Category Archives: Winston Churchill

Famed Churchill portrait stolen from hotel and replaced with fake

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An employee at the Château Laurier in Ottawa spotted something amiss with ‘Roaring Lion’ portrait by photographer Yousuf Karsh

Police in Canada are investigating the “brazen” heist of a famed Sir Winston Churchill portrait after the original photograph was mysteriously swapped for a fake.

Last week, an employee at the Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa, noticed something amiss with a portrait known as the “Roaring Lion” which was taken after the wartime leader addressed the Canadian parliament in 1941.

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Rightwing protesters clash with police in central London

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Arrests made as ‘guard our monuments’ demonstrators chant ‘Eng-ger-land’ and throw bottles

At least five people have been arrested in clashes between protesters and police in central London at a demonstration against perceived slights to British national heritage.

Scotland Yard said that as of 5pm on Saturday, they had arrested five people for offences including violent disorder, assault on police, possession of an offensive weapon, being drunk and disorderly and possession of class A drugs.

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The ‘United States of Europe’ speech that Winston Churchill so nearly made

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A recently discovered document sheds new light on the wartime leader’s ‘iron curtain’ address

It was a speech that electrified the world, one that coined a phrase that was to characterise the political era that followed the second world war. But its content could have been very different, reveals a document freshly unearthed by a historian researching the life of Winston Churchill.

On 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, before a huge crowd which included the US president, Harry Truman, Britain’s wartime leader issued a famous description of the political division that was opening across Europe between the Soviet-dominated Communist east and the western democracies. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

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Under Boris Johnson, Putin and Trump the world has uncanny parallels to 1945

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Russia on the offensive, Brexit Britain stands alone, and US disdain for European allies recalls its naivety with Stalin

Victory in Europe was made possible by a remarkable military collaboration between the main anti-Axis powers – the US, Russia and Britain. But the three-way relationship, between Franklin D Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, was never easy, and it set a pattern of national rivalry, suspicion, fear and distrust that persists to this day.

A row over a top-secret message, known as SCAF-252, sent to Stalin in late March 1945 by Gen Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, shows how fraught the relationship could be. In it, Eisenhower detailed his plans for the final defeat of Nazi Germany – but omitted to first consult or inform his British allies.

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VE Day: Churchill feared De Gaulle would declare victory early

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War cabinet papers reveal PM’s concern French ally would pre-empt joint announcement

Winston Churchill believed a disgruntled general Charles de Gaulle intended to pre-empt the allies’ announcement of victory in Europe by 24 hours but felt unable to pressure him to change his plans, according to British war cabinet documents released free online by the National Archives during the lockdown.

VE Day will be celebrated for the 75th time on Friday 8 May but Gen Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in north-west Europe, and the Soviet high command had actually received the German surrender in the French city of Reims on 7 May 1945 at 2.41am.

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Among Allentown’s Syrians, mostly shock over Trump missile strike

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Zarour also said Trump's action was "confusing" because of his previous actions cutting off the flow of Syrian refugees to the U.S. "This is patterned behavior", Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, said to BuzzFeed. And not just Christians, Sabbagh added, but nonradicalized Muslims in Syria.

Trump’s shallowness runs deep

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In the 1870s, when Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall controlled New York City, and in the 1950s and 1960s, when Chicago's Democratic machine was especially rampant, there was a phenomenon that can be called immunity through profusion: Fresh scandals arrived with metronomic regularity, so there was no time to concentrate on any of them. The public, bewildered by blitzkriegs of bad behavior, was enervated.