Forged letter that sealed two schoolboys’ death sentences

The British Merchant Navy freighter Fiscus, 4,815 tonnes and built by W. H. Seager & Co. loaded a cargo of steel ingots, lumber and a deck cargo of crated aircraft parts in Canada and sailed from Three Rivers to Sydney, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. There she joined up with the 35 ships making up Convoy SC-7, which left Sydney, Canada on October 5, 1940.

Political heads in the gutters of corruption

We’re all in this together? Well, not quite. German MP Nikolas Löbel, a member of Angela Merkel’s CDU party, will quit parliament and not seek re-election. British MPs will be smirking as ‘the house’ in Pigminster voted to make corruption legal whilst outlawing principles and honesty.

The Death Experience

Death and Transfiguration is neither poem nor soliloquy. The hour of midnight had long struck when my thoughts asked the question, what is it like to die? I was alone, the background to my whimsical notions was Richard Strauss’s musical-poem, “Death and Transfiguration”.

Maslenitsa: Slavic ‘Spring Festival’

Maslenitsa (Belarusian: Масленіца, Russian: Мaсленица, Rusyn: Fašengy, Ukrainian: Масниця, ; also known as Butter Lady, Butter Week, Crepe week, or Cheesefare Week) is an Eastern Slavic religious and folk holiday, which has retained a number of elements of Slavic mythology in its ritual, celebrated during the last week before Great Lent, that is, the eighth week before Eastern Orthodox Pascha (Easter).

Meet France’s Mister Nasty

Roger Faulques was born in France on 14 December 1924, and he joined the French Resistance in 1944 during World War II. He served in the French 1st Army as a corporal, fighting in the last battles of the war and received the Croix de Guerre medal.