Quoted: westward migration, possibly in waves, is believed to have occurred between 500 A.D. and 1000 A.D. ... The persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos, the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Quoted: is a counterculture phrase coined by Timothy Leary in the 1960s. The phrase came to him in the shower one day after Marshall McLuhan suggested to Leary that he come up with "something snappy" to promote the benefits of LSD.

Quoted: Two years ago, Nouriel Roubini predicted the current economic crisis. Now he sees things becoming far worse.

Quoted: The influence of Surrealism, to which the Czechs responded with alacrity, is evident. Jan Lukas worked Dalíesque wonders with three snail shells and their elongated shadows, and he veers close to abstraction when photographing the underside of a modern staircase.

Quoted: The earliest piece, an expertly finished sandstone stele of the meditating Buddha dated 462 A.D., retains some of the sweet, yielding organicism of contemporaneous Indian art. But within a few decades into the Northern Wei period (386-534 A.D.), this model undergoes alteration. The limbs are stretched, the body flattened, the face squared off, the faint smile replaced, as often as not, by an emphatic grin.

They look like such nice people... includes a slideshow.

Quoted: they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers ...rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

Good source of information on old Nikon/Nikkor camera bodies and lenses.

Quoted: It was in 1507, with the publication of a large cut-out map suitable for creating a do-it-yourself globe, that Vespucci’s first name, if not Vespucci himself, achieved lasting renown. On this map, published in the intellectual backwater of St. Dié in Lorraine, the designation “America” (the feminine of Amerigo) was chosen for the portion of the hemisphere where Vespucci claimed to have landed during his second voyage.