SYDNEY, Australia — As a 21-year-old, Ric Johnstone drove 150 miles daily across the scorching vastness of the Australian outback to work. A motor mechanic in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), he spent 1956 servicing military vehicles in the Great Victorian Desert. He lived with 300 other men in a tent town, eating dinners of bullied beef with the occasional vegetable. Johnstone described his first six months as similar to being a prisoner in a chain gang: “There was no church, no women, no entertainment, nothing.”

LONDON, United Kingdom — The “special relationship” between Britain and the United States has come under scrutiny here recently because of differences of opinion between the allies about a windswept archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean claimed by both Britain and Argentina.