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From CNN: European universities are facing increased competitive pressure to help students finish their degree programs quickly and find meaningful employment after graduation. In Germany, some universities are charging tuition. French universities are using selective admission policies. Greece may allow private universities into the country.

Will the University of Phoenix expand its European presence? Will European employers allow more employees to earn degrees online or in corporate classrooms?

From Yahoo: The International Tracing Service, which is part of the International Red Cross, maintains an archive of documents related to the Holocaust.

Much of the material is recorded on 16 miles paper, contained in six buildings in Bad Aronson, Germany. Only 2 percent of the material is available to the public. Many of the records were retrieved from German government and military offices after the Nazis surrendered in 1945. Some of the archives include transcripts from Allied interrogations of collaborators and prisoners.

How detailed is this information? An entry about Anne Frank’s deportation from the Netherlands was found in these archives, according to this article in Time.

The service plans to convert some of the documents to digital formats over the next decade.

If you’re interested in the military history of information systems, read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. While IBM’s management has continued to deny Black’s findings, the book presents a wide variety of evidence that IBM information systems and services were used by Nazi Germany to schedule and manage their war effort. The footnotes are compelling reading, and are quite authoritative.

USA: Yahoo! News - Marine Who Vanished in Iraq Heading Home: “‘All thanks and praises are due to God for my safety,’ he said. ‘I am also very thankful for all the kind wishes, support and praise for me and my family from my fellow Marines, all the people in the United States, Lebanon and around the world. ”

Tech: Yahoo! News - DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years: Bill Gates: “Asked what home entertainment would like in the future, Gates said that DVD technology would be ‘obsolete in 10 years at the latest. If you consider that nowadays we have to carry around film and music on little silver discs and stick them in the computer, it’s ridiculous,’ Gates said in comments reproduced in German in the mass-circulation daily Bild. ”

PCWorld.com - MPAA: Movie Piracy Is the New Plague: “According to the survey, 24 percent of respondents reported that they had downloaded a movie online, and 69 percent said that they did not believe that online music piracy was a major concern. The study was performed in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S., and shows a direct correlation between broadband penetration and the incidence of piracy, the researcher says. In Korea, for instance, where broadband penetration is estimated to stand at 98 percent, 58 percent of respondents said that they had downloaded a movie online.”