It’s no surprise that a many people that I speak to in our village have never seen a police officer on the streets, so it comes as less of a surprise to know we are one of the areas which is victim to a spate of petty robberies and burglaries.

It has been said that one can measure how civilized a culture is by the way its dead are  treated, which is why I was delighted to read that UNESCO have announced that the uncontrolled plundering and grave robbing of artifacts and personal effects from the wreck of the Titanic is to stop.

Sifting through the archives in this neglected part of local history is a fascinating past time, especially when you can write a headline such as “Hitler was responsible for income tax in Cyprus.” – (well along with a fellow called Sir William Battershill). It is true.

Whilst clearing out my office this week, I stumbled upon an article I wrote a few years ago about the looming prospect of the Second World War coming to Cyprus. With so much interest in that war recently, Ive decided to re-publish it here on my page.

I wrote the story after paying  a visit to Othello’s Tower in Famagusta. That beautiful ancient tower still over looks the once busy port, which now is host to a handful of Turkish ships.

Despite little physical change - infact it remains almost identicial to how it looked in the fisrt half of the 20th century, the Famagusta of 1941 was a very different place.

There is some good news for the many long suffering travelers that have to make frequent visits to Brussels. It’s finally been announced that Cyprus Airways will re-introduce direct flights to Brussels before the island’s EU Presidency in the second half of 2012.

So hopefully the days of hanging around for connections in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Frankfurt and Athens are finally over.  It’s reported that the airline will operate six direct flights a week as from June.

Let’s just hope that when the Presidency is over, the airline can keep at least one or two direct flights, as opposed to scrapping the service altogether as they did last year.

 GOT AN MOT JOHN?

Tonight Professor Emanuel Gutmann, who worked in the British detention camps during the late 1940s will deliver a lecture about this extraordinary period in Cyprus history.

To give you a sense of how these dreadful camps operated, I have taken an article from the Cyprus Mail archives which I wrote back in April of this year.

The story features two remarkable men, one in Larnaca, the other in Famagusta. Both men, who are now in their eighties, worked at the camps.

Between 1946 and 1949, twelve "Jewish internment camps" on the east coast held the equivalent of almost ten per cent of the population of Cyprus at that time.

In this Sunday's Cyprus Mail I'm looking into claims which feature in a new book by academic Susan Williams called “Who Killed Dag Hammarskjöld” which asks intriguing questions about the possibility of foul play being behind the plane crash which killed the former UNSG back in 1961.

NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN pictures of Cyprus are revealed in a new book called "Cyprus Scenes and Way of Life 1954"

The author, British pensioner Richard Chamberlain, discovered a stash of photographs he took whilst serving in the army in Cyprus 57-years-ago. The find is providing a fascinating glimpse of bygone life.

There is increasing speculation as to why the Turkish government has stumped up half a million euros to fix water-pipes in the fenced off city of Varosha, near Famagusta.

But they may find it takes more than pipes and paint to sort the problems of this dilapidated place.