Hanukkah dinner in Odessa, bathers in the Baltic Sea, a tailor in front of his shop in Serbia - just some of the 25,000 images of pre-war Jewish life garnered from the private collections of survivors for a new exhibition.

With the number of those who lived through the Holocaust fast dwindling, researchers scoured cities across Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Baltic states, to glean as much as they could about the lives of Jewish families in the years before World War II.

The resulting collection of stories and around 300 photographs - selected from the thousands that were copied and preserved - is now on display in the northern Austrian city of Linz, where Hitler also attended school.

Since 2000, experts from Serotta's Vienna-based organisation Centropa have interviewed 1,350 elderly Jews living in 15 different European countries and copied around 25,000 old photographs.

The nation fell silent at 11am today as the passing of the First World War generation was marked at a moving Westminster Abbey memorial service for Armistice Day.

The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, senior politicians and the heads of the Armed Forces gathered for the ceremony in central London.

The Very Rev Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster, opened the service by recalling the moment exactly 91 years ago when the guns fell silent in Europe.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood gunman, had been in recent contact with a radical imam said to have been a "spiritual adviser" to two of the September 11 hijackers.

The communications, believed to be emails, between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, who is in Yemen, were sent over the last two years and had been intercepted by US intelligence agencies.

They were investigated but it was decided that they did not require following up. The disclosure will open US authorities to criticism that they failed to recognise warning signs about Hasan, and fuel fears that he was in contact with other extremists abroad prior to the shootings.

Later this month Egyptian archaeologists will travel to the Louvre Museum in Paris to collect five ancient fresco fragments stolen from a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in the 1980s, but there are many other "stolen" antiquities which they also want back, reports the BBC's Yolande Knell in Cairo.

Thousands of artefacts were spirited out of Egypt during the period of colonial rule and afterwards by archaeologists, adventurers and thieves.

According to a 1972 United Nations agreement, artefacts are the property of their country of origin and pieces smuggled out must be returned.

Egypt also pursues items taken before that time if it has evidence of illegal practices. However, the process of determining whether an item has ever been stolen can be laborious and complicated.

A red granite fragment returned last month was an exceptional case.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the piece from an antiques collector in New York so that it could be returned to a shrine in the Ptah temple at Karnak, near Luxor.

Researchers have discovered a fossil skeleton that appears to link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods.

This could help to bridge an evolutionary gap between the two-legged common ancestors of dinosaurs and the four-legged giants, such as diplodocus.

The remarkably complete skeleton shows that the creature was bipedal but occasionally walked on all four legs.

The team reports its discovery in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

A Jacobean manuscript of a play which was to have been performed for James I and was later found in a trunk at a castle has sold at auction for £84,000.

The heavily crossed out draft for The Amazon was discovered in an attic at Powis Castle in Welshpool, Powys.

The hitherto unknown play by Lord Edward Herbert of Chirbury had been valued at £90,000 by Bonhams in London.

It is believed the play was to have been performed before the king and his court in 1618, but it was cancelled.

Three Czech soldiers who served as part of the Nato force in Afghanistan have been suspended for wearing Nazi symbols, Czech defence officials say.

Two are said to have adorned their helmets with symbols of SS divisions while serving in eastern Afghanistan.

Czech Defence Minister Martin Bartak said their behaviour was "unacceptable" and suspended them immediately.

MOSCOW — What’s powering your home appliances?

For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.

“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.

But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.

Already nervous about a supply gap, utilities operating America’s 104 nuclear reactors are paying as much attention to President Obama’s efforts to conclude a new arms treaty as the Nobel Peace Prize committee did.

In the last two decades, nuclear disarmament has become an integral part of the electricity industry, little known to most Americans.

EDINBURGH — Come April a small team of experts from the Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.

Aside from the wee bit of Scottish blood in three of the four enshrined presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man out, in case you’re wondering), there is of course nothing whatsoever Scottish about this most all-American of sites. But cultural expertise transcends national borders. The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days setting up and moving around their various scanners to capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies, collecting billions of bits of digital information, which will then be brought back here, to be crunched and sorted out by computer.

What results should be the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accuratethan the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter...

... The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland, which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser team’s work.

It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. The bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it.

No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary. “Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001...

In 1997, Congress passed a budget law that mandated tough curbs on Medicare spending, setting up formulas to reduce doctor payments if broad spending targets were exceeded. But when the formula began taking a serious bite out of doctor reimbursements in 2002, Congress acted to reverse the cuts -- a step it has repeated five times since then.

That history shows why some critics believe billions of dollars in budget savings Congress is promising through its health-care overhaul might never materialize.

Under both Democrats and Republicans, Congress repeatedly has waived curbs it has tried to place on spending. It has given back other savings from the 1997 law to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and other providers, most notably in 1999. More recently, Congress has twice switched off a cost-saving trigger that was contained in a 2003 bill establishing a Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Congress also frequently has waived budget resolution limits, as well as pay-as-you-go rules requiring offsets for tax cuts and entitlement spending.

The House bill passed last weekend trims government spending in several areas by more than $400 billion, through a combination of cuts falling largely on pharmaceutical makers, private health insurance companies and hospitals.

"Congress is notorious for passing Medicare savings, and then after the cuts take place and the political groups get activated, we restore all the money," said Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). "The [new] cuts will never take place. ...In the next few years, they'll all be given back" with some exceptions.

Germans from both sides of the former Berlin Wall celebrated on Monday, 20 years after the Iron Curtain fell, sending East Germans flooding west and setting in motion events that soon led to the country's reunification.

Chancellor Angela Merkel — reunited Germany's first leader to grow up in the communist east — started the day with President Horst Koehler and other leaders at a prayer service at a former East Berlin church that was a rallying point for opposition activists in 1989.

Memorials also were planned to the 136 people killed trying to cross the border. Candles were lit and 1,000 towering plastic foam dominoes placed along the wall's route to be tipped over.

Also expected in Berlin for the ceremonies were the leaders of all 27 European Union countries and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.