Ex-President's foundation threatens legal action to prevent Guernsey firm selling grisly souvenir

Ronald Reagan's foundation expressed outrage yesterday at a British company's auction of what it says is a vial of the late US president's blood taken at the hospital where he was treated after a 1981 assassination attempt.

Out of America: Obama's common-sense hawkishness confounds received wisdom and may win him re-election

Spoiler alert: The Bridge may be a dinner-party talking point, but I'd rather watch the Steps reunion

Individuals and lobby groups linked to the advertising giant WPP have emerged as some of the biggest backers of Jeff Sessions, one of America's most hardline Republican senators.

Barack Obama often gets asked for money, and sometimes he gets his personal chequebook out

In the mid-1980s, Clair George, who has died aged 81, was deputy director of operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, its third-highest position, in charge of covert espionage operations worldwide. George was in one sense an American George Smiley, a professional less concerned with his own advancement than with the success, and the reputation, of the agency he served. But Smiley never found himself brought before congressional committees to testify about his agency's involvement in, or knowledge of, illegal activities run out of the White House. To protect the CIA, George lied about the Iran-Contra operation, and was eventually convicted of two counts of perjury. Though a presidential pardon meant he avoided a jail sentence, by then he had been forced to resign from the agency he had tried to protect.

Obama's Coach Force One joins a tradition of US campaigning

Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary William Hague bask in the sunlight as a new statue of Ronald Reagan is unveiled in London's Grosvenor Square.

US Independence Day was marked in London with the unveiling of a 10ft bronze statue of the late US President, Ronald Reagan, outside the US embassy. To which there is only one rational response: why? At least it was not funded by the British taxpayer. On the other hand, if the project had depended on British money, there might well have been no statue at all. The only home-grown contribution was Westminster Council's decision to waive a rule that requires someone to have been dead for 10 years before qualifying for a public statue. Which prompts thoughts about who might justifiably qualify for such a dispensation. How about Mikhail Gorbachev – the man who really ended the Cold War?

A statue of former US president Ronald Reagan has been unveiled to mark 100 years since his birth.

Musicians like to think they are writing songs for people like themselves, but they can be sorely mistaken, as Tom Petty found when his anthem "American Girl" was blasted out before the right-wing US presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann took the stage. He promptly sent her a "cease and desist" letter.