleary-eyed lyrics tell us their union's come to naught:

Jamie is over and Jamie is gone
Jamie's decided it's time to move on
Jamie has new dreams he's building upon
And I'm still hurting.

Only after she's sung about the breakup, much as Fanny Brice does at the ouset of Funny Girl, does the movie flash back to beginnings: the two of them tearing their clothes off, leaping into bed, as Jamie sings ecstatically about breaking his Jewish mother's heart by falling for this blonde "Shiksa Goddess."

Young love, right? So now the plot can go forward. Except that The Last Five Years has an ingenious trick up its structural sleeve. While his songs tell the story conventionally, starting at the beginning, his songs are alternating with her songs, which tell the story in reverse. He goes start to finish, she goes finish to start, and their only duet is right in the middle, on the day she accepts his proposal.

Sounds confusing, but it's all pretty effortless in Richard LaGravenese's clean, clear adaptation of a stage two-hander by composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown. The dovetailed songs, in fact, end up revealing quite a lot about, not just their relationship, but relationships in general. You feel the ache of endings in the joy of beginnings, and know which forks in the road will lead straight off cliffs.

Which is not to suggest there aren't surprises along the way — Cathy's resilience is impressive, for instance, as her partner's career takes off while her dreams of Broadway stardom lead only to summer stock in Ohio.

Kendrick qualifies as the movie's secret weapon — actually not so secret now that she's charmed audiences in both Into the Woods and Pitch Perfect. She's so appealing here, in fact, that audience sympathies are likely to be less-than-evenly split between the two leads. Jeremy Jordan's Jamie is plenty energetic, but in terms of appeal, he's sort of the Omar Sharif to her Barbra Streisand.

LaGravanese tries to balance that where he can, by making Jamie one of the world's most physically active writers, hardly ever sitting still with an idea when he can instead be rushing from pillar to post in cars, on the run, biking, and even on the Staten Island Ferry. That allows the director to do a nice job of opening up a show that on stage is generally done with two performers and very little else.

The movie sketches in a whole world around Cathy and Jamie, though the story still comes down to just them, and their haunting, bittersweet recounting of The Last Five Years.

Put it in the category of things we know for sure that just ain't so.

No sooner did the Democratic National Committee announce it had chosen Philadelphia, Pa., as its 2016 convention site than a lot of us political analyst types popped out the conventional wisdom about "appealing to a swing state in the general election."

It sounds good and it makes sense, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go very far.

Sure, it ought to help the Democrats to have their convention in a state that they absolutely have to win in November. It also ought to help the GOP to have its convention in Cleveland; no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio.

But let's face it. If the Democrats do win Pennsylvania, it won't be because they had their convention in Philadelphia, which is already a motherlode of Democratic votes. And if the Republicans wind up winning Ohio, it won't be because they won over a lot of precincts in Cleveland, which is a similarly rich trove of Democratic support in elections at all levels.

The idea that conventions are located with an eye toward winning the host city's state is popular to the point of being irresistible. But it doesn't fare well against the facts.

Convention State Wins & Losses

2012

Republicans in Florida (November loss)

Democrats in North Carolina (November loss)

2008

Republicans in Minnesota (loss)

Democrats in Colorado (win)

2004

Republicans in New York (loss)

Democrats in Massachusetts (win)

2000

Republicans in Pennsylvania (loss)

Democrats in California (win)

1996

Republicans in California (loss)

Democrats in Illinois (win)

1992

Republicans in Texas (win)

Democrats in New York (win)

1988

Republicans in Louisiana (win)

Democrats in Georgia (loss)

1984

Republicans in Texas (win)

Democrats in California (loss

1980

Republicans in Michigan (win)

Democrats in New York (loss)

1976

Republicans in Missouri (loss)

Democrats in New York (win)

1972

Republicans in Florida (win)

Democrats in Florida (loss)

1968

Republicans in Florida (win)

Democrats in Illinois (loss)

1964

Republicans in California (loss)

Democrats in New Jersey (win)

1960

Republicans in Illinois (loss)

Democrats in California (loss)

1956

Republicans in California (win)

Democrats in Illinois (loss)

True, both parties took their conventions to swing states in 2012. But both parties wound up losing those swing states. The Republicans headed for Tampa in pivotal Florida but their nominee, Mitt Romney, lost the state in November. The Democrats went to Charlotte, N.C., in part to celebrate winning there in 2008 (for the first time in 32 years). But four years later, after holding their convention in the Tar Heel state, they saw it go GOP.

In a sense, both parties thought they were wooing swing states in 2008, too. The Democrats saw Colorado as winnable, even though they had only won it three times since the 1930s. The Republicans went after Minnesota, which had the longest streak of voting blue for president in the whole country. The Democrats managed to make their swipe, the GOP didn't even come close.

But to the two Obama elections, the parties' choice of their convention sites seems to have had only occasional connection to the voting patterns of the states. From 1988 to 2004, the parties sited 10 conventions and chose a swing state only once (the GOP went to Philadelphia in 2000). The rest of the time they were in states as reliably red as Texas and Louisiana or as true blue as Massachusetts and California.

In fact, through those five cycles, the Republicans twice went to states (California and New York) that they would lose by double digits in the fall voting for president. The Democrats, for their part, took a similar drubbing in Georgia after convening in Atlanta in 1988. It is hard to imagine that party professionals in either case really thought things would be different because of the convention.

In the cycles where the two parties did manage to win their convention-site states, they held those gatherings in states they could scarcely have lost – such as Texas for the GOP and Massachusetts for the Democrats.

The truth is, political parties locate their conventions much the way large trade associations and professional groups do. They look for geographical balance (which is why the first generations of conventions were usually held in Baltimore and later generations in Chicago). They look for fun stuff to do (see New Orleans, for example, or San Diego). But in the end, it comes down to state-of-the-art facilities, an adequate supply of quality hotel rooms and a financial aid package from the city and private donors.

Those criteria make a lot more sense than a hopeful lunge after an iffy package of electoral votes, especially given the poor return on past attempts.

Going back to the 1950s, and the last 30 choices of convention sites, the party has lost the state where it held its convention 16 times and won it 14.

The pattern holds perfectly within each party, too. Republicans have won the state that hosted their convention seven times but lost it eight times. For the Democrats the numbers are exactly the same: seven wins, eight losses. One bright note for the Dems, though, prior to the 2012 loss in North Carolina, their nominee had won the convention site state five times in a row (after losing five of six).

Two days before a cease-fire is set to take effect in eastern Ukraine, forces on both sides are fighting over strategic territory they hope to control after the peace begins. A truce between the government and Russian-backed separatists is set to begin Sunday.

Despite Thursday's apparent breakthrough, "The enemy shelled positions of the 'anti-terrorist operation' forces with the same intensity as before," a Ukrainian military official said Friday, according to Reuters.

The news agency reports that fighting continued at separatist strongholds such as Donetsk, and at other sites such as a railway junction. The clashes followed reports that more Russian equipment had been sent across the border to separatist-controlled areas shortly after the temporary peace was announced.

There are also concerns about the terms of the cease-fire. From Brussels, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports for our Newscast unit:

"Some feel the deal, reached after 16 hours of negotiations among the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, may give too much to Russia and the pro-Russian rebels.

"Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko says they did what they had to, in order to stop the fighting.

"'We managed to get the sides to commit to the ceasefire,' he says, 'and this wasn't easy task, because other side was not inclined to stop the aggression.'"

Both U.S. and European leaders say that they're waiting to see actions that match the the cease-fire's peaceful intentions.

European Council President Donald Tusk says the EU will go ahead with sanctions "against 19 Russian and Ukrainian individuals and nine entities next week," France 24 reports.

Secretary of State John Kerry says the U.S. "is prepared to consider rolling back sanctions on Russia when the Minsk agreements of September 2014, and now this agreement, are fully implemented."

"The parties have a long road ahead," Kerry said, explaining later that the conditions for sanctions to be eased include "a full ceasefire, the withdrawal of all foreign troops and equipment from Ukraine, the full restoration of Ukrainian control of the international border, and the release of all hostages."

Ukraine

Russia