Texting Charitable Contributions to Haiti Overwhelms Telecoms
WSJ : "In a texting donation, a person types a so-called short-code such as 90999 and then types in "HAITI" to donate a preset amount of $10. The cellphone user then gets a text back asking that they confirm the donation. After a confirmation, the person receives a text saying, "Thanks! $10 charged to your phone bill for Red Cross Int'l Relief." But no money moves until a person pays their cellphone bill to cover the pledge. The money then is routed through a carrier that aggregates the donations before dispatching them to one of the foundations. Those then move the money to agencies such as the Red Cross. Meantime, officials warned that hundreds of charities that may not be equipped to help often try to raise money and others are simply fraudulent scams. The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Americans to ignore unsolicited emails and to be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as surviving victims."
• See also Haiti Earthquake: FTC Warns Consumers to Give Wisely

What does mind your p's and q's mean?
Be on your best behaviour; be careful of your language. Or, advice to printer’s apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs. I've never heard any suggestion that printer should mind their ds and bs. Ps and Qs are just the plural of the letters P and Q. There some disagreement amongst grammarians about how to spell Ps and Qs - either upper-case or lower-case and either with or without a hyphen. You may see the phrase as mind your p's and q's or mind your Ps and Qs or (occasionally) mind your P's and Q's or (rarely) as mind your ps and qs. For other meanings, see: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/248000.html

Jazz was illegal in Nazi Germany. Hitler declared jazz to be a "degenerate music" just as he had so famously done to certain Western Classical composers like Mendelssohn and Mahler. Read more at Suite101: Hitler's War on Jazz in France: During WWII Jazz Music Was Banned in Paris by the Nazi Movement http://jazz-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_day_the_music_stopped#ixzz0cijOw56O

Wagner music unofficially banned in Israel since 1938
A week after its musicians voted to perform a special Wagner concert in December 1991, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra said that the program would be postponed until it asks its 36,000 subscribers if they agree with ending a decades-old ban on the 19th-century German composer. Technically, the decision to conduct a referendum means nothing more than a delay, perhaps for a month, Philharmonic officials said. But some musicians and arts writers were convinced that it would be a long time before the taboo is broken, especially since a ranking sponsor of the planned poll says that even if only 20 percent oppose change, they should be considered a sufficiently sizable minority to block a Wagner concert. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/arts/israel-philharmonic-puts-off-wagner-concert.html?pagewanted=1

In 1981, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, offered an encore at the close of a subscription concert. Commotion broke out, with shouts from the audience aiming to silence the music. In introducing the piece from Tristan und Isolde, Mehta had made a short speech in which he spoke of Israel as a democracy in which all music should be played. But, he added, if this particular music offended the feelings of some of the listeners present, they were free to leave. (Two orchestra members had, at their request, been excused from playing the encore). Some older members of the audience quietly got up and went home. A few continued for a while to protest noisily, even running threateningly onto the stage, but the piece was played to the end.
A few years later a survey was conducted on the question - should the Philharmonic play Wagner's music? Of those questioned, 50 percent were against playing Wagner, 25 percent for, and 25 percent had no firm convictions on the subject. In 1992, the Philharmonic conducted its own poll among its subscribers. The majority was in favour, 30 percent were against. In view of the large minority, it was decided to continue to refrain from playing Wagner, at least for the time being. In July 2001, the prestigious Berlin Staatskapelle performed the "Tristan und Isolde" overture at the Israel Festival. While the orchestra's condutor, Daniel Barenboim (himself a Jew), had promised to respect the ban on Wagner's music, he surprised his audience by asking them if they wanted to hear Wagner as an encore following the scheduled performance. Most of the audience was in favor of the encore, which received a standing ovation from all but a few of the listeners. However, during a half-hour debate that preceded the performance of the overture, numerous Israelis protested and walked out of the theater, some shouting insults as they went. The controversy over the foreign orchestra's performance rekindeled the debate over what course the Israeli orchestras should pursue. Yaakov Mishori, a leading Philharmonic musician, feels the orchestra should play Wagner. "After all," he says, "Wagner died 50 years before Hitler came to power. Moreover, he was a kind of private anti-Semite, refusing to sign any public declarations against the Jews." "I am opposed to any ban on culture," says Avi Chanani, director of the classical music division of Israel's state radio . "Zubin Mehta risked playing Wagner in one fell swoop, but I believe in introducing him gradually, and that is what I have been doing. Wagner was a revolutionary in music. His work is central to the development of European music. Without Wagner it is difficult to understand the history of music. That is one important consideration for playing his music. But what I feel is cardinal in my decision to present Wagner on the radio is my belief that in a democracy, the public has a right to know; it must be exposed to all information." http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Wagner.html

American jazz pianist Harry Connick Jr. bumped up against China’s cultural restrictions when he was forced to make last-minute changes to his performance in Shanghai on 8 March 2008. Officials also refused to allow him to perform a revised set list. Players in Connick's band told a reporter from the Shanghaiist that 'government people' showed up an hour before they were to perform in Shanghai. The officials from the Cultural Bureau went to town on their set list, crossing off a number of tunes they disapproved of and replacing them with "safer" tunes. Tunes which the band did not happen to have charts on hand for. Thus explains the extraordinary number of solo piano-with-vocals tunes heard throughout the show.
http://www.freemuse.org/sw29177.asp