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A half-smoked cigar British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put down before a Cabinet meeting in 1941 is up for auction. Andrew Bullock, from the auction firm Keys in Aylsham in Norfolk, England, said he expects the 4-inch cigar butt to go for about 300 pounds (almost $500), the Daily Mail reported. The auction is scheduled at Keys on Jan. 29. Churchill smoked the cigar at one of the most difficult times in World War II for Britain. British troops were bogged down in North Africa, the Wehrmacht was at the gates of Leningrad in Russia and the United States had...

Britain's special relationship 'just a myth' Toby Harnden in Washington A senior American official has spoken of "the myth of the special relationship" between the United States and Britain, arguing that Tony Blair got "nothing, no payback" for supporting President George W Bush in Iraq. Kendall Myers, a leading State Department adviser, suggested that Mr Blair should have been ditched by Labour but the party had lacked the "courage or audacity" to remove him. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was "shrewd, astute" to have distanced himself from America. In candid comments that will embarrass Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the...

"I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire."--Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1927For the past 6 years, Chris Matthews has hosted a show in which guests gleefully reported the purported success of both indigenous insurgents and foreign al Qaeda fighters in Iraq. On his network, MSNBC, that became the default setting. They were the publicity arm of al Qaeda. Car bombs led the news, successful American battles, infrastructure completion, or the like were not even news. Bagdad Bob had nothing on them. Chris would evoke the worst kind of moral equivalence by constantly posing...

French anti-war campaigners have desecrated a statue of Winston Churchill in central Paris on the anniversary of the city's liberation from Nazi rule. The night time attack saw the bronze hands of the £250,000 statue daubed in red paint. The initials RH were also daubed on the statue, perhaps a reference to Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy, who flew to Britain at the height of the Second World War to allegedly try and make peace. Instead, Churchill had him thrown in prison in 1941, and the war continued for a further four years. After the war, Hess was tried at...

On Sunday, September 3, 1939 - 70 years ago next month - Britain declared war on Germany in fulfilment of its pledge to aid Poland, invaded by the Nazis. 'I know now that it will come to me to deal with Mr Hitler,' Winston Churchill told a cousin a few days earlier. He perceived his own hour of destiny at hand. That same afternoon, he was summoned to Downing Street by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. For most of the decade Churchill had been a scourge of the Tory government. From 'the wilderness' of the Commons back benches, he denounced the...

Winston Churchill, the great and wise British statesman, once stated: If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time -- a tremendous whack. Winston was a whack'em & stack'em kind of guy -- the kind I respect and admire. Everything good in life is a direct result of piledrivers piledriving on. I piledrive at all costs. I am a piledriver. Apparently Barry O does not share my admiration of Mr. Churchill because, after...

Journalism: After the eulogies, the fact remains that "the most trusted man in America" betrayed that trust. He helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam and tried hard to do the same in Iraq.President Obama on Friday praised Walter Cronkite as a journalistic icon, calling the CBS anchor the "voice of certainty in an uncertain world." More to the point, he was the father of advocacy journalism, the patron saint of media bias. He went from reporting news to recreating it in his own image. Far from the image of the patriotic war correspondent, Cronkite was a...

HBO’s Into the Storm, dramatizing Winston Churchill’s leadership during World War II, deserves close study from our statesmen, their spouses, and anyone with questions about the stakes and requirements of warfare. This Churchill, portrayed brilliantly by Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, is an unapologetic conservative, a tenacious dynamo whose rhetoric and resolve protected Britain and the West from submission to tyranny. We pick up Churchill where HBO’s Emmy-winning 2002 film The Gathering Storm left off. Hitler appeaser Neville Chamberlain has been discredited, and Churchill takes over as prime minister. After the successful retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk, France, Churchill...

      May 1, 2009 A Tribute to Margaret Thatcher--30 Years On  by Robin Harris, D. Phil. WebMemo #2419 Thirty years ago, Britain embarked upon a conservative revolution that not only transformed the country but left an indelible and unmistakable impact on the rest of the world. Only two British Prime Ministers--Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher--have by force of personality and power of example done anything like this.In The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote of his initial thoughts after his election as Prime Minister in May 1940: As I went to bed at about 3 a.m., I was...

Last night, Barack Obama said he had recently read an article about Winston Churchill during the London blitz. "Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat," Obama said. "And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country." It was, perhaps, the most powerful anecdote of the night, and an apparently powerful moral condemnation of President Bush, an admitted admirer of Churchill who kept the...

While on the BOAC flight in June 1954 the plane's menu was not good enough for the Prime Minister so he wrote one out himself. He requested his meal be brought on two trays. He lists in his own hand: "1st Tray. Poached egg, Toast, Jam, Butter, Coffee and milk, Jug of cold milk, Cold Chicken or Meat. "2nd Tray. Grapefruit, Sugar Bowl, Glass orange squash (ice), Whisky soda." He then adds: "Wash hands, cigar." At first he had tried to amend the printed menu, but in the end wrote out his own on the other side. With his Foreign...

Economic Fundamentalists by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 16, 2009 A Baptist minister gave a sermon on economics that the ACLU and the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State would surely regard as crossing the theological divide. “During the last two years, some of the most notable commercial reputations have been hopelessly destroyed,” he said. “Men in the great world of trade, who were trusted, around whose characters there hovered no cloud of suspicion, not even the shade of doubt, have proved themselves reckless of honesty and devoid of principle.” “The fiery trial has been too much for...

Eugenics … death of the defenceless The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton By Russell Grigg Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?...

The thrill is back! Chris Matthews got a Churchillian frisson from the Obama speech–even before the president delivered it. During the Hardball pre-game, Matthews declared this to guests Pat Buchanan and Larry O’Donnell: CHRIS MATTHEWS: Here’s the key line, I think, though there will be others. “The day of reckoning has arrived,” this is Senator, this is President Obama. “The day of reckoning has arrived. The time to take charge of our future is here.” This is Churchillian. Buchanan had a telling retort . . . View video.

It is hard to understand this deal,” said Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy. And, if the special envoy of the so-called smartest and most impressive administration in living memory can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have? Nevertheless, let’s try. In the Swat Valley, where a young Winston Churchill once served with the Malakand Field Force battling Muslim insurgents, his successors have concluded the game isn’t worth the candle. In return for a temporary ceasefire, the Pakistani government agreed to let the local franchise of the Taliban impose its industrial strength version of sharia across the...

What do John Lennon and Barack Obama have in common, you may ask? (There isn't enough bandwidth in the Western Hemisphere to sufficiently respond).The answer ... they both rejected Winston Churchill.Lennon did so when he publicly renounced his birth name of John Winston Lennon in favor of John Ono Lennon, although never legally. (His mother named him Winston after being overcome with an irresistible wave of patriotism as the Battle of Britain waged in 1940).Obama rejected Churchill by returning a prized bronze bust of the great statesman and wartime leader (created by Sir Jacob Epstein) that was loaned to...

Gordon Brown invoked the wartime spirit of Winston Churchill yesterday when he made a surprise pre-Christmas trip to the Afghanistan front line just hours after bombs killed four British troops in the area.He was flown to the top of Roshan Tower post, situated in the thick of the Helmand fighting zone – and, in so doing, out-machoed his predecessor Tony Blair, who never left the safety of a fortified British base. (edit)Downing Street aides claimed that no British Prime Minister had been as close to a major front line since Winston Churchill in the Second World War.(edit) But the...

LONDON: It seems that new history has completely forgotten one of Britain's tallest leaders — Winston Churchill. The wartime PM, who led Britain to victory in the World War II, failed to secure a place on the list of the most important people and events in UK history. In fact, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Captain Cook and Sir Walter Raleigh also couldn't get into the "British" list — though the Beatles found a place, the Sun reported. A team of scholars working for the History Channel has compiled the comprehensive list for a television series.

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real. The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth. And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

One in four Britons don't believe wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill existed, according to a recent survey. Churchill is compared to Florence Nightingale and Sir Walter Raleigh, seen by many survey respondents as a mythical person, the London Daily Mail reported Monday. The survey, conducted with 3,000 respondents to test their general knowledge, reported other historical figures such as Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, Cleopatra and the Duke of Wellington were made up for books and films, the Mail reported. The survey, by UKTV Gold, also found that Sherlock Holmes was a real person.