Latest news with #Bloomsday
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Man committed to state hospital for shooting his wife and daughter during a mental health episode in Airway Heights
May 30—A Spokane County judge on Friday sentenced a man with schizophrenia to a stay in Eastern State Hospital for the 2021 shooting of his wife and stepdaughter. Zion Carter, 42, was found not guilty by reason of insanity during a bench trial this year. Experts say Carter has schizophrenia spectrum disorder and experienced a severe psychotic break when he shot his wife, Stephanie Luke, and his 11-year-old stepdaughter in July 2021, according to court records. That night, Carter reportedly appeared agitated, so he left the couple's home in Airway Heights to cool off. Luke and her daughter went to bed, but a few hours later, she awoke to the sound of a gun cocking and Carter mumbling about someone attacking him, The Spokesman-Review reported. Luke was shot in the chest and the stomach. When she awoke, her daughter came into the room with gunshot wounds of her own. The young girl ran to the neighbor's house for help, court records say. Carter was later arrested in Pierce County. Two years after the shooting, Luke and her daughter celebrated the end of numerous surgeries from the shooting by running Bloomsday, according to previous reporting. Carter, who donned a yellow jumpsuit in court on Friday, told Spokane County Superior Court Judge Rachelle Anderson that a decadeslong sentence in solitary confinement as a teenager contributed to his mental health issues and he had no idea he was mentally ill until doctors expressed it to him. When he got out of prison, he was left with no help or support, which likely snowballed his mental illness, Anderson acknowledged. Carter asked for a less-restrictive treatment, but Anderson ultimately decided it was safer for him to be in a state mental hospital . Both the prosecution and defense agreed. Carter also received a 45-month sentence Friday for unlawful possession of a firearm, but was granted time served for the years he has already spent in jail.
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Bloom is the crowning jewel of our capital city
Ah, Bloom! That annual horticultural hootenanny where the scent of freshly turned soil mingles with the aroma of artisan sausage rolls, and where the only thing more abundant than the flora is the flurry of floppy hats. This year, Bord Bia Bloom 2025 blossomed once again in Dublin's Phoenix Park, transforming 70 acres into a veritable Eden of eco-consciousness, culinary delights, and enough garden gnomes to march on the Aras and stage a coup. The earth laughs in flowers, so said Ralph Waldo Emerson, yesterday, it was in stitches. First, an admission of guilt. As a novice, the name of this festival confused me. Bloomsday falls on June 16 each year. That celebration of Joycean pomp is no relation to Bord Bia Bloom, but the timing and title caught me a little off guard. Were there enough Ulysses nuts to warrant a five-day celebration in the largest public park in any capital city in Europe? No, it turns out, there isn't. Which is a relief. This is something else entirely. It's reductive to compare festivals — each lives and dies on its own merits — but given the scale and logistical footprint of Bloom, the National Ploughing Festival is an obvious and worthy inspiration for Irelands premier gardening and horticultural festival. Beginning on Thursday and running throughout the Bank Holiday weekend, Bloom will have attracted over 120,000 punters through its gates by the time the last tent is collapsed on Monday. If the ploughing is Glastonbury, Bloom is Electric Picnic. The setting is majestic and the mood more than a little mischievous. The variety on display from the moment you enter is so rich it'd make a willow weep. Puns aside, Bloom means business. I'm no sooner in the gate but I'm watching the Ballymaloe crew do a cooking demo on the Dunnes Stores stage. Chef Neven Maguire is hanging in the wings signing autographs like he's a member of Metallica. Maisie Carton, aged 15, from Dundrum, was prepared for moody weather in the Phoenix Park. Picture: Moya Nolan If there are politicians about, they are keeping a low profile. The weather, too, is appropriate; wet on Thursday, Friday brings dark clouds broken up by brilliant sunshine. Good gardening weather, right? Weather so rich you can feel the grass grow beneath your feet. Excited school kids follow patient teachers like mini climbers trailing their sherpa. Grownups who should know better sip Aperol spritz from recyclable plastic cups. With a taste of summer already lingering in the back of our throats, the timing of Bloom could not be more apposite. The heart of the festival lies in its show gardens — 21 verdant visions ranging from the sublime to the surreal. Take, for instance, the 'Make A Wish Foundation Garden' by Linda McKeown, a space so enchanting it could make a grown man weep into his compost. Then there's the 'GRÁ' garden by Kathryn Feeley for Dogs Trust, a canine-centric paradise where even the shrubs seem to wag their leaves in approval. Not to be outdone, the 'Tusla Fostering Garden' by Pip Probert offers a vibrant tapestry of colours and textures, symbolising the diverse journeys of foster families. Bloom, though, is not just about seasoned green thumbs; it's also a fertile ground for budding gardening superstars. The 'Cultivating Talent' initiative, now in its third year, continues to nurture and showcase the next generation of garden designers. This year's standout is Dr Sarah Cotterill — an assistant professor at UCD — whose 'Into the Woods' garden pays homage to Ireland's Atlantic rainforests, proving that even civil engineers can have a soft spot for ferns. Billy Alexander of Kells Bay House and Gardens in Kerry brought his Chelsea Flower Show-winning fern garden to Bloom. Picture: Moya Nolan For those of us whose idea of gardening involves little more ingenuity than picking herbs for a G&T, the Food Village offers enough distraction to fill a day. I unwittingly followed one chap who easily reached his daily calorie quota by exclusively eating free samples. It was an admirably frugal tactic, if a tad unnecessary. Unlike other festivals, the food was ample and reasonably priced. The village — which features nearly 100 Irish producers — is a smorgasbord of local delights. I'd eaten two gourmet burgers and a hot dog before lunchtime. Not every day in the trenches is like this, and this one-man army marches on its stomach. The food stages are accessible and unfussy — culinary luminaries like Neven, Darina Allen, and Fiona Uyema are on hand to whip up some dishes that would make an intermittent faster reconsider their life choices. The atmosphere is collegiate, the food divine. Sure, there are plenty of healthy options on display, too, but Bloom is not the space to suddenly become precious. There is lots of cream and butter, and the fun and food police are conspicuous in their absence. A key theme running throughout the festival is sustainability, with the Sustainable Living Stage hosting 40 talks on topics ranging from food waste to natural skincare hacks. The festival walked the walk — quite literally — by offering free shuttle buses, ample bicycle parking, and ensuring all food and drink packaging was compostable or recyclable. There were even volunteers on hand at each bin to advise you on what goes where. Keen not to take itself too seriously, Bloom isn't just for the horticulturally inclined; it's a family affair. The Budding Bloomers area offered a range of activities for the young and the young at heart, from bug workshops to interactive performances. Chef Tricia Lewis giving a cookery demonstration to a crew of hungry festivalgoers. Picture: Moya Nolan For those looking to bring a piece of Bloom home, the Grand Pavilion and Plant Emporium offered everything from handcrafted garden sculptures to rare plant species. It's the kind of place where you go in for a packet of seeds and come out with a bonsai tree and a newfound appreciation for macrame rope. In its 19th year, Bord Bia Bloom continues to be a testament to Ireland's love affair with all things green and growing. It's a safe, creative space where gardeners, foodies, and families converge to celebrate the simple joys of nature, nourishment, and community. In a time when the deforestation of the island is a hot topic, Bloom offers an antidote to the doom and gloom that can sometimes suffocate green-adjacent conversations. The jewel of the crown of this festival, however, is not any one of the celebrity gardeners, chefs or even Juniperus Communis on display. It's not even the extra-mature cheeses, of which I consumed quite a few. No, it is unquestionably the venue. The Phoenix Park frames this event and makes it a masterpiece, a celebration of nature its creators and organisers can absolutely be proud of. Verdant and resplendent, the vastness of the park itself makes access and egress easy. The walled gardens within the festival compound act as a spine for a sprawl that is beautifully organised, but never contrived. Great oak trees provide shelter from the infrequent showers. The grass acts as a quilt to lie on and bask in the brilliant sunshine. Just outside the fence, a herd of fallow deer skip by, as if curious about the din inside. There is a lot wrong with our capital city, and, understandably, we spend plenty of time talking about it. Bloom is an example of something done incredibly right. A festival of nature, food, colour, and life, hosted in a public park at an incredibly reasonable price. Accessible to everybody, and not a Joycean scholar in sight.
Irish Independent
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Labour's George Lawlor on how stand-up comedy and opera help him balance the stresses of political life
As well as stand-up comedy, he's also an outstanding operatic and musical performer — and was in good voice last week when he spoke to the Sunday Independent. Brendan Howlin's successor in Wexford reeled off a host of funny stories, including one about the time a character he was playing had to ask who he needed to sleep with in order to make it on Broadway. In response, three nuns, in full regalia, got up in the front row and walked out. 'People laughed and clapped — they thought it was all part of the show,' he said. A comedian and tenor-baritone, Lawlor (56), has regularly trod the boards of the Opera House, while also serving as mayor of Wexford five times and being a member of Wexford County Council for 15 years. Last year, he was in The Phantom of the Opera before his election as a TD, and has played Daryl Van Horne — 'Jack Nicholson's character' — in The Witches of Eastwick, among scores of other productions. He began performing in public in 1980 in the boys' choir in Wexford. 'We now have the National Opera House [in Wexford] and we're very proud of it,' he said. 'I find participation is great for mental health, and for the stress and concerns of day-to-day politics. As a local councillor and parliamentary assistant to Brendan Howlin, I was run off my feet. Urban councillors have a huge workload, but don't have any staff to support them.' Now the chair of the Dáil committee on the Traveller community, and sometimes in the House until midnight, he says he misses the 'roar of the greasepaint and smell of the crowd' (a nod to the musical of the same name). He says it is still a performance in the chamber — 'where my constituency colleague Verona Murphy wields the baton'. Lawlor jokes it will be the voters who decide when he goes back to the theatre, saying: 'I will go back to it after this stage. Any form of music or am-dram [amateur drama] is a great winter pastime. Phantom did €200,000 worth of business and was booked out two months in advance.' The Labour TD is also PR and marketing chair for the Fleadh, which marks its second year in Wexford in August, having drawn 650,000 visitors to the town last year. He can sing from Les Mis or Jekyll & Hyde at the drop of a hat and believes his involvement with musicals and opera has helped to propel him on to the national stage. 'I've long been part of the Wexford Light Opera Society, one of the most successful on the island, and sadly was not able to take part in this year's production of Young Frankenstein.' He loves singers Kiri Te Kanawa and Marilyn Horne and adores the Three Tenors — but the best voice of all, he believes, belonged to Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling, the choice of many cognoscenti. 'As to sopranos, Maria Callas will never be surpassed.' He's thinking he might squeeze something in with the Oireachtas Drama Society, although he has yet to join. It's currently rehearsing a stage version of Ulysses to mark Bloomsday next month.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A small country with an epic history for book lovers
Ireland is a country in love with words, both written and spoken, its denizens rightly famous for the craic, that indefinable melange of music and laughter and the joy taken in a simple chat or a tale well-told. It's also there on the walls as we make our way through the crowds to the rambunctious streets of Temple Bar on our first night in Dublin – in a mural with the headline 'Feed Your Head – READ'. There's Brendan Behan cheek-by-jowl with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. A panel nearby reveals that Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that's without mention of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and the great James Joyce, whose masterful Ulysses spawned Bloomsday (June 16 every year), one of the biggest literary festivals in the world. This is the land, for goodness' sake, of John Banville, Colm Toibin, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney and Bram Stoker. Which makes our first day in Dublin, before we head south-west for Kilkenny and beyond, such a pleasure; because our first stop is Trinity College's Old Library, which houses the famous Long Room and the Book of Kells. Unarguably one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Long Room is 65 metres of burnished wooden bookshelves, normally filled from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling with 200,000 of the library's oldest tomes. These, however, have been temporarily removed as part of the Old Library Development Project, which aims to improve fire and environmental protections in the library and clean, document and electronically tag the books. Even without them, it's still an alarmingly impressive space. And taking things up a notch since November 2023 is the presence of Gaia, a remarkable illuminated globe that, using detailed NASA imagery of the Earth's surface, shows our planet as it is viewed from space. Sitting about two-thirds of the way along the Long Room, this large but miniature Earth by artist Luke Jerram is suspended in the air, a bright blue ball contrasting beautifully with the polished old oak beams of the library. It is mesmerising, eminently Instagramable, and it will be a crying shame when it is taken down in September 2026 (so get your skates on).
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A small country with an epic history for book lovers
Ireland is a country in love with words, both written and spoken, its denizens rightly famous for the craic, that indefinable melange of music and laughter and the joy taken in a simple chat or a tale well-told. It's also there on the walls as we make our way through the crowds to the rambunctious streets of Temple Bar on our first night in Dublin – in a mural with the headline 'Feed Your Head – READ'. There's Brendan Behan cheek-by-jowl with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. A panel nearby reveals that Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that's without mention of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and the great James Joyce, whose masterful Ulysses spawned Bloomsday (June 16 every year), one of the biggest literary festivals in the world. This is the land, for goodness' sake, of John Banville, Colm Toibin, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney and Bram Stoker. Which makes our first day in Dublin, before we head south-west for Kilkenny and beyond, such a pleasure; because our first stop is Trinity College's Old Library, which houses the famous Long Room and the Book of Kells. Unarguably one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Long Room is 65 metres of burnished wooden bookshelves, normally filled from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling with 200,000 of the library's oldest tomes. These, however, have been temporarily removed as part of the Old Library Development Project, which aims to improve fire and environmental protections in the library and clean, document and electronically tag the books. Even without them, it's still an alarmingly impressive space. And taking things up a notch since November 2023 is the presence of Gaia, a remarkable illuminated globe that, using detailed NASA imagery of the Earth's surface, shows our planet as it is viewed from space. Sitting about two-thirds of the way along the Long Room, this large but miniature Earth by artist Luke Jerram is suspended in the air, a bright blue ball contrasting beautifully with the polished old oak beams of the library. It is mesmerising, eminently Instagramable, and it will be a crying shame when it is taken down in September 2026 (so get your skates on).
