Yesterday morning November 28th at Spink in London, a crowded auction room saw Russian lots sell for enormous prices. Amongst the highlights were the honours and awards bestowed upon General Thiébault Charles Maurice Janin (1862-1946), Commanding Officer of the Czech Legion, and one of the three most senior Allied Officers during the Allied Intervention in Russia, 1918-20.

A Parisian by birth, he was a controversial figure prominent in the Russian Imperial Court of Tsar Nicholas II during a period of high intrigue. After the infamous murder of the Russian Imperial Family it is reported by several contemporary sources, including Pierre Gilliard, the French tutor of the Tsar’s children (1905-18), that Janin carried out of Russia the human remains and effects of the Imperial Family on a high speed train from under the clutches of the Bolshevik agents charged with retrieving the damning evidence.

The collection was made up of 18 lots that sold for a total of £293,418. The top selling lot was the extremely rare Order of the White Eagle with swords, which sold for £161,100 to an anonymous phone bidder- a new world record price for this order at auction. There were ten phone bidders competing for the medals and awards of General Janin, making the sale a truly global event. (more…)

NGC has just certified a gold medal flown aboard the Apollo 16 moon mission. This Robbins Medal is pedigreed to Apollo 16 lunar module pilot, Charles M. Duke, Jr., the tenth man to have walked on the moon. While a number of medals have been flown on space missions, this is one of only two Apollo 16 gold medals, documented thus far, to have gone in the lunar module to the moon’s surface. It has been graded MS 65 by NGC.

The Robbins Company privately struck medals as mementos for the astronauts to take aboard their missions into space and they were not originally intended for a wider audience. Robbins began this medal series, often simply referred to as “Robbins Space Medals” in 1968 to commemorate Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission. Since then, they have been issued for all manned space missions without interruption. The medals have been struck for all Apollo, Skylab, Soyuz, Space Shuttle, International Space Station stints and long duration space stays. Most were struck in high relief, and depict the mission emblem and crew member names on the obverse and launch, landed and return dates on the reverse. Read Full Story

MELVILLE, N.Y. — Newsday’s newsroom got an interesting tip last week: Its three gold medals for public service journalism had been listed on eBay and sold at a California auction for a total of $15,500.

The online listing had photographs of three gold medals that certainly looked like the ones won by the paper in 1954, 1970 and 1974, along with an extensive description of the medals as “three fabulously rare and never before offered gold Pulitzer Prize medals,” obtained “through an unlikely confluence of events” originating with a 2001 estate sale on Long Island.

This jolted Newsday officials and staff members. Their medals, they believed, had long been locked away in a safe at the paper’s headquarters (the medals mounted on a plaque in the executive offices were reproductions)……. Read Full Story

The Dalai Lama was on Capitol Hill to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour in the United States. The decision to present the award infuriated China’s Communist leaders, who on Wednesday said they were insulted by American “interference” in the country’s internal affairs.

Congress was honouring the Dalai Lama because of his importance as a religious figure, and in recognition of his efforts toward peace, nonviolence, human rights and religious understanding and tolerance.

The Congressional Gold Medal was designed and struck by the Mint and was presented by Bush to the Dalai Lama in the Capitol Rotunda. The U.S. Mint is now offering bronze replicas of that medal to the general public.

The front of the medal, designed by Mint sculptor-engraver Don Everhart, includes a portrait of the Dalai Lama with the Himalayas in the background. The inscriptions are “14th Dalai Lama of Tibet,” “enzin Gyatso,” which is his birth name, “Act of Congress” and “2006.”

The reverse, designed by Joseph Menna, a Mint medallic sculptor, shows a stylized lotus flower, a symbol of purity, and a quotation from the Dalai Lama: “World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not the absence of violence. Peace is the manifestation of human compassion.”

Three-inch bronze reproductions of the medal went on sale Wednesday at $38. The shipping and handling fee is $4.95 per order. Presentation cases are available. For information, go to www.usmint.gov or call (800) 872-6468.