One of my favorite films is ‘The Great Escape” with its spectacular cast and haunting conclusion. If you are unfamiliar with the film, it is based upon a true account concerning a POW camp especially built for Allied officers who were “problematic”; that is, always escaping. The audacity of their escape had wide effects, and is said to have helped with the D-Day landing, considering the escapees tied up a whole lot of soldiers trying to round them up. Tragically, the majority of the escapees were executed upon capture in retaliation.
A largely unknown story is about to be told. It is well chronicled in the book “Colditz” by Henry Chancellor (among other books). The town of Colditz is located approximately 150 km southwest of Berlin. Prisoners, upon arrival, found it confusing. Disembarking from the train, there was no camp. They were marched from the station, through the village, up a hill and right into the courtyard of a large, gloomy castle. They half expected to be executed.
Colditz Castle was built in 1014 and steadily enlarged until about 1694 when it comprised of about 700 rooms. It was used as a hunting lodge at times until 1824 when it was converted to an asylum. In 1933, it was converted into a labor camp for Hitler’s communist enemies.
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There is a new, non-invasive technology being developed which is able to peer into your brain to discover whether you are familiar with a given phrase, sound, or photo. It is being funded by the CIA, and its proponents claim that it offers 99.9% accuracy. The technique is intended to be used in criminal investigations to discover whether a suspect is familiar with a particular person, such as the face of a murder victim; or a location, such as a photo of a crime scene. It could also be used to detect whether a subject recognized specific names, phrases, etc. 
In an operation that lasted several hours, a woman who had lost her nose, lips, and chin in a vicious dog attack has received the world’s first face transplant. The controversial surgery was performed in France, and involved the tissues, muscles, and arteries from a braindead patient’s face. 
Everyone has a secret. Frank Warren has several thousand of them, pasted and scribbled on four-by-six inch postcards, and locked away in stainless steel boxes. They’re not all his secrets, though more than one of his own are among them. They are the responses to the PostSecret invitation… they are the most intimate secrets of thousands of people, which they have never shared with anyone before.
. I procured a copy of this book today, and had a chance to give it a good, hard look. I also recently had the opportunity to converse with Frank Warren, the custodian of these secrets.
An interesting idea in reducing global warming has been suggested by a reader of New Scientist magazine. Mike Follows Willenhall from England points out that if the roofs of all of the buildings on Earth were painted white, the amount of sunlight reflected back into space may be increased, which could reduce global temperatures by an average of 1 degree Celsius. This would almost exactly cancel out the global warming that has taken place since the start of the industrial revolution.
During the 1950s and 1960s, some otherwise freedom-loving governments waged secret wars against suspected homosexuals within their borders. During those years, Canada’s campaign to eliminate all homosexuals from the military, police, and the civil service was particularly broad and unforgiving, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) compiling files on over 9,000 suspected homosexuals. Reports indicate that the RCMP created Security Service subsection A-3 in the 1950s, whose sole purpose was the identification and dismissal of every gay person in public service. 
The US Navy has a nifty oceangoing research ship which performs a controlled capsize in order to perform scientific tests. It’s called the FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), and it was conceived and developed by the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
If you are terrified or even mildly afraid of spiders this story is not going put you at any ease. You have probably heard before that while we sleep bugs or spiders crawl about and often times we ingest these little buggers without having known it. I was once told that we ingest up to 2 lbs of bugs per year through sleep or perhaps just through the allowable FDA limits of bugs we eat or rodent fecal matter, but that is another story all together.