An important portrait of UK prime minister Winston Churchill painted to celebrate the Allied Victory in 1945 is to be sold.
The portrait conveys the pugnacious spirit of the wartime leader and was originally commissioned by Odhams Press for the “Victory Book”, which was published in 1946.
The picture, which was painted from life, shows Churchill in typical stance and attire wearing a polka dot bow tie standing in the Cabinet Room.
He stares with steely determination at the viewer with his hand placed firmly on a map of Europe underlining Allied supremacy and victory in Europe following the D-Day Landings in France in 1944. (AP)
Gay man stoned to death
A man has been stoned to death in Somalia for a homosexual sex act.
Militant al-Shabab fighters buried a blindfolded man to his waist and threw stones at him until he died, according to resident, Yusuf Abdi.
An al-Shabab official said one of its judges sentenced the man to death because he forced a 13-year-old boy to have sex with him. Sheikh Ibrahim Ali, a Somali religious leader in Mogadishu, said homosexuality is controversial inside Islam.
One strict reading of Islamic law, he said, is that a married man who engages in a homosexual act should be killed.
Al-Shabab enforces a conservative brand of Islam in areas it controls. (AP)
Bears ‘under the weather’
One of the most southerly populations of polar bears are being hit by a warming climate that is reducing the time they can hunt on sea ice, research suggests.
The polar bears of Hudson Bay, Canada, migrate on to land in the summer when the sea ice melts, relying on fat reserves to survive until the sea refreezes in late November or early December.
During the winter and spring months they use the sea ice to hunt their prey of seals. But the bears were coming to land earlier and leaving later in recent years as a result of climate change that was reducing the ice, researchers said.
Longer stretches without food were hitting the predators’ health, breeding success and population as for polar bears, “it’s survival of the fattest”. (AP)