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?

SIR Jimmy Savile is probably looking down from above thrilled at the blanket coverage his demise has generated. Not even old media-savvy Jim could have imagined that his body would be lying in state, with three days of celebrations to mark his passing.

He would have also been chuffed to bits at news that a statue of him is planned in Scarborough. Hows-about-that-then?

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.