The following was submitted by a What If Diary reader:
Grand re-opening. Did you ever think you would ever see this in your lifetime?

Germany’s biggest synagogue, on Rykestrasse in Berlin, has re-opened after a lavish restoration.

The synagogue was set ablaze on Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass in 1938.

Friday’s inauguration saw rabbis bringing the Torah [...]

Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media.
Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them.
Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.
Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis [...]

Turning points of history throw up intriguing alternatives. How would the world and the US be different if there had been no invasion in 2003?
Tim Watkin
guardian.co.uk
I went to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age at the cinema this week. Gorgeously shot, but the grand, epic feel of the film overwhelms a pretty average script and ponderous [...]

Tom Engelhardt has the cover story in the new issue of The Nation, a reconsideration of the American response to the 9/11 attacks five years after the event. In it, he asks:
What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United 175, had plunged into those north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, [...]

What if Britain Hadn’t Fought in 1939?
It’s interesting to think about the counterfactual of what would have happened in Europe if Britain had decided not to defend Poland. France would probably have followed Britain’s lead, as she did after Munich in 1938. There would have been no need for a Hitler-Stalin Pact, and it wouldn’t [...]