We must rally against the threat of violence
Almost two days after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby the sense of shock has not abated, and many of the questions are still unanswered.
Almost two days after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby the sense of shock has not abated, and many of the questions are still unanswered.
Now there is some flesh on the bones of the shared future strategy outlined by the First and Deputy First Ministers. And at first glance it is a document with some encouraging initiatives. The idea of work experience placements for 10,000 young people not in employment, education or training is innovative. Even more so, the proposals that all public contracts should offer apprenticeships to young people.
It sounds like the plot of a budget Irish thriller movie.
The near 18% increase in the price of electricity announced by Power NI will be punishing for many businesses and households who are already struggling to make ends meet in the face of other cost of living increases.
We often talk about how public money is wasted through the duplication of services in our divided community.
The story of little Oscar Knox, the four-year-old who has made an astonishing recovery from a rare form of cancer, is one of the best examples of the indomitable nature of the human spirit and the power of parental love.
It is important to say at the outset that I am sorry for any stress and anxiety caused over the last few weeks to any older person currently residing in our statutory residential care homes and their families.
Belief in witches was a significant part of Irish culture, while Scottish and English settlers in Ireland often accused each other of witchcraft. It is commonly assumed that the European witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, never reached Irish shores.
For years, academics from Queen's University have been engaged in transformative research in many parts of the world, helping people to make the transition from conflict to peace.
SIR Alex Ferguson was honoured by MPs last week for his contribution to football – not just in Manchester, but in Northern Ireland.
All sides who took part in the Cardiff talks aimed at defusing marching season tensions certainly deserve praise for their endeavours.
For years, academics from Queen's University have been engaged in transformative research in many parts of the world, helping people to make the transition from conflict to peace.
I AM getting bored watching posturing politicians trying to divert attention from their own failures.
PLEASE could someone explain to those of us who are neutral on the subject, and would like a better understanding, what are the key points of difference between a registry office wedding and a civil partnership?
PERHAPS someone will explain why, when a Muslim kills a solider on British soil, he is called a terrorist, but when a British solider kills a Muslim in Iraq, or Afghanistan, he is not called a terrorist, but a hero? Why the double standard?
I AM confused by the decision of Crusaders Football club to challenge the decision over the funding allocation to improve Windsor Park (News, May 23). They claim it is "state sponsorship" for a rival club, that being Linfield Football Club.
DENNIS Golden (Write Back, May 23) highlighted an important point regarding gay marriage: "Before rushing through legislation allowing same-sex marriage, the inequality created by the introduction of same-sex civil partnership needs to be corrected and a formal definition of 'marriage' needs to be constructed."
THE sickening killing in Woolwich is wrong. Such acts are incompatible with Islam.
THE gay marriage Bill (News, May 21) confuses equality and sameness. True equality will only emerge when the fundamental differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships are openly celebrated and respected.
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Sheryl Sandberg says that it's ok for women to cry in the office – "I cry at work" – adding that women are not "one type of person Monday through Friday" and "then a different person in the nights and weekend. I think we are all of us emotional beings and it's ok for us to share that emotion at work".
Sometimes life's just inexplicable. Take poor Ryan Dolan.
There used to be a phrase in Northern Ireland to characterise those who carried out non-political illegal activity. Remember "ordinary decent criminals"? They were burglars, car thieves, muggers, TV licence dodgers, double do-ers and spivs. Fair enough, it's a wide moral compass to the word "decent" but we got the point.
Stephen Hawking is either a hypocrite or a fool. How else can you explain his decision to boycott Israel?
So Rolf Harris had been arrested months before but it only came out a few weeks ago to a chorus of speculation but no charges yet. The release of his name to the press was never formally sanctioned but no one seemed overly bothered about the fact he hadn't been charged, the moment traditionally when two things happen – the suspect's identity enters the public domain and public comment ceases until the trial.
What is it about Olivia Colman? Everybody likes her. (And quite right too.)
By now you've probably watched the latest viral YouTube hit of the woman trying to parallel park in Fitzroy Avenue in Belfast. First things first, the lads responsible for it were incredibly winning. Their commentary (complete with charming north Antrim accents) was rather droll – "Get in ye girl ye!" indeed. They were chivalrous, too, even going so far as to offer to help the woman to park. We will forgive the odd sexist remark.
Viva Forever!? Viva Six Months!, more like. The closure of the Spice Girls musical followed a critical savaging and disappointing ticket sales.
One of the reasons Belfast ice skater Katie Scarbrough gave for deciding to write her blog was to keep family and friends "in the know" as she battled what tragically turned out to be terminal cancer.
To mark the snappily entitled Dying Matters Awareness Week, our local Public Health Agency has been running a campaign which, in the immortal language of leaflet-speak, is aimed at highlighting "end of life issues."
Does Pippa Middleton tour the country, fascinator on stand-by, actively seeking out society weddings to attend?
I feel a bit like one of those slaves in the old Spartacus movie (the one currently aped in the TV ad) where supporters stand up one-by-one to defend the leader of their revolt by claiming to be that man. "I'm Spartacus!"
Where Nick Clegg may have slipped up when he described how he and his wife buy their children's clothes from Primark, was that he was wearing a £600-plus designer suit at the time.
Prime time dramas showcasing the scenic splendour of this part of the world are currently coming at us faster than you can say Bafta award-winning TV series. They include the dark, new thriller The Fall starring local actor Jamie Dornan as a crazed serial killer, the massive global hit that is Game of Thrones and, due curtain-up in Enniskillen in a just few weeks time, the G8-est show on earth.
You're what?! You're pregnant! How lovely. Congratulations. Now if you would just care to blow into this wee tester so we can check to see how many fags you've had in the last 24 hours ...
It must have been quite a moment when a drumming party happily banging away outside the Gielgud theatre in the West End were suddenly accosted by Her Majesty in full tiara and pearls demanding that they shut up.
If only we had a Ukip here ... . Not the actual Farage party per se. But, oh for any oul collection of clowns (as Ken Clarke might say) who could offer us a viable protest vote option against the three-ring circus that is Stormont.
The PSNI have released a picture of a cannabis factory in Ahoghill where cultivation to the tune of around £500,000 was halted by a police raid last week.
As another football season ends, don't worry about your future in the European Community, or the slaughter in Syria, or the forthcoming G8 summit in Fermanagh.
The First and deputy First Ministers should be commended for making a start at last. Northern Ireland cannot have a truly shared future unless Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness are demonstrating a greater togetherness in public, as has not been apparent until now.
The Royal British Legion and the Irish Football Association made the right calls. Both organisations should be congratulated for the pragmatic stance they have adopted over the flying of the Union flag in one case and the playing of the national anthem in the other.
Before the bulldozers moved in, I was given access one wintry November afternoon to the site of the old Maze prison. I had been many times before in the days when it was crammed full of republican and loyalist inmates. The creaking of the pedestrian turnstile at the entrance is imprinted on my memory, as is the bleak reception area where visitors waited.
The brutality of the Boston bombs brought back distressing memories for people in Northern Ireland. So many of us can relate to the loss of life and terrible suffering from our personal experience of living through the Troubles.
The coincidence of Margaret Thatcher's death in the same week as the 15th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement should not be lost on Northern Ireland.
Whatever the Agreement's deficiencies, few can deny that in Northern Ireland life changed for the better after April 10, 1998. In virtually every corner of this land, people rested easier in their beds and experienced a calmer atmosphere of relative normality.
The bar on broadcasting standards has been lowered again. The BBC's Eddie Mair has taken opinionated and aggressive interviewing on television and radio to a new level of disrespect for people in authority.
A warm welcome back to the First and Deputy First Minister after their travels to the Americas. We must hope that such an extensive tour will bear investment fruit and that their talks with the Prime Minister, David Cameron, today will give Northern Ireland some hope of countering the grim fact that unemployment is now higher than before the Good Friday Agreement.
This week I want to talk about The Fall. Not the Mancunian post-punk legends, whose latest album, Re-Mit, is every bit as good as the rest of their 35-year blistering output.
Many years ago, a young trainee journalist was sent to the house of a well-known vicar in his patch, who had been the subject of a substantial burglary.
Why am I in a field with 20 pensioners, all of us going brr, brr, brr, brr brrrrrrrrrr in unison? What a vision is this cagouled collective of hip replacements and walking sticks moving in unison through the church meadow making bizarre sounds.
If you want the tickets, you'll have to be quick, I was told; others are waiting if you don't snap them up. And so it came to pass that I have bought the most expensive tickets I have ever paid for to watch a football match.
I only watch one programme on TV these days, apart that is from the footie. I'm hooked on University Challenge. Have been for years.
Look at the date. It's April 17. Where did the year go already? What happened to, let's say, February 25? What was I doing. I can't remember. I've just looked it up on the calendar to find it was a Monday. A bit grim then, probably.
I was 16 when Margaret Thatcher came to power. We didn't know what had hit us.
Chin, chin Uncle Monty. You were the best. Your words, phrases and philosophies will live on, repeated by future generations of film fans stumbling across one of the finest British movies ever made.
Look, I'm not trying to boast, but I did go to Washington last week for work and wound up at the White House while the world's most powerful man made a speech two feet away from me.
Just over four weeks ago I was reading a book by Kate Atkinson called Life After Life.
Loved a line from Oscar Wilde I read recently -- "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."
I wonder what a dissident republican would do if he was in a car accident and the PSNI arrived at the scene within minutes to help him. Would he stand on his principle of hatred?
I'd never heard of rapper Rick Ross until I read that Reebok had dropped him from ads for their trainers.
I've debated whether to write this bit about North Korea or Claudia Winkleman's fringe. I want to appear serious and concerned with world affairs, but also a bit fun and down with the light-hearted types.
Last Thursday a friend said he'd reached Thatcheration point.
At the time of writing, an online petition to get Iain Duncan Smith to live for a year on £53 a week has reached nearly half a million signatures.
Sales of petrol have dropped by 20% in the last five years.
The DUP have time to put forward motions in Belfast City Council condemning the murders of two corporals in west Belfast many years ago. The same party helped set up a Unionist Forum to look at problems in loyalist areas, following the fleg protests.
The local debate over freedom of speech versus even more restrictive defamation laws has really started to take off. And it’s a very healthy thing to watch.
Newspaper libraries are intriguing places. All human life is in there, normally in print and photograph, but of course, for the past decade or so, in digital format.
The number of comments posted underneath stories and articles on our website is a great indication of how popular this method of engagement with, and by, readers has become.
A grubby stitch-up which hopefully is falling apart under the weight of its own contradictions. That's my tuppence worth on the new Royal Charter on Press Conduct, anyway.
The news business is, by necessity, often full of tragic events. But even by the grim standards of our trade, the story of James Fenton, a 22-year-old from Bangor, is a particularly distressing one.
Well, I've been banging on about it for a while now, but I'm delighted to say that it's finally become a burning political issue.
AN influential group of around 14 Labour MPs have now joined the Tories in wanting a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU.
In spite of being painted as the Mr Angry of Ulster politics, Peter Robinson does have a sense of humour – and even the ability to be self-deprecating.
Pope Benedict did it. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands did it. Ian Paisley did it. And now even Alex Ferguson is doing it: all stepped aside at a high point in their careers. Isn't it time for the Queen to consider following suit?
Did anyone wonder that there were no official receptions, or no meeting with ministers, during the Dalai Lama's visit to Londonderry last month?
Handling the successful development of the Maze site is a major opportunity and challenge to the two big parties, which must do the heavy lifting if it is to work.
At last, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness feel that they have some leverage with the British Government.
Last week, I tried to find out when our car needed to go in for service, as the erroneous reminder popping up on the display was annoying me.
The stand-off between Sinn Fein and the DUP reminds me of North Korean diplomacy. I'm not hinting that either party resembles a secretive, Stalinist personality cult (perish the thought).
Flying flags from every lamp-post to mark out territory is one of the things that makes us seems most foreign to many visitors from other parts of the UK.
At what point do we stop offering love, tolerance and respect to delinquent kids and, instead, make them take responsibility for their own actions?
I'd say we were dumbing down, if the phrase itself didn't seem so dumb. But there's no doubt that we are. Study after study shows that modern society is getting ever more stupid with each passing year.
Perverse. Outrageous. Shameful. Embarrassing. These are just some of the words used by free speech campaigners to describe Stormont's so-far unexplained decision to opt out of the new Defamation Bill, which passed into UK law last month.
Commemoration is not the same as veneration. Telling a story – if it is an honest, rounded and impartial narrative – is not the same as building a shrine.
Is there any more futile gesture than dancing on someone's grave?
Exactly 14 days after the Good Friday Agreement, my daughter was born. This year, this month, she turns 15. And so does that longed-for settlement.
Shouting loudly about how world-class everything is in Northern Ireland – world-class golf courses, world-class restaurants, world-class colleges, world-class museum experiences: you name it, we're the world-beaters – leaves us with a problem.
It's not the sort of thing that a self-declared feminist is supposed to say, but I'm going to say it anyway: why bother having a child if you're going to plonk him or her in full-time daycare from when they're knee-high to a grasshopper?
It's the day when the world turns a particularly lurid shade of emerald.
So, a couple of weeks after pre-judging Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby adaptation as shallow and ill-judged on the basis of its shiny fashion-tastic marketing, I can now confirm that, once more, I was wrong.
I didn't think I'd write about Angelina Jolie this week. I didn't imagine there would be much debate about her frank, thoughtful and sensibly unsensational piece in the New York Times explaining why she'd chosen to have a cancer-preventative double mastectomy.
There are, I accept, some ways in which I am a manipulative nazi mother (small n). When it comes to guiding my children's reading, watching and listening choices, I exercise a cultural stranglehold which is unhealthy, unfair and may result in years of resentment.
I am too young to remember Dave Allen in his pomp, and though my folks always spoke of him with reverence, he had little impact on me growing up.
As the man world pauses this week, either to mourn the end of the greatest reign in football history or to declare that Alex Ferguson was never as good as Bill Shankly anyway, spare a thought for the nation's Fergie widows.
How reassuring for local election voters in England to be told by UKIP leader Nigel Farage that his is the only UK party which expressly bans BNP members from joining. Though after rejoicing in this progressive stand, mightn't some wonder why Nigel's party are the only ones who need such a policy in the first place?
How reassuring for local election voters in England to be told by UKIP leader Nigel Farage that his is the only UK party which expressly bans BNP members from joining. Though after rejoicing in this progressive stand, mightn't some wonder why Nigel's party are the only ones who need such a policy in the first place?
So, where were you when you heard the news that JLS had been shot? No, hang on, that's not right... that JLS had split up? While standing on a grassy knoll. Probably.
It's not often we see politicians crying. Politicians tend to have tough hides.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. But uneasier still is the bottom that sits on a throne.
The Doctor Who actress Jenna-Louise Coleman has "never been on a date" with anyone. Like many things public figures say, this is simultaneously true and untrue. It doesn't mean, as it implies, that the 27-year-old has never gone out with anyone.
Gwyneth Paltrow is forever getting a pasting. The willowy American actress arouses the ire of the lieges with her blogs or tweets about food, exercise and health.
Of all cuts in Britain's austerity programme, surely this is the most extreme: reducing the size of the citizenry's biscuits.
Oh, to be free of noise! It has become the impossible dream. Even in the deepest countryside, you can find yourself assailed by the racket of farmers, fish farmers, and weirdos with guns, not to the mention the ruddy wildlife, with their endless roaring and squawking.
Top experts – usually the best kind – are encouraging tweeters who use Twitter to be more happy and interesting.
Jeez, what's with these unionist guys in Stormont? Scare-ee! I'm told Monday's debate on same-sex marriage was restrained by some previous standards. And, it's true, nobody completely lost it. But you could see it simmering underneath.
Not like me to stick up for a rich person "earning" £250,000 per TV episode but, in the case of Hugh Laurie, I make an exception.
Reverse parking ain't easy. You have to go backwards and use the special mirrors fitted to all cars that give an inaccurate picture of your position.
I first heard about the TV drama The Fall more than a year ago, when it was being filmed in Belfast. I had a tip-off that Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan were in town, working on a major crime thriller. To say my curiosity was piqued would be an understatement.
April 2013 has been a month of anniversaries for me, none of which I've particularly felt like celebrating.
Game of Thrones is back at last and all's right with the world of Westeros.
I was back in my old stomping ground Manchester recently.
The Catholic Church has been in crisis for so long, marred by so much controversy, I can hardly remember a time when I felt proud to be part of its congregation.
My son bought me a precious casket of ocular unguent for Mother's Day.
The well-bred fillies were out in force yesterday at day two of Cheltenham Races.
With both Mother's Day and International Womens' Day happening at once, this really is a weekend to celebrate all things female and rejoice in the matriarchs who made us who we are.
Since my first-born son, Luke the Elder, flew the nest last September to go to university in London, I've been more aware than ever that my job as a full-time mum is drawing to a close.
We’re supposed to admire people who think “outside the box”, so you have to be impressed with Americans who still rage against gun control.
To start with, why do the news channels ask Tony Blair for his advice on conflict in the Middle East? It’s like asking Gary Glitter for advice on what to do about Jimmy Savile.
The genius of Jimmy Savile is that each day the revelations manage to get worse. By tomorrow, it will turn out he was a commander in the Provisional IRA, and on Saturday that in 1997 he used to drive a Fiat Uno haphazardly round the underpasses of Paris.
Members of the Ulster Orchestra were hitting the right note this week by lending support to the 'Enough Food For Everyone Campaign (IF)', at a press conference in the Palm House in Botanic Gardens.
This week, the Church of Ireland's General Synod established a select committee to consider human sexuality in the light of Christian teaching and to report back in two years' time.
The tone of this year’s Church of Ireland Synod was set by the low-key Presidential speech of the Primate Richard Clarke in which he outlined several important social and ethical issues.