Channel4.com: "Jasper Maskelyne is no longer a household name, but in 1930s' Britain, he was a star magician. When the Second World War broke out, his sleight-of-hand techniques came in useful in the campaign to beat Rommel's German army in north Africa."

Great story I found on metafilter.com. Tom Cruise and Peter Weir worked on a biopic about Maskelyne for a while.

More: maskelynemagic.com

Great collection at Freeinfosociety. Remix a speech by Che Guevara and mash it up with "Hey Companero"!

Forget about "War of the Worlds"! Read this incredible story in "Manitoba History", Number 13 "The idea was to stage a fake Nazi invasion of Manitoba. The “Nazis” were to occupy and administer the province for the rest of the day. The key was realism. One couldn’t ignore these Nazis any more than real ones.
(...)
It was an incredibly realistic invasion, yet, aside from a soldier who sprained his ankle and a Miss Gorin who cut her thumb in her blacked-out apartment, there were no casualties.
(...)
Official 'laughing classes' were to be set up as soon as possible to better instruct the population in German humour. "

Found in "The Ex-Berliner"

A banned cartoon...

Interesting AP-Story at "Wired": " MOSCOW (AP) -- When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.

But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age."
Read on...

Really interesting story: "Boris Kobe (1905 - 1981) – Slovenian architect and painter was a political prisoner at the concentration camp of Allach, a sub-camp of Dachau."

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