Financial problems are causing America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, a museum started by a lynching survivor, to close its doors on Friday after 20 years. But the museum’s board chairman, Reggie Jackson, said he was certain that reconfiguring the board, a new fund-raising effort and increasing awareness would allow the museum to open again. “We have every intention of reopening the museum once we get a plan in place,” Mr. Jackson said. The lagging economy, building debt, a revolving door of executive directors over the past eight years and the death of its founder have all contributed to the museum’s state, said Bethany Criss, the museum’s interim executive director. One of the first of its kind in the country, the museum explores the struggles of blacks in America. It was founded in 1988 by James Cameron, above, who, in 1930, survived a lynch mob in Marion, Ind. He died in 2006 at 92

The BBC film, Margaret, is "an intimate portrayal of a woman on the brink of ruin", according to its makers, who liken the story to a Shakespearean tragedy.

Lady Thatcher is shown fighting for her political life as Cabinet colleagues plot her downfall, leading to her resignation as Prime Minister in 1990.

The drama "intimately explores the strengths and tragic flaws of Margaret Thatcher's character that led to her closest political allies turning on her" and promises to reveal a hitherto unseen side of the former Prime Minister. It will be screened on BBC2 this winter...

The widow of German actor Klaus Kinski has launched legal proceedings against a former lunatic asylum in Berlin which released records claiming the famously eccentric performer was a "psychopath".

Minhaoi Loanic, who was Kinski's third wife before he died in 1991 aged 65, has begun the case after the Karl Bonhoeffer Nerve Clinic in Berlin released archive files from 1880 to 1960.

The documents are now part of the Berlin state archives, against which Loanic is also taking legal action.

Historians were expected to examine the files, from a clinic previously known as the State Insane and Idiot Asylum of Dalldorf, for details of Nazi euthanasia policies against the mentally ill.

Instead, it was the September 5th, 1950 file of the man born Klaus Nakschinski which quickly hit the headlines.

Under photographs taken from his particularly tempestuous 1971 one man show, in which he took the part of a ranting, abusive Jesus,...

A pair of 100-year-old Levi's jeans that lay undiscovered in a California goldmine have been put up for sale on eBay.

The trousers are covered in wax drops from a candle carried by their original owner to light the mine but are generally in “excellent condition”, the seller claims.
The vintage blue jeans are size 34 waist and 33 leg, according to the attached "Levi Strauss & Co" label.
The colour has partially faded on the seat and on the front of the legs, causing them to resemble to fashionable “worn” look of many modern jeans.
They were found next to a paper bag bearing the name of a local shop frequented by miners which stopped trading in 1898, the seller claims.

The world-famous terra cotta warriors and horses, which were buried more than 2,200 years ago as the army guarding China's first emperor's afterlife, have come to Beijing for an exhibition ahead of the Olympics.

Set in the Capital Museum, the exhibition,"the memory of China: treasures along its 5,000-year civilization", is open to the public on Tuesday. It will run to October 7.

"It's the best greeting from the ancient country to the modern Olympics," said Yao An, vice president of the Museum. The exhibition was a long-time plan by the Chinese heritage system to welcome the Olympics, said Yao.

Are you ready for this? George W. Bush that drinks and gambles? The first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's W. biopic has just hit and it's not that bad! I'm not sure it will be any good either, but I'm going to leave that judgment up to you. I'm amazed to see that they're showing him in such a revealing light throughout all of this trailer. He looks like a troublemaker and the trailer poses an interesting question - how did he get into the White House?! W. tells the life story of our 43rd President, George W. Bush, and his rise to power and prominence. As everyone already knows, this is a very highly anticipated movie and I hope this teaser lives up to all of the early expectations.

[Click on the SOURCE link to watch the video.]

"I'm back home again," said Maria von Trapp in Salzburg, after spending several nights in her childhood home, which has been transformed into a hotel.

Located in an upmarket district of Salzburg, the "Villa Trapp" once belonged to the von Trapps, who gained global fame in the 1965 blockbuster starring Julie Andrews, which tells the story of a trainee nun who captures the heart of a lonely widower after introducing his seven children to the joy of music.

The hotel is expected to open to guests in October. Fans of the classic musical will have the chance stay in the house the von Trapps lived in between 1923 and 1938 before emigrating to the United States.

[HNN Breaking News Editor Al Magary warns readers not to confuse Julie Andrews's character with the Maria highlighted in this news story: "Julie Andrews Maria was the stepmom (1905-1987), and the Telegraph Maria is Maria Franziska von Trapp (b.1914), one of the...

Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin’s final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Research in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as these, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler’s troops would take Holland six weeks later—was composed during the same months as ‘On the Concept of History’.

Benjamin’s personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed because of the cold.
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under...

A plan by the British Museum to build a £130 million exhibition centre in its northwest corner has provoked anger from heritage groups that claim it will destroy some of the 19th-century building’s most beautiful period details and vistas.

The ambitious scheme for the rear of the building in Bloomsbury, Central London, would provide 17,000 square metres (183,000 sq ft) for shows and conservation.

The museum has become the country’s most popular cultural attraction drawing more than six million visitors last year. It claims that with more space it could have accommodated “many times” more than the 160,000 paying visitors who enjoyed its recent Michelangelo exhibition.

It has commissioned Lord Rogers of Riverside to design a series of pavilions to replace the British Library’s former offices in Montague Place, but heritage groups say that the modern design will have a detrimental impact on Robert Smirke’s original building as well as its views over...