Paul Edwards spent his childhood in the village of Turvey in Bedfordshire. He liked church music, especially the sound of the big organ in the church at Turvey. He became a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral for four and a half years and then spent the same amount of time as lay clerk at Peterborough Cathedral. He has been organist and choir master at several churches in Bedfordshire, including All Saints, Turvey and St. Paul's Church, Bedford. He works as a teacher, piano accompanist and choral singer.
Edwards has made a series of recordings of interesting old organs of North Bedfordshire. He has transcribed and edited ten volumes of 18th century "English Organ Music". The list of all his compositions has 450 opus numbers. They include about 150 hymn tunes and a large number of anthems. Many of these works have been published in collections including "Hymns for Today’s Church", "Psalms for Today" and "Carols for Today". His carol "No Small Wonder", written in 1983 was published in "Carols for Today" in 1986 and was recorded on LP by Canterbury Cathedral Choir. It was sung at the famous Nine Lessons and Carols service broadcast on the BBC Television by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge in 2000. His music has been recorded on several CDs.
Edwards finds inspiration for his compositions in the English countryside, especially that of Norfolk He also enjoys driving and photographing busses and coaches.
Lay clerk
A lay clerk, also known as a lay vicar, is a term used in the United Kingdom to describe a male singer who sings in a cathedral choir or a choir belonging to a college of one of the large traditional universities. A lay clerk is usually paid for the job. When he is called "lay vicar" the term "vicar" comes from the Latin word "vice" (meaning "deputy"). A lay vicar is not in holy orders (he is not a priest). Today there are a few female lay clerks, e.g. in Dublin.
The term "layman" was used in the Middle Ages for a chorister who sings some of the music that was too difficult for the priests to sing. Today many of the lay clerks in places such as Oxford or Cambridge combine their work as layclerk with studying at University. It is similar to a scholarship for studying.
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen KCB (Lancaster, 20 July 1804–18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.
Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word "Dinosauria" (meaning 'Terrible Reptile'), and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
Owen was the driving force behind the establishment, in 1881, of the British Museum (Natural History) in London.
Owen's technical descriptions of vertebrates were important. His "Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates" (3 vols. London 1866–1868) was a standard reference work for many years.
His career was tainted by accusations that he failed to give credit to the work of others and even tried to appropriate it under his own name.
Owen credited himself and Georges Cuvier with the discovery of the "Iguanodon", completely excluding any credit for the original discoverer of the dinosaur, Gideon Mantell. This was not the first or last time Owen would deliberately claim a discovery as his own, when in fact it was not. Owen was finally dismissed from the Royal Society's Zoological Council for plagiarism.
Owen was highly critical of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", in part because Darwin did not refer much to the previous scientific theories of evolution. Instead, Darwin compared the theory of evolution by natural selection with the unscientific theory in the Bible.
Owen, in Darwin's opinion, was "Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever; the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about". "It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me".
Owen was also a party to the threat to end government funding of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew botanical collection (see Joseph Dalton Hooker):
In the first part of his career Owen was regarded rightly as one of the great scientific figures of the age. In the second part of his career his reputation slipped. This was not solely due to his underhanded dealings with colleagues; it was also due to the serious errors of scientific judgement which were discovered and publicized. A fine example was his decision to classify man in a separate sub-class of the Mammalia (see Thomas Henry Huxley). In this Owen had no supporters at all. Also, his unwillingness to come off the fence concerning evolution became increasingly damaging to his reputation as time went on.
Owen continued working after his official retirement at the age of 79, but he never recovered the good opinions he had got in his younger days.
Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd
Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd is a 2011 case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a civil lawsuit filed in federal court. It argued that holding Muslim-Americans after the September 11 attacks was unconstitutional.
A young man named Lavoni T. Kidd was a prominent football player at the University of Idaho. He is an American citizen. While at college, Kidd converted to Islam and took the name Abudulla al-Kidd.
In 2003, the police arrested Al-Kidd as he was boarding a flight to Saudi Arabia, where he planned to study. He was held for 15 nights under the federal material witness statute (a law that allows police to hold people who are going to testify in court) because he was going to testify in the trial of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told Congress that al-Kidd's capture was one of the FBI's "success" stories. Al-Kidd was never charged with a crime or called as a witness. He was later released.
Al-Kidd went to court, suing John Ashcroft, who was United States Attorney General from 2001 to 2005. Al-Kidd said he was strip-searched, shackled, interrogated without having a lawyer with him, and treated as a terrorist. The American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who represented al-Kidd claimed he was one of 70 Muslim men who were treated this way.
Aschroft claimed that he had "absolute immunity" from civil lawsuits like al-Kidd's. In other words, because his actions were part of his duties as Attorney General, nobody can sue him about those actions. Ashcroft also claimed that he had "qualified immunity" that prevents such lawsuits unless the official violated someone's constitutional rights.
In 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that Ashcroft could be sued and held personally responsible for the wrongful holding of al-Kidd. On October 18, 2010, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear Ashcroft's appeal.
On May 31, 2011, the Supreme Court ruled against al-Kidd by a vote of 8-0. (Usually there are nine Supreme Court Justices, but Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in the al-Kidd case.)
To show that Ashcroft could be sued, al-Kidd's lawyers had to meet a very high burden of proof. They needed to prove that Ashcroft was directly involved in holding al-Kidd, or that he knew what was happening to al-Kidd. The Court ruled that al-Kidd's lawyers had not proved these things. They suggested that al-Kidd's detention was handled mostly by people who were much less powerful than Ashcroft.
All eight Supreme Court Justices agreed that the Ninth Circuit's ruling should be reversed. However, the Justices reached this decision for different reasons.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Scalia wrote that a Magistrate Judge had issued a valid arrest warrant for al-Kidd based on specific information about him. Al-Kidd was not arrested in a general effort to sweep a large group of Muslims into jail he was specifically arrested because he was suspected.