Short answers, pulled from the story.
The butcher cover is the original front image for the Beatles' 1966 album Yesterday and Today, depicting the band in white butcher smocks covered with raw meat and dismembered baby doll parts. Capitol Records recalled approximately 750,000 copies on the 10th of June 1966 after disc jockeys and retailers objected to the image; replacing the cover cost $250,000.
British photographer Robert Whitaker photographed the Beatles at his studio at 1 The Vale, off King's Road in Chelsea, on the 25th of March 1966. The image was one panel of a planned conceptual triptych he called A Somnambulant Adventure, intended as a commentary on the band's celebrity.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney insisted the image was the band's statement against the Vietnam War; McCartney described it to Capitol president Alan Livingston as "our comment on the Vietnam war". Some US industry figures interpreted it differently, reading it as a protest against Capitol's practice of altering the band's British albums for the North American market.
Capitol Records assembled its own shorter albums for the North American market by withholding tracks from the Beatles' EMI releases and reconfiguring them into new packages. Yesterday and Today drew from Help!, Rubber Soul, a 1965 double A-side single, and three tracks from the then-unreleased Revolver, which had not yet appeared on any American release.
Values depend on pressing plant, mono or stereo format, and condition. A first state mono copy sold for US$457 at the first documented collector's sale in 1974; by 2006 similar copies were valued around $20,000. In 2016, a mint-condition first state stereo copy in original shrink-wrap sold for $125,000.
Yesterday and Today received its first CD release in 2014, both individually and as part of the Beatles' U.S. Albums box set. The 2014 CD uses the butcher cover image and includes several altered mixes: the mono "Drive My Car" was replaced with the UK mono mix, and the mono "Doctor Robert" omits Lennon's quiet spoken words at the end.