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Press and Journal
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Press and Journal
Video: Kellands School pupils celebrate Dons victory with football-inspired lesson
A video of pupils and staff at an Inverurie primary school celebrating the Dandy Dons has attracted much attention online. After Aberdeen FC won the Scottish Cup, Kellands School decided to mark the occasion with a red and white day. Pupils from P1 to P7 donned the team colours to create a sea of red and white across the school. Teachers organised a variety of fun activities and even a Dons-inspired lesson, with depute head Alan Souter helping one class expand their knowledge of the squad. A video of the 'daft' lesson now has more than 250,000 views on Facebook. 'A few of us here are quite big Dandies so we obviously wanted to celebrate the game,' Mr Souter told The Press and Journal. 'I teach one of the classes on a Monday so I came in with my full kit on. 'The lesson was to wind up one of the other teachers, who is a Rangers fan. 'I said to the class 'let's play a little joke' and they were all on board. 'What you see in the video is two minutes after we came up with the idea. 'It was just a bit of fun. 'They did have proper spelling words as well!' The staff at Kellands School have been shocked to see how much attention the video has gained online. 'We're in our own little world running a primary school,' Mr Souter said. 'But it's been really nice – and most of the feedback has been very complimentary. 'We have lots of close links with the club, so it felt amazing to celebrate. 'It's mad that it's gone a bit viral.' Deputy head teacher Caroline Brunton added: 'We had a long-term relationship with the Aberdeen FC Community Trust and we've always maintained close links with the club. 'A lot of the kids are football fans, and we really push sport at the school, so it's nice to make a big deal of it with the kids. 'Lots of the children were at the game. 'One of our P5s was even a mascot.' The teachers said the school was 'buzzing' as they celebrated the Dons winning the Scottish Cup for the first time in 35 years. And to end the day, all of the classes came together to enjoy a Dandies Disco in the playground.
CNN
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CNN
In pictures: Supreme Court Justice David Souter
Souter, right, leaves the US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Castle, New Hampshire, in 1969. At the time, he was the assistant attorney general of New Hampshire. AP Souter was born in Massachusetts, but he grew up and attended grade school in New Hampshire. He went on to attend Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School. Ken Williams/Concord Monitor/AP Souter signs documents after being sworn in. With him, from left, are Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, Thurgood Marshall, Anthony Kennedy, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens. Ken Heinen/Pool/AP Souter works with a group to promote civics education in New Hampshire schools in 2009. In a break with today's norms, Souter retired from the Supreme Court that year, seeking a return to his contemplative life in New Hampshire. Souter was only 69 when he stepped down – far younger than most departing justices. He never married, and he was never fond of the Washington social scene. Jim Cole/AP Souter, second from left, stands with members of the Supreme Court before a procession marking Harvard Law School's bicentennial in 2017. Standing with him, from left, are Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Neil Gorsuch. Jessica Rinaldi/The
Press and Journal
20-05-2025
- General
- Press and Journal
Remembering the day an RAF bomber crashed into Lossiemouth homes, killing 11
On May 20 1945, Lossiemouth was a town revelling in peace. World War Two was over in Europe. The daily diet of death, fear and insecurity was gone. It doesn't take much to imagine the joy and relief in people's hearts. Then abruptly, that quiet Sunday morning, tragedy struck the town. A Wellington bomber on a test flight from RAF Lossiemouth fell from the sky and hit a row of council houses. It resulted in the loss of eight civilians, six of them from the same family, and three RAF air crew. From a town celebrating the end of the war less than a fortnight earlier, Lossie was now a town in mourning. Lossiemouth's war had already had profound effects on the humble fishing town. RAF Lossiemouth opened in 1939 and played vital part in the war effort, particularly as a strategic base for bombing missions. The war came close to home on October 26 1940, when the base was attacked by the German Luftwaffe, killing one RAF officer and two air crew. A four-man German crew also died and were buried in Lossiemouth. Less than a year later, on July 11 1941, a German Junkers 88 fighter dropped four bombs over the town, possibly mistaking it for the RAF base. The first bomb hit Kinneddar Street resulting in injuries to members of the Souter family. The second bomb hit 6 Dunbar Street, killing Mr and Mrs John Wilson and their house guests Mr and Mrs Joseph Leighton, who had fled Portsmouth and come to Lossie to try and escape the worst of the war. Their daughter was married to an RAF officer at the base. Two more bombs were dropped that night, one fell on King Street, the other in a nearby quarry. But all that trauma was rapidly becoming history after VE day, and the community was looking forward to the future. Just before 10am on Sunday May 20, at RAF Lossiemouth, a Wellington bomber crewed by RD Rickard from Manchester; DR Cameron and CGW Mawby from South Ealing were preparing to take off on a test flight. At the same time, the Flood family were stirring at home in their upper council house on the block 43, 45 and 49 Church Street. John Flood and his 11-year old daughter Jeanie decided to treat the rest of the family to tea in bed, and were in the kitchen. Mum Joey Flood and her other five children were at the other end of the house. Their next door neighbours upstairs, Judith Allan, 66 and her adopted daughter Vera were also having a lazy morning before church. Meanwhile things were going wrong on the test flight. An eyewitness said the plane failed to gain height as it flew over Coulard Hill in an easterly direction, and was struggling, its engines cutting out. He told the P&J: 'The pilot was obviously making a supreme effort to get the bomber clear of the own and make for the sea. 'But the plane whirled three times, the engines suddenly became silent and the machine dropped like a stone on top of a block of flatted municipal houses. 'Part of the fuselage fell in front of the building and the other part in the garden at the rear. The plane completely disintegrated. There was a loud explosion and in a matter of seconds the plane and the block of houses were enveloped in flames. 'Had it gone three yards farther the plane would have missed the houses and fallen in the open space formed by the old Market Square.' In an instant, 11 people lost their lives. Vera Allan died in bed. Her mother Judith, who had lost a son in France in 1940 and whose surviving son was serving with the Seaforths in India, was charred and barely recognisable when she was found. Downstairs, other residents scrambled to safety. The fate of the Flood family was unimaginable. Mum Joey Flood and five of her six boys were trapped in their blazing home and perished in the flames. John Flood threw Jeanie, 11, out of the window, a 15ft drop, saving her life. He grabbed his youngest, three year old David and headed for the window, but the wall caved in from the force of one of the explosions. The boy, David, was wrenched out of his hands and died, while at the same time John Flood was blown out through the window. He and Jeannie were the only survivors from their family of eight. Joey, aged 37, Jack, James, Sinclair, Michael and David died. The boys ranged in age from three to 15. Fire tenders from the RAF base rushed to the scene along with wartime National Fire Service detachments from Lossiemouth and Elgin and civil defence personnel, but their efforts were in vain. Immediately after the crash, the Women's Voluntary Service went into action, seeing to the homeless and organising food and clothes for the survivors. The Floods were a well-known Lossie family. John, 38, was employed as a carter with Miller Alexander carting contractor in Ogston Place. A few days later came a funeral for all eight civilian victims. The Evening Express reported that practically the entire community turned out for the tragic occasion. 'The funeral took place from the old and now disused Chapel of Ease which serves as a public mortuary and where the bodies had rested. 'Fisherwomen in deep morning, many of them with young children in their arms, along with their menfolk, man of who had come straight from the fishing grounds earlier than usual to attend the funeral were amongst the crowd. 'Many wept openly during the funeral obsequies outside the Chapel where a short but impressive service was conducted by the Rev N M Sammon, of the High Church. 'The three young children were in white coffins. 'Behind them lay banks of wreaths. 'A tragic figure during the service was the bereaved husband John Flood, who in carpet slippers and able to walk with the aid of a walking stick, and his relatives, remained seated during the service, his eleven year old daughter Jeannie who was the only one of the family saved, clasped to his side.' Afterwards RAF personnel bore the coffins to RAF vehicles as the band, with muffled drums played Flowers of the Forest. Behind the cortege to Lossiemouth cemetery came 200 school boys, many friends of the Flood boys. 'Then followed a car with Mr Flood, his young daughter and mother and father. 'Then members of the Town Council and next of kin, detachments from the RAF rescue party, NFS coastguards and postmen with the general public taking up the rear. ' A memorial stone of the site of the tragedy was erected in 1995, with funds from the RAF, local clubs and Grampian Region councillors. At that time, survivor Jeannie then aged 60 and living in Hawick came to Lossie to carry out the unveiling. She said: 'I have never forgotten my mother and brothers. I was only 10 years old but it is still as fresh in my mind as the day it happened.' Her father John, who brought her up after the accident, died in 1965 when he fractured his skull falling down the stairs. To mark the 80th anniversary of the tragedy, Tuesday, May 20 2025, Lossiemouth Men's Shed have organised a wreath-laying ceremony. An RAF Lossiemouth detachment will attend, as will Lossiemouth Men's Shed and the chaplain and pupils from St Gerardine's school. Assembly at Mercator Green, Church Street, Lossiemouth is at 9.30am, with two minutes silence at 9.52am, followed by the wreath laying and dispersal at 10am. If you enjoyed this story, you may also like: Was your Aberdeen street hit by tragedy in WW2? Our map shows addresses of more than 1,000 victims
New Straits Times
19-05-2025
- Business
- New Straits Times
Nord-Lock opens distribution hub in Malaysia to accelerate APAC deliveries
KUALA LUMPUR: Sweden's Nord-Lock Group has launched a new regional distribution centre (RDC) in North Port, Selangor, designed to slash industrial component delivery times across the Asia-Pacific by over 50 per cent, while sharply reducing reliance on air freight. Despite its compact 539-square-metre footprint, the facility is equipped with advanced automation systems that significantly boost logistics efficiency and handling capacity. It will cater to critical sectors, including renewable energy, automotive manufacturing, and infrastructure development across the region. "From this hub based in Northport, we can now deliver critical components to the Asia-Pacific region with unprecedented speed—enhancing our service capabilities, significantly reducing turnaround times, and empowering our customers with the efficiency they need to excel in today's fast-paced market," Nord-Lock vice president and head of business unit Graham Souter said in a statement. The RDC also plays a key role in Nord-Lock's long-term sustainability agenda. According to Souter, the facility is expected to reduce monthly air freight shipments by a factor of 25—minimising the company's carbon footprint while improving delivery timelines and cost-efficiency through sea and land transport. "This distribution centre represents the cornerstone of our sustainability commitment across the Asia-Pacific region. By significantly reducing our dependence on air freight and optimising our logistics network, we are simultaneously decreasing our carbon footprint whilst enhancing delivery reliability and offering more competitive pricing to our valued customers," he said. Swedish Ambassador to Malaysia Niklas Wiberg said Nord-Lock Group's decision to establish this new distribution centre in Malaysia is a testament to the country's strategic importance in the region. Given Malaysia's strategic role as a regional hub in Asean, especially in its capacity as ASEAN Chair this year, Wiberg said this opening comes at a highly relevant time. "The centre will create local jobs and economic opportunities and facilitate knowledge transfer and upskilling, further enhancing Malaysia's position in the region. It will also highlight Swedish companies, benefitting both our countries," he added. The facility is expected to support over 5,000 shipments per year through Malaysia, contributing to the country's position as a high-value logistics hub.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'No more Souters'
One by one, the nine Supreme Court justices paid tribute to David Souter following his passing last week. They praised his decency, his old-fashioned ways, his generosity to law clerks and his deep love of New Hampshire. Yet something important was missing from the statements by the six Republicans and three Democrats who currently hold those seats. No one praised David Souter's political independence, or his freedom from any specific ideology, political, constitutional or otherwise. The respect for his old-fashioned ways referred not to the unblinkered honesty he brought to the law but to his asceticism and simplicity – his devotion to books, New England, the yogurt and apple he ate for lunch every day, core and all. Such honesty, of course, would give away the game. The justices most important, yet difficult, task is remaining straight-faced as they deliver their lines pretending to be umpires, neutral arbiters, or scholarly vessels of the Founders' original intent – anything but robed politicians wearing the red or blue colors of the party that appointed them – for the benefit of an audience that quite rightly no longer buys this elevated hogwash. No, in this moment of conservative judicial ascendancy, carefully strategized by political strategists and ideologues over decades, funded like a political campaign with dark money millions, with the Court now gift-wrapped for the right by generations to come, one must not speak of politics at all. The Court is the pinnacle and provider of Republican political primacy; its legitimacy requires the public to believe delusions about impartiality while the justices act politically. It is a sign of hope that majorities of Americans do not. Indeed, tucked behind the justices' careful praise of Souter's life lies perhaps his greatest contribution. David Souter stripped aside the well-maintained fiction that justices are appointed to the Court for their erudition, their intellect, their learnedness, and their reason. No, they are appointed to deliver political outcomes while maintaining a robed veneer, after proving their political trustworthiness to partisan judicial gatekeepers. What these justices would never dare say is that they sit on the court today because they mastered a game that David Souter would not play. They are the lessons that the movement learned from a conservative appointment that the movement did not know and could not trust. It lives in the very mission statement of those who placed them there, court whisperers such as Leonard Leo, and like-minded right-wing watchdogs, career makers and enforcers within the Federalist Society and the conservative legal movement, all of whom vowed that there would be 'No More Souters.' The right's pledge that there would be 'No More Souters' had clear meaning and deep consequences. It meant that conservatives would never again countenance a lifetime Supreme Court appointment to any ideological wildcard. Souter, appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, was vouched for by Sen. Warren Rudman and quickly nominated to an unexpected opening created by the retirement of liberal justice William Brennan. But he lacked a paper trail, or a history with the conservative Federalist Society or Ronald Reagan's Department of Justice, which served as proving grounds for the rising generation of Republican lawyers. This would not happen again. Conservatives set about undoing the legacy of the progressive Warren Court of the 1960s by mastering the process of judicial appointments. The Federalist Society began grooming young law students for future roles. Others like John Roberts and Samuel Alito were nurtured in the Reagan DOJ. But GOP presidents kept misfiring on court appointments. Gerald Ford named John Paul Stevens, who would later lead the liberal wing. Reagan nominated centrist-minded Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. Now here was Bush with another unknown moderate. Insufficiently conservative court appointees had set conservative policy goals on abortion, the regulatory state, campaign finance, guns and more for parts of three decades. After Souter, this would no longer be tolerated. Future appointees would be known, deeply and intimately known. The Federalist Society would be the lead vehicle. One of its executives, Leonard Leo, took on the task of getting to know these future appointees better than anyone else. The message went out to all hopefuls: Mastering this game would offer the possibility of a lifetime appointment to the high court. Proven ideological reliability, demonstrated over decades, paved the career path for this entire court, but particularly the six Republicans, who aced auditions judged by Federalist Society elders, sent unmistakable ideological signals on cases and doctrines that meant most to the conservative legal movement, or pledged fealty through partisan legal work on cases such as Bush v Gore. No David Souter – who nearly resigned in agony over the court's nakedly partisan interference to decide the 2000 presidential election, who would not countenance the push by John Roberts and the conservative wing to dishonestly undo campaign finance precedent in Citizens United – would be allowed near a lifetime appointment again. Republican presidents got the memo as well. When George W. Bush nominated his friend and White House counsel Harriet Miers for the high court in 2005, the conservative legal movement pushed back hard and forced her to withdraw from consideration. The Federal Society apparatchiks who controlled advancement didn't know her. They didn't trust her. And they would not approve her for life. The appointment went to someone very well known by the right: Samuel Alito. 'I had always been a big Samuel Alito fan,' Leo told the New Yorker, and you can almost imagine the kingmaker saying it with a big wink. When Donald Trump, the next GOP president, took office, he, too, had to be vetted by Leo; Trump agreed to select future Supreme Court nominees from a list pre-selected by Leo and others. Trump's White House counsel would joke about this at a Federalist Society gala: Trump hadn't outsourced judicial appointments to them, he cracked: 'Frankly, it seems like it's been in-sourced.' These days, the truth is that partisans look to ensure the fealty of those they spend millions on, with the zeal of a political campaign, to elevate to the court. Once on the court, the movement spends millions more to surround them with like-minded courtiers, to furnish them with law school sinecures, European vacations over the summer, luxury vacations funded by right-wing super donors and much more. The Court, in turn, has become so predictably partisan that when a single justice departs from the party line on even one case, it becomes headline news. (Academics whose prestige is owed to the Court's might point to 9-0 rulings each year as a sign of comity and the court functioning as a court; this is statistics as lies and damn lies, a game of make-believe for the gullible, the counting of minor technical decisions and not the cases that matter.) This, too, was a game David Souter would not play. When he retired in 2010, he did something none of the current justices are likely to even imagine doing, which in itself gives away the political nature of their game. Souter not only walked away from power he could have held for another 15 years, but he also allowed a president of the party other than the one that selected him to name his replacement. No more Souters? That's much of the reason why we are in this mess today.
