Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Britannica contributor Mairead Maguire is one of five Irish activists onboard the MV Rachel Corrie en route to Gaza to deliver aid. They expect their ship to be boarded by Israeli forces.

This action follows on the heels of the deadly shoot out over the weekend, involving Israeli commandos, on another aid ship, during which nine people were killed.

Civil rights lawyer Michael Mansfield told the BBC he is concerned, both for Ms. Maguire’s safety and the safety of all of those on board the Irish vessel.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker has been earning praise, not least from GIs serving in Iraq, for its depiction of the terrors of war. Scarcely had World War II ended when William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives appeared, similarly earning applause for its portrayal of the difficulties three veterans face in returning home to the lives they once lived.

Here’s the trailer. Step inside for a delightfully off-kilter speech by one of them, a banker played by Fredric March.

You liked Up for its aeronautic qualities, didn’t you? Then have a look straightaway at the very first film ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, Wings, which did so way back in 1928.

Few films were as emblematic of their time as was Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 romp Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, a mouthful of a title and a scathing satirical blast of a movie.

Two honorable mentions today (CLICK BELOW for these clips): War Games and The Day After.

The boffo box-office-busting opening of the end-of-the-world spectacular 2012 (trailer shown here) suggests two things: first, discerning viewers love John Cusack, and second, in this time of grinding hardship and overall slide into decadence, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good cinematic exercise in apocalyptic visions.

With this in mind, the Britannica Blog’s own Gregory McNamee will offer up his Top 10 list of apocalyptic films over the next couple of weeks.

Your comments on these films, and related flicks, are welcome.

Happy apocalypticizing!

He called himself an “amateur barbarian,” but his comrades in arms called him “that devil Burton” and much worse.

None of the epithets mattered much to their subject, for Richard Francis Burton, a junior officer in the Indian Army, had no time for petty indignations.

He was too busy playing out the life of a hero in what Rudyard Kipling called “the Great Game,” conquering the world on England’s behalf—and doing very much more besides.

Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now celebrates its 30th birthday tomorrow, August 15.

It channels Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by way of the Mekong Delta, but also makes use of another classic book: Michael Herr’s Dispatches, first published in 1977.

D-Day is fast receding into memory.

My local paper no longer mentions it as anything special, except on occasion when a veteran is eulogized in the obituaries. Those who were there on the Normandy beaches are fast disappearing; too many of their descendants, it seems, cannot much be bothered to care about what happens to the memory of what they did.

Giving the D-Day Memorial a fighting chance, short of resources though the National Park system may now be, seems a modest effort to correct all that.

The Chinese Navy had its coming-out party on April 23, with a parade of modern warships and aircraft in Qingdao.

From news reports, it sounds like a combination of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet — the display of a new power’s benign arrival on the world scene — and the Kaiser’s more belligerent naval shows in the runup to World War I.

Many of China’s neighbors are seeing the latter.

What about the U.S.?

On April 20, 1769, Pontiac went hunting in the low forest along the Mississippi River near the village of Cahokia, Illinois, near present-day St. Louis. A Peoria Indian followed and murdered him. We do not know the killer’s name or his motive; some historians have suggested mere robbery, others revenge for a long-ago insult, others a conspiracy on the part of the British to assassinate a man who was still a potential threat to royal authority.

The whites who streamed into what has been called the Old Northwest after the American Revolution commemorated Pontiac by naming a Michigan settlement, now a major city, after him. Generations later, an automobile made in that state would bear his name as well.

The man who lived and died resisting foreign invasion would doubtless have refused such honors.