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Seventy years ago today 300 German bombers attacked London, killing over 400 people and leaving 1,600 badly injured – nearly all of these were ordinary civilians either in their homes or at their work.

When President Barack Obama addresses the nation on Iraq tonight, his Oval Office setting will be sporting a brand new look. While the president and his family were away on vacation in Martha's Vineyard, workers installed new wallpaper, a new rug, new chairs, lamps and a coffee table. The famous bust of Winston Churchill has been removed and replaced with one of civil rights hero Martin Luther King. Officials allowed photographers their first look hours before Mr Obama was due to make a speech today. The rug - a honey-coloured carpet with the the presidential seal - has a border...

Under a slate grey sky, the words of Winston Churchill rang defiantly around Westminster: 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' It may be 70 years old, but the resounding call to arms during the Battle of Britain still stiffened the sinew bringing pride and not a few tears yesterday. Churchill's famous address was delivered by actor Robert Hardy at 3.52pm  -  exactly the time they were originally spoken in Parliament by the wartime Prime Minister on August 20, 1940.   Former fighter pilots, Churchill's daughter Lady Soames and...

JERUSALEM — Two photographs adorn the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist. One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism's founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national...

Broadcast to the United States from London Before the House of Commons summer recess, Churchill makes one final effort to arouse the Great Republic, his term of endearment for the United States, from its reveries, barely four weeks before the outbreak of war in Europe. Holiday time, ladies and gentlemen! Holiday time, my friends across the Atlantic! Holiday time, when the summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too brief spell from the offices and mills and stiff routine of daily life and breadwinning, and sends them to seek if not rest at least change in new...

So, not much text necessary... enjoy, think, and remember!

Amidst a haystack of words on the parlous state of the British economy, the Queen’s speech at the State Opening of Parliament contained the following needle of intent: “My Government looks forward to an enhanced partnership with India.” The Times took up the theme with a substantial report entitled “Hague heads east for new ‘special relationship’.” It told of the Foreign Secretary’s planned sojourn to India sometime this summer as “Britain’s new Government tries to turn cultural and trade ties with the emerging superpower into a ‘genuinely special relationship’.” The Foreign Secretary’s aides later confirmed that the country was considered...

Not Quite Churchillian By Marc Thiessen June 18, 2010, 11:36 am This week, President Obama delivered what has been declared by commentators on the left and right one of the worst Oval Office addresses in presidential history. How ironic that Obama’s worst rhetorical hour came in the very same week we celebrate the 70th anniversary of perhaps the greatest speech ever delivered in the English language: Winston Churchill’s “Finest Hour” address. Seven decades ago today, on June 18, 1940, Churchill rallied Britain and the world to fight on in a battle he declared would determine “the survival of Christian civilization.”...

My parents listened to that broadcast sitting in their home in London. They never forgot it for the rest of their lives. Suddenly, they recalled, years later, Churchill’s stirring rhetoric at a time when things seemed totally lost, gave people a new sense of confidence – a feeling that, at last, after decades of weakness, the nation and its leader were at one with each other.

A photograph of Winston Churchill giving his victory salute has been airbrushed to remove his signature cigar. In the well-known original image, Churchill makes a "V" shaped symbol with his fingers – while gripping a cigar in the corner of his mouth. But in a reproduction of the picture, hanging over the main entrance to a London museum celebrating the wartime leader, he has been made into a non-smoker through the use of image-altering techniques. It is unclear who is responsible for doctoring the photograph, with the museum – The Winston Churchill's Britain at War Experience – claiming not to...

Its been said that life often imitates art. However, I never imagined that the satirical airbrushing campaign undertaken by the rabid anti-smoking lobby at the end of “Thank You For Smoking” would ever actually be replicated in real life. Apparently, as the Daily Mail reports, I was wrong (h/t Adam S Baldwin): It seems the man who steered Britain through the most dangerous period of its recent history may have fallen victim to the modern curse of political correctness. (pictures within link)

Shortly after his inauguration in January 2009, President Barack Obama removed the bronze bust of Winston Churchill that had been displayed in the Oval Office as a post-9/11 commemoration from Great Britain. Was that just a décor makeover or was it symbolic of unease with what Churchill stood for — the rejection of Neville Chamberlain's peace at any price and the courage to do what it takes to defeat evil? A fourth round of sanctions were imposed on Iran last week. Yet the times continue to have similarities to the late 1930s, when weakness and disunity among allied powers enabled...

This Sunday past was the anniversary of D-Day, an event so important to recall. If many do not recall (including our President from whom no statement can be found at this time of writing), it is because our culture and its leaders have failed to truly learn. They have failed to broadly inculcate the lessons of that great global conflict -- one that led to such massive death and culminated in such compelling victory over tyrannical evil.

Would anyone be expected to pay $3,111 for a Havana cigar in a box simply labeled "Hotel de Paris"? Well, someone did just that today, because it wasn't just any old cigar -- it was one that belonged to Winston Churchill that he never got around to smoking. Initial estimates for the Cuban cigar by Camacho ranged from $1,500 to $2,200, according to the Christie's London auction company.

Having read Churchill’s The Gathering Storm for the third or fourth time, it strikes me as frighteningly inauspicious, and not only for the United States today. Churchill was a leading proponent of stopping Hitler before stopping him would involve the massive devastation inflicted on much of the world when World War II eventually came. He noted: We must regard as deeply blameworthy before history … [all British parties] during this fatal period. Delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the State, genuine love of peace and...

He was a brilliant but flawed man. He spent most of his political career as a bomb-thrower in the lower House. He was despised by his party's establishment. After a debacle, he fell into disfavor with the public. He was discounted as a politician and stayed so for many years. Then came a crisis, which he had warned was coming and which the nation's leadership bungled grossly. He became his nation's leader not because he was loved, but because he was right and had the pluck to carry the fight.  He was Winston Churchill.  Churchill's time came. Could Newt Gingrich's...

(edit) As part of the survey, carried out to mark this week's 70th anniversary of Churchill taking over as prime minister, more than 1,136 people were asked to identify three prominent 20th century PMs including Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. One in five (19 per cent) adults failed to name Churchill, with the figure rising to 32 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds and 44 per cent of those aged 16 to 24. Following the pattern, researchers projected the rough date when the leaders would no longer be recognised, with Churchill's demise predicted in 80 years' time.They said the...

A STRUGGLING health authority shelled out £10,000 on a survey asking staff if they thought HITLER was COOL. The bizarre questionnaire also asked NHS workers to compare the Nazi dictator to their OWN chief executive. Staff were asked to rate the "coolness" of other leaders including Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Winston Churchill and England manager Fabio Cappello. The survey — called Making Leadership Cool — was rubber-stamped by NHS West Midlands Strategic Health Authority. Health chiefs forked out £10,000 to fund the project after two paramedics applied for a bursary to carry out the survey. It was circulated to all...

Bill Ayers and a University of Wyoming student filed suit against UW on Thursday, asking a federal judge for an injunction allowing Ayers to speak on campus later this month. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cheyenne, comes three days after UW banned Ayers, a University of Illinois-Chicago education professor with a radical past, from using any university venue for a planned April 28 lecture. The lawsuit alleges the ban is unconstitutional under First Amendment rights to free speech and to assemble. In 1969, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a Marxist-Leninist anti-war group that claimed responsibility for a...

Of Winston Churchill, Paul Johnson writes that his “orations, in print, usually carry all the resonance of his voice with them: they are magnificent prose, too.” One can reverse the point and apply it to Paul Johnson. His writings are like his speaking; he reads his lectures from a text, but with animation. He holds the podium to give him four points of anchor—feet and hands. He sways back and forth. He comes up on his toes. His voice rises and grows from the strength of his chest, eyes twinkling, body and voice keeping time together. It is like hearing...