Ukraine: The country’s new prime minister says $70 billion was drained from the treasury into offshore accounts during the last three years. Arseniy Yatseniuk, who was confirmed only yesterday, said the money was “stolen by representatives of the previous government.” He said that less that $400 million remains in the treasury. Ukraine might need as much as $30 billion in international help to stay on its feet.

  Ousted President Victor Yanukovych gave a defiant press conference in Russia this morning, saying, “Nobody has overthrown me. I was compelled to leave Ukraine due to a direct threat to my life and my nearest and dearest.” He vowed to continue to “fight for my country.” The interim government has accused him of murder for ordering the shooting of demonstrators.

In Kiev, journalists have fished from a pond documents that were dumped during Yanukovych’s hasty departure from his estate. The papers are being dried and posted online. So far they reveal details of how Yanukovych paid for his extravagant life, and how he tried to hold onto power the last several weeks before he fled. The papers even reveal that he had a mistress, the sister of the house cook.

Econo-News: The federal deficit dropped to $680 billion last year, down from $1.1 trillion the year before. It is the lowest deficit since 2008. Revenue grew and spending was nearly the same year to year. As a percentage of the economy, the deficit fell to 4.1 percent of the economy, down from a high of 10 percent during the worst of the recession.

But on the downside of economic news, the Commerce Department says the economy grew at a slower rate in the 4^th quarter of 2013 than previously thought: 2.4 percent rather than 3.2 percent.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen yesterday told Congress that unusual cold and snow this winter have been at least partly responsible for slowing the economy. Yellen said the Fed would try to sort out how much the weather is to blame, and how much the economy softened on its own.

Winter: Heavy rain is falling in Southern California. The first major storm of the winter is expected to drop up to six inches of rain in some areas. Residents in hillside neighborhoods are sandbagging and bracing for mudslides.

Temperatures continue to run 20-40 degrees below average in the Midwest and East. Minneapolis: 0; Chicago: 11; Detroit: 7; New York: 14; Boston: 17.

Spy Cam: British intelligence collected millions of webcam videos from Yahoo users, some of them sexually explicit, even from people who were not suspects of terrorist or criminal activity, according to documents leaked to The Guardian newspaper by Edward Snowden. Noting the amount of sexual activity on the net an intelligence document noted, “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”

The Verdict: The misdemeanor trial of the century ended this morning when Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, was found not guilty of driving under the influence of a drug.  Kennedy got into an accident when she fell asleep at the wheel after mistakenly taking Ambien instead of a similar-looking thyroid pill. The prosecution conceded that Kennedy took the wrong pill by mistake, but argued she should have recognized the effects and stopped driving. The trial included the 54-year-old Kennedy pulling for sympathy because she’s an orphan. Her father was assassinated when she was 8 years old.

Outer Space: Sandra Bullock’s deal for the movie “Gravity” pays her a percentage of the gross, which will bring her paycheck to about $70 million dollars. To quote George Bernard Shaw, “Madam, that’s what we tip for bad service.”

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