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A Cookstown woman who found a WWI medal as she walked to school as a child, is now trying to reunite it with its rightful owner. Gillian Henry was about seven-years-old when she found the award on a pathway alongside the old court house as she made her way to Cookstown Primary School.

Now a mum-of-three, Occupational Therapist Gillian said she had forgotten all about it until her son Shane started on a school project about WWII and found the medal at his Granny’s - Gillian’s mother’s house.

Explaining how she came across the now almost 100-year-old decoration, Gillian said: “It was on the ground, down near enough at the bottom of the avenue. That was year’s ago and I took it home and never looked about it.”

William Sellick pinched the tiny scarlet petals with deft ease, turning them into paper poppies and pressing them into a wreath. The flowers are a potent symbol of remembrance and patriotism that sprang up in the aftermath of World War I to honor the war dead and raise funds for survivors.

Each handmade flower evokes the image of poppies springing up from destruction and decay in Belgium’s Flanders Fields, home to many of the Great War’s bloodiest battlefields. The haunting scene was immortalized in a war poem by Canadian army doctor John McCrae: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row.”

For Sellick, who suffered combat stress after an army tour to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, making poppies is a way to move on from a life shadowed by depression and alcoholism. He doesn’t like to recall his army days, but every November he makes an effort to help plant crosses decorated with poppies outside London’s Westminster Abbey.

WITH the recent Government announcement of the events that are being held in various parts of the UK to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Jutland next year, it is fitting to remember the important part that Plymouth played in the only major clash between the dreadnought fleets of Britain and Imperial Germany in WW1 on May 31 1916 in the grey wastes of the North Sea.

Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the German Navy C in C, knowing that the RN was now too powerful to be defeated, recommended to the Kaiser a return to unrestricted submarine warfare resulting in the once proud High Seas Fleet spending most of the remainder of the war confined to harbour, never again to challenge the might of the Grand Flee

The courage and sacrifice of all those who took part, over 6,000 RN personnel and 14 ships being lost in total, should never be forgotten and it is appropriate that Plymouth's main commemoration will be held at the Naval Memorial on the Hoe.

The Royal British Legion has run many emotive and memorable campaigns to support its annual Poppy Appeal, which marks Remembrance Day. This year it has produced a series of haunting photographs of modern service people, that are also meticulous reconstructions of photographs taken a century ago.

In an accompanying film, Reeves explains he found in the studio archives a series of photographs of First World War servicemen, who had come to have their portraits taken before they went to the front. He set about recreating the same shots, in the same studio, using the same backdrops with modern servicemen and women

The Royal British Legion was founded by veterans of the First World War and the Poppy Appeal is just one of its many activities to support and help veterans, servicemen and women and their families

Sir Edward Grey made an important statement in the House of Commons this afternoon [Sept. 28] on the Balkan situation. He declared, replying to Sir P. Magnus, that Great Britain had no hostility toward the Bulgarian people, but, on the contrary, entertained a feeling of warm sympathy toward their aspirations. If, however, the mobilization in Bulgaria was not for defensive purposes and if Bulgaria assumed an aggressive attitude on the side of the enemy, Great Britain was prepared to give its Balkan friends all the support in its power, in concert with Britain’s Allies.

A World War I cannon was stolen from outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars building in Michigan, and an official is concerned it could be sold for scrap metal.

The vintage piece of military hardware was hauled away earlier this week from outside VFW Post 1137 in Benton Township in southwestern Michigan, The Herald-Palladium of St. Joseph reported (http://bit.ly/1NXqHgd ) Thursday.

The 12- to 14-foot-long cannon has a heavy metal barrel, wooden wheel spokes and sat on a concrete slab. It had been displayed since 1976 at the post. The non-working cannon doesn't have a firing pin.

Belgium on Monday commemorated the heroism of British World War I nurse Edith Cavell a century after she was executed by the German forces that occupied the country.

Germany accused Cavell — the head of a nursing school in Brussels — of helping injured Britons escape, and shot her at dawn on October 12, 1915. Around much of the world she has largely been forgotten, but at the time the allied nations considered her a

Cavell was the head of a nursing school in Brussels when Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. She was sentenced in the very rooms of the Belgian senate where the commemoration took place and which the Germans had occupied during the war.

Scotland is to be the focus of one of the main acts of World War One remembrance in 2016.

The biggest naval forces in the world clashed off the coast of Denmark in 1916 in the Battle of Jutland but it was a battle in which Scotland played a key role.

Two lines of trenches face off across No Man’s Land. A soldier marches, rifle in hand, along a ditch. These are instantly familiar images of World War I - but this is Britain, a century on and an English Channel away from the battlefields of the Western Front.

This overgrown and oddly corrugated patch of heathland on England’s south coast was once a practice battlefield, complete with trenches, weapons and barbed wire. Thousands of troops trained here to take on the German army. After the 1918 victory - which cost 1 million Britons their lives - the site was forgotten, until it was recently rediscovered by a local official with an interest in military history.

Now the trenches are being used to reveal how the Great War transformed Britain - physically as well as socially.

In Rogers City’s Memorial Park cemetery, there’s a new gravestone marking the spot where a World War I veteran was buried nearly 86 years ago.

James Elmer Brenay served as a private in the U.S. Army during World War I, and died at 33 in 1928.

“Every year we’ve been putting up a flag in this little flag holder, and that was the only thing in this whole lot there,” he said. “I got to thinking a few years ago, ‘why are we putting a flag there?’ There had to be a veteran there.”

1. Sanitary towels..

A material called Cellucotton had already been invented before war broke out, by what was then a small US firm - Kimberly-Clark. The company's head of research, Ernst Mahler, and its vice-president, James, C Kimberly, had toured pulp and paper plants in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia in 1914 and spotted a material five times more absorbent than cotton and - when mass-produced - half as expensive.

A backlash to globalization appears to be gaining strength around the world. U.S. politicians on both the right and left have called for curbing free trade deals they say benefit foreigners or the global elite. President-elect Donald Trump has championed tariffs on imports and limits on immigration, and suggested withdrawing from international alliances and trade agreements. Meanwhile, populist and nationalist governments have gained ground in Europe and Asia, and voters in Britain have elected to withdraw from the European Union

To some, it looks ominously like another moment in history — the period leading up to World War I, which marked the end of a multi-decade expansion in global ties that many call the first era of globalization.

the world could see a substantial backsliding to globalization in decades to come. After all, he writes, we have seen it happen before, in the years of chaos and isolationism that encompassed the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression.

The air war's been going on for 14 months but this is the first time news cameras have been allowed into its nerve center.

"The weapon of choice here is information because the more information we have both about the enemy and about our friendlies, the better we're able to make decisions."

From just that one airplane, scheduling-wise, about a three-day process and some of those targets we've looked at for, you know, for days, weeks and sometimes months.

During (and after) World War I, British folklorist Edward Lovett made a point of collecting examples of lucky charms and amulets that soldiers had carried to war.

Lovett was interested in seeing how country folklore lived on in working-class parts of London.

He investigated the use of such charms to cure illnesses, wish ill upon enemies, or attract good luck

Kennard Wiggins Jr. has been retired from the Delaware Air National Guard for 11 years, but he still goes to work every day – by searching through online archives and state libraries and writing books about Delaware’s military history.

In addition, the state’s population grew roughly 10 percent between 1910 and 1920, mostly in the north, according to Wiggins. Wilmington, booming with industry from manufacturers and shipbuilders, had 110,000 people living there – nearly 15 percent more than today’s population.

In one of the strangest consequences of global warming yet, glaciers far north in the Italian Alps are slowly melting to reveal the frozen corpses of soldiers killed during World War I.

They were casualties of the White War, an obscure part of WWI

In May 1915, a newly united Italy decided to join the war on the side of the Allies, opening up a front on the northern border of the country which abutted the enemy Hapsburgs, part of the Central Powers.

erbia’s president has compared European Union demands of the country in exchange for membership of the bloc to an ultimatum the Austro-Hungarian empire presented to Belgrade on the eve of World War One.

Germany has dismissed the accusations as “unfounded” and Western diplomats say little is being asked of Serbia that it has not already signed up to under an EU-brokered accord with Kosovo in 2013 that is slowly being implemented.

Kosovo has been recognized by more than 100 countries, including the major Western powers, but not by Serbia or its big-power ally Russia.

eglected for decades, underground caves in a small village in France's Somme valley contain a treasure trove of hundreds of engravings by World War One Canadian and British soldiers as they sought refuge from German assaults.

ar researchers say the engravings in the chalky rocks of Bouzincourt, which range from inscriptions of a soldier's name to crudely carved flags and hearts, offer a powerful insight into the thoughts of those caught up in the Somme Offensive, one of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century.

"They knew that they may be about to die. We all want to be known, we all want to feel like our lives matter. And so here on these walls we see them writing their last message to all of us, not knowing if anyone would ever see it," Jeffrey Gusky, a U.S. medic who for the past 20 years has gathered images for a photo project called "The Hidden World of WWI",

World War I slaughtered and mutilated soldiers on a scale the world had never seen. It's little wonder that its vast numbers of returning crippled veterans led to major gains in the technology of prosthetic limbs.

Virtually every device produced today to replace lost body function of soldiers returning from our modern wars -- as well as accident victims, or victims of criminal acts, such as the Boston Marathon bombings -- has its roots in the technological advances that emerged from World War I.

Thanks to better surgery, many now survived. On the German side alone, there were 2 million casualties, 64 percent of them with injured limbs. Some 67,000 were amputees. Over 4,000 amputations were performed on U.S. service personnel according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.