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BBC News
4 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Londonderry: Police say union flag theft was sectarian hate crime
An investigation is underway into the theft of a union flag which was being flown at a civil service building in Londonderry to mark Queen Camilla's News NI understands an Irish tricolour was erected in its Department for Communities said it was aware of the "unauthorised" removal of the union flag from its offices in Lisahally on 17 Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said it was being treated as a "sectarian hate crime". Under legislation, the union flag is flown from government buildings in Northern Ireland on designated days each was being flown from the civil service building at Lisahally to mark the 78th birthday of Queen Camilla on 17 department did not confirm that the Irish flag was erected on the flagpole. But BBC News NI has spoken to workers who say this was the PSNI said the theft of the union flag was reported to them last Thursday afternoon and they have appealed for anyone with information to come forward. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) described the removal of the union flag and its replacement with the Irish tricolour as "an idiotic act"."Such silly attention-seeking behaviour is disrespectful and totally unacceptable," Foyle MLA Gary Middleton said. "Those involved should be dealt with by the law."Ulster Unionist councillor Darren Guy said those responsible were fuelled by "hate and sectarianism"."Over the past few weeks, we have had acts of theft and vandalism occur throughout the city and district," he said."Soldier statues beheaded at a memorial in Artigarvan; a historical US flag stolen from Foyle College; poppy wreaths had to be removed immediately after being laid in remembrance of the Battle of the Somme - the one left was stolen that night and countless attacks on Protestant homes in The Fountain [a mainly unionist estate]."Guy criticised the SDLP and Sinn Féin over their response to similar incidents."Yet, these actions fuelled by hate and sectarianism continue, unchallenged, from their own elected representatives," he said."If this is acceptable now, then it's not surprising that unionists will never want to be part of the pipe dream that is a united Ireland."But the criticism was rejected by Sinn Féin and the Féin said it had been "unequivocal, consistent and vocal" in asserting that all cultures must be respected."All and every incident of hate crime must be called out," a spokesperson said."In stark contrast we have seen the selective approach and double standards of unionist politicians in response to illegal bonfires and hate crimes." SDLP MLA Mark H Durkan said the incidents were damaging community relations."The SDLP has always called urged tolerance around these issues and condemn those who engage in any attacks, sectarianism or intimidation," he said."I would urge anyone involved in this kind of activity to stop, they are achieving nothing but hurting their own city."
Edinburgh Reporter
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Harry Lauder back in Portobello
Portobello's most famous son, Sir Harry Lauder, will be celebrated as Scottish Opera's acclaimed one-man show Lauder is performed at the seaside suburb's Town Hall on 4 and 5 August. Born just a stone's throw from the venue – a plaque marks the cottage at 3 Bridge Street – Lauder's Porty legacy remains strong and is commemorated with a memorial garden at the Town Hall and the local ring-road is named after the international performer. Tenor and broadcaster Jamie MacDougall is reviving the much loved show – written by another legendary Scottish artist, Jimmy Logan – with performances in London, Derbyshire and Portobello, and proceeds will go to the Erskine Veterans Charity, for which MacDougall is an ambassador. Lauder was much affected by the death of his son, Captain John Lauder, at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and raised huge sums of money for injured servicemen, donating his musical royalties to Erskine. Famously performing in full Highland regalia – kilt, sporran, Tam o' Shanter, and walking stick – Lauder's global influence led Winston Churchill to call him 'Scotland's greatest ever ambassador', and acknowledged the comfort his songs provided during WW2. Jamie MacDougall said: 'I was 10 when I was taken twice to see Jimmy Logan in Lauder at the King's Theatre Glasgow. That was the start of my life-long association with these wonderful songs and Sir Harry, an entertainer who was the first truly global star. I am honoured to be an Ambassador for Erskine, and hope audiences can come along to see this special show and raise money for an incredible charity.' Adapted by MacDougall and director Kally LloydJones from the original script by Jimmy Logan, it features well-known songs such as 'I Love a Lassie', composed for the 1905 Glasgow pantomime Aladdin, and 'Roamin' in the Gloamin'' and 'End of the Road'. The performance also includes footage of Lauder's funeral and trenchera visuals, transporting audience members through his life. Like this: Like Related
Daily Mail
16-07-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
Long lost WWI sketchbook reveals Tommy's view of life in the trenches in the year of the Battle of the Somme
A fascinating sketchbook from a Tommy in the trenches has been discovered in a storage locker 109 years later. Lieutenant Frederick Holmes was a Chelsea tailor and an accomplished artist before the start of the First World War. He was sent to the Western Front in 1916 - the year of the bloody Battle of the Somme - and fought with the London Regiment. During his time there he produced 45 colour sketches depicting wartime views including life in the trenches and the French countryside. There is a poignant image of a lone soldier sitting at the end of a trench with his bayonet staring into the distance. Another is of a collection of rifle grenades stood upright and primed for action while a third is a harrowing view of a smouldering battlefield. Away from the front Lieutenant Holmes also captured views of the French countryside. There is one picture of a church at Auxi-le-Chateau which had so far escaped battle damage and a row of barren trees. On a break from fighting, Lieutenant Holmes brought his sketchbook with him to the idyllic St Cecile beach on the north French coast and did some drawings there. The tranquil setting would have been a stark contrast to the bloodshed he witnessed on the battlegrounds of north west France. The sketchbook was recently unearthed by the vendor who was going through a storage locker in Devon. Its previous provenance is a mystery but the auctioneers hailed it as a 'rare and evocative discovery'. The sketchbook has emerged for sale for £1,200 at Rendells Auctioneers, of Newton Abbot, Devon. Dave Marochan, specialist at Rendells Auctioneers, said: 'The vendor was at a storage locker sale in Devon and spotted the sketchbook which caught her interest. 'We sadly don't know how it ended up there in the first place but it is really is a fabulous thing. 'There are 45, mostly colour, sketches which are of high quality and Lieutenant Holmes clearly had a very good eye. 'We believe that he worked as a tailor in Chelsea which helped him with the lines. 'There are some very evocative sketches of life in the trenches and you almost feel as it you are transported back there. 'To discover something like this is quite rare and I would say it is worthy of a museum.' The sale takes place tomorrow.
The National
15-07-2025
- General
- The National
The Scot who who suggested schoolchildren be given free milk
Garlanded with honours during his long career, Boyd Orr was knighted in 1935 and created a life peer as Lord Boyd Orr in 1949. A tall, distinctive man with 'penetrating blue eyes' and 'astonishing' bushy eyebrows and who smoked a pipe, his family affectionately referred to him as 'Popeye'. Unsurprisingly, much has been written about Boyd Orr. Yet few of these narratives make mention of the driving ideological force behind his endeavours: humanism. READ MORE: Rarely seen Millais artworks to be displayed in Scotland for the first time While readers might associate humanism with celebrants who conduct wedding, funeral and naming ceremonies for the non-religious, it is, and has been, a considerably more expansive moral, ethical and rational life stance. Historian Callum Brown reassesses this aspect of Boyd Orr's career in his forthcoming book, Ninety Humanists And The Ethical Transition Of Britain. For Brown, Boyd Orr was: 'A humanist scientist whose ethical commitment drew upon humanitarianism, the autonomy of the human being and internationalism. He was devoted to a simple cause – ending hunger as a means to ending war.' Humanism and Humanitarianism BOYD Orr was born in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, in 1880. His hostility to organised religion, Brown writes, was 'shaped in his youth and crafted an adherence to rationalist science and humanist ethics'. Boyd Orr's family home was 'strictly religious'. His Free Church father, 'enveloped the family in a regime of nightly prayers, puritan morality and Sabbath observance'. As Boyd Orr recalled in his memoir, 'promiscuous dancing' was considered abhorrent, and he did not dance until he was nearly 30. After this, he rarely missed a ceilidh. He discarded the faith of his family, although, rather confusingly, not before he had published a book on theological debate. He eschewed church, apart from a visit to a Quaker Meeting House, where he approved of the lack of ornamentation, doctrines and freedom of conscience. Reading the work of Charles Darwin led Boyd Orr, Brown argues, to break from the hold of biblical interpretation. In Glasgow, he was much affected by the deprivation he witnessed in the city's slums, then among the worst in western Europe. His experience, which included several years as a teacher in the east end, gave him an 'intense hatred of unnecessary hunger and poverty'. After a complex career of study, in which he came to specialise in nutrition, Boyd Orr graduated as a medical doctor in 1913, joining a new research centre in Aberdeen, the Rowett Institute. Following the outbreak of the First World War, Boyd Orr served as a senior medic in the Royal Army Medical Corps, rescuing the wounded at the Battle of the Somme, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. He also used his knowledge to improve the diet of soldiers. Nutrition BROWN demonstrates that Boyd Orr's humanitarian drive to understand and counter the malnourishment of the poor, and children in particular, was a constant driver in his research. Convinced of the nutritional benefits of milk, Boyd Orr was appalled it was wasted when poor families could not afford it, and that his proposals for a government scheme to supply free milk to schools were ignored. He conducted large-scale experiments in the mid-1930s which conclusively showed the benefits of milk consumption among Scottish children and was reported widely in the press as having shown that around one-third of children in Britain and Northern Ireland were malnourished. By the 1950s and 60s, the free milk in schools scheme was the eventual result of such campaigning. It was, according to Brown, the simplest and most effective mass system to improve physical health ever devised. Boyd Orr was at the forefront of an ethical movement for dietary improvement, which drew the admiration of humanists such as Julian Huxley and fellow Scot Naomi Mitchison. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, he persistently lobbied government to improve the diet of the population, advocating that food supply be subject to state intervention. In 1943, he appeared in a documentary, World Of Plenty, which presented in simple terms his argument that the world was shifting from food scarcity to plenty. The same year, he was elected to Parliament as an independent MP representing the Scottish universities. World Government BOYD Orr's ethical ambitions were greater still. In the years following the Second World War, his mission was to achieve world peace by transforming the supply of food across the globe. In 1946, acclaimed by fellow nutritionists the world over, he was appointed the first director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Three years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Receiving the award, he stated there would be: 'No peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lacks the necessities of life and believes that a change in the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty.' Humanists such as HG Wells had long dreamed of utopian schemes which would create international institutions to ensure prosperity and to prevent conflict. With Boyd Orr appointed to the United Nations, such dreams seemed upon the cusp of becoming reality. Yet his plans for a World Food Bank, and a huge international project to boost agricultural productivity, lacked political support. 'Boyd Orr,' Brown argues, 'proclaimed the power of science to transform the world, to quell racism, to feed the millions and thereby to end war, travelling the world telling this story to intellectuals, medics and scientists.' On Boyd Orr's death in 1971, aged 90, an extensive obituary lauded him as 'one of the truly outstanding Scotsmen of the age'. Charlie Lynch thanks Callum Brown for providing him with a preview of his forthcoming book, Ninety Humanists And The Ethical Transition Of Britain: The Open Conspiracy 1930-80, which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in November
Miami Herald
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
A Vision of 1984: Social Injustice and Its Enemies
Chadwick Lane Murray Issues a Scholarly, Soul-Shaking Clarion Call on Injustice-Rooted in History, Reaching Toward the Future MILWAUKEE, WI / ACCESS Newswire / July 12, 2025 / With an eye on Orwell and a finger on the pulse of generational upheaval, Chadwick Lane Murray's A Vision of 1984: Social Injustice and Its Enemies is not merely a book; it is a reckoning in print. Combining personal discovery with public inquiry, this genre-defiant work dissects war, racism, economic inequality, and planetary decline through the prism of history, sociology, and unapologetic moral urgency. Launched in 2025, A Vision of 1984 arrives at a time when public discourse has never been louder-nor truth more elusive. The echoes of the past are impossible to ignore; from soldiers' personal letters smuggled through trenches in Verdun to the dusty protest pamphlets of 1968's Paris uprisings, Murray excavates the forgotten margins of history to illuminate our present. The narrative threads converge into a singular message: systemic injustice isn't accidental; it's by design. "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." - Steve Jobs A Book Anchored in Humanity-and Armed with Numbers Structured into four critical sections-Arbitrariness, Inequitable Distribution, Defective Correctives, and What Can Be Done-the book provides a rigorous framework for understanding how injustice operates across cultural, institutional, and economic lines. Murray doesn't simply ask what went wrong; he asks who made it so. Arbitrariness explores how imperialism, racism, and military conflict create environments where suffering becomes predictable; the author draws on personal family archives, including letters from the Battle of the Somme and Khe Distribution traces the legacy of wealth hoarding and monopolistic behavior; referencing post-war boom statistics, Murray cites that by 1982, the top 1% of Americans controlled 33% of national wealth-a number eerily similar to current Correctives critiques modern education, judicial, and political systems. As early as 1980, voter confidence in Congress had dropped below 30%; it has yet to meaningfully Can Be Done proposes moral advocacy over institutional neutrality; a radical thesis for a radical age. His prose is often poetic; his analysis, razor-sharp. There is a method behind the heartbreak. "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." - Bill Gates The Ghost of Orwell Meets the Algorithm Age By resurrecting Orwell's prophetic spirit in the age of misinformation, A Vision of 1984 speaks not just to policy experts or historians, but to anyone questioning the trajectory of modern civilization. Murray juxtaposes the rigidity of bureaucracy with the chaos of human longing; he paints portraits of those ground down by economic gears too large to see. The book is both a historical synthesis and a sociological sermon. And there's data behind the drama. Murray pulls from the digital archives of post-war Britain; he examines U.S. labor participation trends since 1945; he even references the founding of Silicon Valley itself, noting that by 1984-the year Orwell imagined totalitarian surveillance-the seeds of the tech-industrial complex were already blooming in Palo Alto. In fact, by 1984, over 40% of the world's semiconductors were being produced in Santa Clara County; as Murray notes, "Surveillance didn't come from the government; it came from an IPO." It's this interweaving of ideology and infrastructure that makes the book both timeless and timely. The Rise of Humanistic Sociology-And the Moral Reckoning Ahead Inspired by the "new sociology" and thinkers such as Morris Ginsberg, Murray refuses academic detachment. He considers objectivity overrated when facing systemic violence. Instead, he urges action; he views sociology not as a lens but as a lever. Readers will find themselves challenged-emotionally, intellectually, even ethically. "This is not a bedtime story; this is a wake-up call," said Ovais Riaz, who represents Murray. "It challenges every reader-scholars, students, and citizens-to choose whether they want to be part of the solution or simply spectators to decline." If Orwell gave us a dystopia to fear, Chadwick Lane Murray gives us one to recognize. Book Details About the Author Chadwick Lane Murray is an independent scholar, essayist, and human rights advocate. Raised between libraries and living rooms filled with war stories, his worldview was shaped not by ideology, but by testimony. He studied the intersections of history and sociology at the University of [Insert], and later worked in urban planning and policy research before devoting himself fully to writing. His passion for justice is more than theoretical; Murray has conducted oral history interviews with veterans of World War II, organized educational outreach in post-industrial cities, and contributed to policy whitepapers addressing economic inequality. His work is known for fusing raw human emotion with empirical rigor-making him a rare voice in a world of noise. Amazon Author Page Disclaimer This original article was independently researched and published by the author with the editorial team of the Evrima Chicago News Bureau. It has not appeared in any previously published form and is presented as a digital-first feature on the sociopolitical relevance of contemporary literary works. The piece is intended for educational, editorial, and syndication purposes across the World Wide Web, news distribution networks, and academic referencing channels. Endorsed by the AuthorThe perspectives, interpretations, and contextual framing expressed herein are those of the Evrima Chicago editorial team and are officially endorsed by Chadwick Lane Murray, author of A Vision of 1984: Social Injustice and Its StandardsThis piece qualifies as an official web syndication under W3C-recognized digital content frameworks and follows metadata tagging standards for news archives, search engine discoverability, and citation integrity. It is timestamped and licensed for redistribution under academic fair use and professional editorial Liability for Moral ReckoningsEvrima Chicago assumes no responsibility for existential crises, civic awakening, or spontaneous acts of justice that may result from reading A Vision of 1984. Proceed with caution; moral clarity is not always NoteEvrima Chicago is an independent research and media outlet producing editorial content spanning literature, political thought, accessibility (A11Y), digital futures, and journalistic integrity. We aim to create thought-leading narratives rooted in credibility, depth, and meaningful public discourse. PR & Media Contact General Inquiries / Interview: PR@ & Media Contact: waasay@ SOURCE: Visions: Social Injustice & it's Enemies.
