Jewish & World News

Millions of Americans will be honoring the legacy of America’s presidents on Monday—even though a national Presidents Day holiday is pure fiction. The annual event is also pegged to a gigantic motor vehicle sales push in neighborhoods across the country, which is definitely not fictional.

The Algemeiner has learned that the secret Iranian art collection now partially displayed at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art includes up to ten works of Israel’s highest-selling and most iconic artist Yaacov Agam.  In an interview, his son expressed concern over the future of the masterpieces.

The Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne is hosting an exhibition from the USA of photographs and extraordinary stories from the Holocaust and genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Cambodia. The exhibition highlights acts of courage by ordinary heroes who resisted overwhelming tides of prejudice and violence to risk their lives saving others. Using photography and narratives it aims to deepen awareness and understanding of the presence of rescue behaviour during genocides. We believe that visitors will leave with better knowledge of how one person can make a difference in the face of organised violence. An adjunct to the exhibition will be displays of Melbourne-based rescuers from the Holocaust which have been kindly donated by Courage to Care.

How do you really know if the person at the other end of that online profile you’re browsing is genuine or some lying creep? There’s no easy ruleset (there never is), but a new study found there are several fascinating word-watching ways you can better predict whether someone’s telling the truth or just feeding you a line. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cornell University wanted to know if deceptive online dating behavior correlated with what online daters said about themselves. The lack of physical interaction or social cues in an online environment (to say nothing of the abstract nature of text) makes it much easier to be deceptive. So if someone turns out to be a dirty rotten liar, could you figure that out beforehand by simply analyzing their online speech? To determine this, researchers compared the actual age, weight and height of 78 online daters to their online photos and profiles on several dating sites. Among other things, the study found that: On...

In 1938, as the Nazis laid plans to annihilate European Jewry, a few desperate Jews dreamed of escaping to the other side of the world: Alaska. Joachim Hein, from Breslau, Germany, was one of many who wrote to the American Department of Interior for permission to immigrate to the vast northern territory with his wife, Anna, and daughter, Henny. “We shall in no way [be] a burden for the country,” he wrote in a letter now in the National Archives, “because we take our electric machines from here and furnish a manufacture in aprons and linen, like we have had here. But if this business is not agreeable to your Excellency, we are prepared to [do] every work.”

It's true: When you were in kindergarten, you really did learn everything you need to know about life. A new study by Linda Pagani, a professor and researcher at the University of Montreal and CHU Sainte-Justine, found that how attentive children are during kindergarten accurately predicts the development of their future work-oriented skills.

As the world's population continues to grow exponentially this century, Japan 's population will buck the trend and decrease by 30 percent over the next 50 years, Kyodo News reported. A report from the Japanese government's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, released Monday, estimates that the country's population will drop to 86.74 million by 2060, down from more than 127 million in 2010.

Why is the moon sometimes out during the day? Why is the sky blue? Will we ever discover aliens? How much does the Earth weigh? How do airplanes stay up? Those are the five questions kids most often ask their parents, and in that order, according to a new survey conducted in the United Kingdom . Unfortunately, they're tough nuts to crack — probably why kids find them so universally puzzling in the first place. Of the 2,000 parents of children ages 5 to 16 who were surveyed about their kid's queries, two-thirds said they struggled with the questions. One-fifth of the parents admitted that if they don't know an answer, they sometimes make up an explanation or pretend that no one knows.

If you walk away from holiday dinners fuming that conservative Uncle Morton just can't see your point of view, or that liberal Aunt Betty just doesn't get it, a new finding may make it easier to cool your jets. According to the study, conservatives and liberals pay attention to their environments differently, meaning the two sides of the political spectrum quite literally don't see eye-to-eye. Conservatives pay more attention to negative stimuli compared with liberals, the study found.

The Austin based Global Language Monitor has released it’s list of top words for 2011. Some year’s it’s very easy to pick the number one word.  In 2001 “9/11″ dominated the news media and was very quickly adopted into general use. Then there are years with several major events that thrust different words into common use. The Global Language Monitor’s Paul Payack says this year’s top word was a bit of a surprise. The word: “Occupy.”

Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper never showed public signs of a disintegrating relationship, so for many, the couple's announcement that they are separating after 40 years of marriage comes as a surprise.