Mashable: Rebuilding Dresden

Over two days and nights in February 1945, American and British bombers dropped 2,400 tons of high explosives and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden.

The barrage turned the cultural jewel of Saxony into a hellish inferno. A firestorm raged across the city, generating hurricane-force winds and temperatures near 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Civilians sheltering in basements suffocated as the city above them was consumed by flame.

When the fires were finally extinguished, an estimated 25,000 people had died and the baroque city center had been reduced to rubble.

A few months later, the war in Europe ended. Under Soviet occupation, the survivors began the daunting task of cleaning and rebuilding their city.

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Vox: Trump says his refugee ban is about protecting America. It's really about Islamophobia.

If you take a close look at Trump’s executive order, you see that it contains a major loophole — an exemption from its ban on refugee entry to the United States for “religious minorities” being persecuted by their governments. Who’s going to qualify for these exemptions? A lot of Christians — according to Trump himself. Here’s what he said in a Friday interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody: [...]

The text of Trump’s executive order never uses the words “Islam” or “Muslim.” Perhaps that’s for legal reasons. But it’s so full of code words that it’s impossible to mistake the intent. [...]

Which “violent ideologies” are those? Surely it’s not white nationalism — the executive order doesn’t ban Scandinavian skinheads from entering the United States. Instead, it bars anyone and everyone from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya, making clear that the theory behind this order is that Muslims, specifically foreign-born Muslims, are seen as an especial kind of threat of violent extremism.

This is a dubious theory. Since 9/11, home-grown white supremacists and similar extremists have killed more Americans in the US than all Islamic extremists, American or non-American, put together. It seems that, if your goal is saving lives and stopping extremism, it makes more sense to look at home than singling out a group of immigrants who come, disproportionately, from one religious group.

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Deutsche Welle: Polish government wins Gdansk World War II museum case

The museum tells the story of World War II by including all the nations involved in the conflict, with a particular focus on civilian suffering instead of military campaigns. Several prominent historians were behind the development of the museum, considered by some as one of the best efforts to explain the global context of the war.

But the PiS has opposed the international angle of the war explained at the museum, preferring instead that it focus on Polish suffering and heroic resistance to Nazi Germany. It is a stance in line with the party's efforts to use the power of the state to develop stronger nationalism and pride.

Shortly after the PiS swept to power in late 2015, Culture Minister Piotr Glinski tried to take over the museum by merging it with the Museum of Westerplatte and the War of 1939, which has not even been built.

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The Telegraph: 'Finding out my priest husband was gay was devastating. It was a death'

13 January 2000 was the date that turned Ruth McElroy's life upside down. On a bleak weekday afternoon her husband of 16 years came home from work to deliver the news that their relationship was not what she had thought. [...]

For many, the new recommendations encourage secrecy, rather than honesty. It's a subject on which Ruth McElroy feels especially strongly, as Larsen's position within the church was another reason he felt compelled to lie to his family for so long.

"No, it isn't right to suppress or ignore it," she says. "It only makes things worse."

The week after Larsen broke the news, McElroy spent three hours a day on the phone to charity Changing Attitude who helped her realise that she didn’t “turn” him gay. Her emotions ranged in the early days and months from seething rage and denial to a profound sadness.

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Quartz: “Mr. President, don’t build this wall”: The Berlin mayor’s powerful message for Donald Trump

In 1987, US president Ronald Reagan famously stood at the Berlin Wall separating the German city—and, symbolically, the world during the Cold War—and spoke to the Soviet Union of peace, prosperity, and liberalization. [...]

Now Berlin’s mayor has invoked that iconic moment in a message for US president Donald Trump, who has vowed to build an expensive wall to keep out immigrants at the US border with its southern neighbor, Mexico. [...]

“Now, in the early years of the 21st century, we cannot let all our historical experience get trashed by the very people to whom we owe much of our freedom: the Americans,” Müller wrote. “I call on the president of the USA not to go down that road to isolation and ostracism. Wherever such divides exist, like in Korea and Cyprus, they cause slavery and pain. I call on the American president: remember your forerunner, Ronald Reagan. Remember his words: ‘Tear down this wall.’ And so I say: ‘Mr. President, don’t build this wall.'”

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