Look at the face of this woman. We don’t know her name, whether she had children, what language she spoke, or her nationality. We know only that she was a gipsy, and she was butchered at Auschwitz.
Joseph Mengele was busily recording the “racial characteristics” of his victims, and was disappointed because photographs didn’t catch skin [...]

To be read aloud, with a perfectly straight face.
BEIJING – You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China’s Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.
No injuries were reported, although the vehicles involved were slightly [...]

Did Dolly do dumb on the International Red Cross?
In the last week of July, the world’s press reported that the Israelis had whacked two ambulances in southern Lebanon, creating a neat hole in the middle of the cross painted on the roof of one.
Since then, an American website called Zombietime has done a [...]

This is a roentgenizdat, a clandestine record from Hungary or Russia, pressed onto discarded X-Ray film.
The method developed with the wartime shortage of wax, coupled I guess with the wartime prevalence of medical treatment, but subsequently became a way of outwitting the Warsaw Pact cultural police, on the prowl to stamp out decadent western [...]

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
That is Rudyard Kipling, of course, and has been used as a strategic cliche for the last three years. But this is a [...]

I have a quotation from the English Anglican novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson on my wall which reads:
“If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that’s obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that’s honey.”
He has just published a biography of poet laureate John Betjemen, [...]

Digg has unearthed a wikipedia list of the 100 most requested topics.
Tiger Woods is at 98. Dr Who at 76. Pokemon at 70. Ghandi at 56. Da Vinci Code at 51. Jedi at 40. Germany at 31.
And number 30 is Neighbours. Yus. More interesting than major European countries. Second only in visual media to [...]

Shirley Ann Richards has died.
She was 88, and her death may have severed our last connection to the first days of Australian talkies. I think she is the woman on the left in the still from Dad and Dave Come to Town.
Born in 1917 in Sydney to an American father and a mother from [...]

Here is a fabulous piece of self pity in public life. Tony Abbott spoke to “a media conference at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne on Monday.”
He complained about the “ambush interview” in which journalists changed topics with sinister intent, and then attacked him for not knowing the answer.

This is truly ugly:
“Plans for a major charity appeal to tackle the humanitarian crisis in Lebanon have been shelved after television broadcasters refused to back it.
The BBC said concerns over its editorial impartiality meant it was unable to support a national appeal despite two separate requests from the Disasters Emergency Committee.
And the corporation, along with [...]