John McGinn has been painted doing his iconic goggle celebration on the side of a house in Clydebank.

A stunning mural celebrating Scotland hero John McGinn has appeared in his hometown ahead of the World Cup.

The eye-catching painting, perched on a house close to where he grew up in Clydebank, captures McGinn performing his iconic goggle celebration. The former St Mirren and Hibernian star previously revealed he first pulled out the famous gesture for his nephew, Jack, who wears goggles while playing football because of his poor eyesight.

Alongside McGinn, the striking artwork proudly displays his Scotland squad number – seven – and the words: “Made in Clydebank. From Girders”, a cheeky nod to Irn-Bru’s legendary mid-80s slogan. The Record understands the mural is part of an upcoming campaign for the beloved soft drink.

The Aston Villa captain was born and raised in Clydebank to his parents Stephen and Mary, where he attended St Columba’s High School and St Peter the Apostle High School. His brothers, Stephen and Paul, also play professional football while his grandfather, Jack McGinn, was once Celtic’s chairman and Scottish Football Association president.

John McGinn is no stranger to seeing himself splashed across a wall, with theWitton Arms pub beside Villa Park in Birmingham also boasting a mural of him doing his trademark celebration. A chant adored by the Tartan Army sits alongside it, declaring: “We’ve got McGinn…Super John McGinn”.

Other Scotland heroes have also recently seen murals spring up in tribute to their incredible achievements. Captain Andy Robertson paid a visit to his own mural last week on Tancred Road, just a short stroll from Anfield.

Painted by MurWalls, it features a powerful portrait of Robertson touching the Liver bird on his chest alongside the message ‘Born in Glasgow, made in Liverpool’. References to the nine trophies he has lifted as a Red are also included, as well as the chant supporters have serenaded him with over the years.

That comes after Scott McTominay’s World Cup-sending overhead kick against Denmark was immortalised in a mural just a stone’s throw from Hampden Park. Alex Coyle, known online as Alko, described the painstaking process of recreating Scott McTominay’s sensational overhead kick, which fired Scotland to the World Cup for the first time in 28 years.

He teamed up with two England-based street artists, Dan Gudgeon and Harvey Whetton, after being commissioned by hand-painted advertising company Global Street Art. The trio spent four gruelling days bringing the massive mural to life on a wall at the end of a tenement block on Somerville Drive in February.

Alex said he was thrilled to be involved. He previously said: “I was pretty happy, because originally [Global Street Art] had just said they had a job for me in Glasgow. And then they sent a depiction of the actual design, and I thought ‘that’s definitely going to be a big deal’.”

The artists began by covering the entire wall in black paint, followed by a layer of Scotland blue. Alex admitted this was the most laborious part of the job.

He continued: “Sometimes you get a bit bored using the roller on the pebble-dash wall. We painted the whole thing black and then the whole thing blue. That’s what takes the biggest amount of time. It’s manually taxing and always a bit boring.”

Once the background was complete, the team moved on to the detailed work using spray paint, taking turns across different levels of scaffolding.

“Our team leader Dan directed us, but we all have pretty similar skills, so we just took turns with whatever needed doing and what parts we fancied doing,” Alex said.

The unpredictable Glasgow weather added a further challenge. He added: “It was quite cold, but on the Wednesday, it was pretty windy.

“I was trying to hold onto the reference image but it was blowing about quite a lot when I was at the top of the scaffolding. But that’s better than if it was raining.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Shrey Parikh finished third in the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee before making a stunning exit from his school bee last year. Now in his final year before he ages out of the competition, he’s fully committed.

The 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, works with three coaches. He pays for word lists and study guides. He tries to learn every Greek and Latin root, every language pattern, every spelling bee-worthy word he can find. And he competes throughout the year in online bees that pit him against the country’s other top spellers.

Shrey’s approach has proven effective for spellers seeking to hold the trophy, and on Wednesday he became one of nine spellers who got through the semifinals and will compete in the finals Thursday night.

But at least one other finalist has gone old-school, shunning outside help and using the dictionary as his guide.

Their opposing strategies have revived a long-running if good-natured debate in spelling circles: Which is more important, mastery of languages or rote memorization?

“At the end of finals, most of the words aren’t going to have a really clean-cut language pattern or rule that you can pull from. So I think memorization is really important,” said Sam Evans, who coached each of the past two champions. “Sometimes it gets a bad reputation, but you have to do it.”

Every word is in the dictionary, if you can find it

It’s all but impossible to reach the finals without knowing the components that make up words absorbed into English: roots and languages of origin. But some champions have stood out for their incredible recall, the ability to instantly visualize any word they’ve run across or even recite dictionary definitions verbatim: Nihar Janga in 2016, Zaila Avant-garde in 2021 and Bruhat Soma in 2024.

Sarv Dharavane might be the next of that group.

Sarv finished third in 2025 as a relative unknown in the spelling community. There’s a reason for that. The 12-year-old sixth-grader from Dunwoody, Georgia, has no coach. He doesn’t participate in online bees. And his only study guide is the source for every word in the competition: Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary.

“The book is my coach,” Sarv said.

Given his past success, he saw no reason to change it up. And he’s back in the finals.

“I didn’t really change anything because my strategy got me far last year, but I did more of what I did before,” Sarv said.

“I used to read the dictionary and set aside difficult words to study later,” he explained. “I did it a lot, so I got a lot of words and it was really easy just to go through them. I’ve always been able to remember pretty well, and I can read through long lists without getting tired, so this strategy works pretty well for me.”

Simple, right?

Many spellers think there’s a better way.

Master the roots, and you don’t need to memorize as much

Dev Shah, the 2023 champion, advocates an artistic approach to spelling — the one also championed by his coach, Scott Remer. Master roots, master language patterns, and learn how to spot the exceptions, and you can spell a word that you’ve never seen or don’t remember.

Shah accepted that he could never memorize the dictionary — “No one can,” he said — and he believed if he got a word he didn’t know, he could figure it out.

“The skill of guessing is everything,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed after his victory.

In an interview Wednesday, Shah said memorization was important, especially for quirky words with obscure origins. He said the best spellers, including Avant-garde, found a balance between memorization and mastery.

Having a conceptual understanding of how words are spelled can also help spellers perform under pressure when their memory fails them, said Shah, who admitted he finds it daunting to memorize a huge volume of words.

Former champion Sohum Sukhatankar, who coaches Shrey, said spellers need to fill their brains with the most useful information.

“When you’re at the highest level, you have to be prepared for hundreds of thousands of words,” he said. “You want to do as little memorization as possible to avoid the chance that you just forget it, so it’s all about efficiency.”

After a catastrophic school bee, one speller seeks every edge

Shrey knows he might have to guess when he’s at the microphone, but he wants to eliminate variables. That makes sense, given that a year ago, he wasn’t even the top speller at his school.

“I had a fever at my school bee last year, and I just blanked on the word ‘calipers’ … and I missed it,” he said. “I was really devastated.”

It took a few months before Shrey was motivated to start studying again. Once he did, he added Sukhatankar to his coaching team. He’s learned how to slow down when he’s at the microphone because of a bad experience in 2023, when he rushed through a word, didn’t enunciate it clearly and judges determined he got it wrong.

He’s also a believer in study guides. Shrey said an interactive, AI-assisted platform called Onyma that offers personalized learning and competition with other spellers — launched this month by Sukhatankar and Evans — has helped with his preparation.

He also uses SpellPundit, an online resource created by two former spellers and their parents that made a splash at the 2019 bee when the majority of that year’s eight co-champions used it. The company claims every champion since as a customer.

Shrey won the annual SpellPundit bee, the South Asian Spelling Bee and several other online bees, which he doesn’t necessarily see as an advantage.

“I feel like it (creates) more pressure to perform,” he said.

Evans believes spellers who want to win should use their study time efficiently, but there’s no barrier to learning every possible word.

“There’s a common joke among spellers that says everything’s in the dictionary, so it’s all ‘on-list,’” he said. “The dictionary is the most basic thing that spellers need to know.”

___

Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow his work here.

A new management system could be installed in the car park

A Cambridgeshire car park could be upgraded to tackle parking “abuse”. ParkingEye has proposed to install a car park management system in the car park along St Mary’s Street and at the back of 28 High Street in Huntingdon.

This would involve installing an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) camera and ANPR column. The parking company wants to install the management system to “reduce car park abuse and ensure spaces are available for genuine site users”.

The car park has 20 parking bays, including disabled spots. The applicant added: “The scheme has been located on an area of land that is already used for car parking and as such will not significantly impact upon visual or landscape receptors. The proposal will ensure that the existing car park is used more effectively and reduce the amount of abuse that currently occurs.”

If approved, the cameras will be installed on columns which will “monitor the entrance and exit points of the car park”. There will also be additional signage on new and existing poles detailing the terms and conditions of using the car park.

The applicant said there is currently no “sophisticated system” to manage the car park, which leaves it open to “misuse and can often mean that spaces are not available for people using the site”.

The development will have a minimal impact on the local landscape and character. Access to the car park will also remain the same.

ANPR cameras used high speed optical character recognition to instantly read vehicle registration plates. This is then cross referenced with real-time to track the vehicles movements.

Bolton Council has labelled the schemes as causing “high expected traffic disruption” after multi-way temporary traffic signals were installed at a number of busy junctions.

The first set of works started today (Tuesday, May 27) at the junction of Bury New Road and Castle Road, opposite the garage.

Multi-way traffic lights have been put in place from 8pm until 5am for utility asset works being carried out by Untitled Utilities.

The works are expected to continue until Thursday, May 29.

A second scheme also began today on Bury Road, outside number 428 and facing Crompton Way.

Multi-way signals have again been installed while new service connections are carried out.

These works are also scheduled to finish on May 29.

Roadworks (Image: NQ)

The combination of both projects starting on the same day is likely to worsen congestion across the area, particularly during peak travel times and evening journeys.

Drivers travelling between Bolton town centre, Halliwell and Tonge Moor could face significant delays as traffic is funnelled through temporary lights at multiple points.

Google Traffic Live shows Bury Road in red meaning heavy traffic (Image: Google Maps)

Motorists are also being warned that disruption is unlikely to ease any time soon.

Further multi-way traffic lights are due to be installed on Bury Road at the junction with Linthorpe Road over the weekend beginning Friday, May 30.

Those works are linked to utility repair and maintenance activity and are expected to create additional delays.

Google maps image (Image: Google Maps)

Residents are being advised to allow extra travel time, consider alternative routes where possible and expect slower-moving traffic across the Bury Road corridor for the remainder of the week and into the weekend.

There are millions of chemical tanks around the U.S., and experts say it is exceedingly rare for them to fail as long as they are properly maintained and inspected.

Yet this past week, there were two major hazardous chemical emergencies on the West Coast. A large tank containing a corrosive chemical at a Longview, Washington, paper mill ruptured on Tuesday, killing two and possibly nine others. And late last week about 50,000 people were evacuated in Southern California after a chemical tank overheated and threatened the area with a catastrophic explosion. Authorities mitigated that risk, and people have been able to return home.

The incidents have raised questions about who is responsible for regulating companies that handle dangerous materials. An Associated Press review has found that officials at the local, state and federal levels all play a part in keeping these facilities safe.

Here’s what to know:

Tanks typically have robust safety standards

Chemical engineering professor Stephen Kmiotek said almost every industry uses chemical tanks. They are common because most manufacturers will use chemicals at some point of their process.

Kmiotek said there might be millions of tanks across the country, but they are generally safe as long as companies are following the standards for how they are built, maintained and inspected. The Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor said the failure rate of chemical tanks is about 1 failure per 1 million tanks per year.

“There are a lot of measures in place to keep people safe,” said Kmiotek, who has tracked the Washington incident closely.

But it is important that companies keep up proper maintenance and inspections, particularly after the tanks get older. Inspections should be increased after a tank passes 10 years, he said. That is especially true for tanks that use highly caustic substances, like the white liquor in the Washington tank. Valves on the tank will need to be replaced more often.

Authorities in Washington said they don’t yet know how old the tank was or how recently valves had been replaced.

After the Bhopal, India, disaster at a pesticide plant in 1984 that killed at least 3,800 people, the chemical industry took a number of steps to improve safety, including making sure chemical tanks are built right and inspected, informing workers about the risks and analyzing what could go wrong if the tank fails and who is at risk.

State agencies are responsible for inspections

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was involved in the response to both situations, and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board said Wednesday it was opening an investigation into the Washington incident. It is an independent federal agency that investigates incidents that could cause “the catastrophic release of extremely hazardous substances.”

But it was state agencies in Washington and California that oversaw the safety at the two companies, along with local fire marshals and hazardous materials teams, said Marissa Baker, an associate professor in the University of Washington, Department of Environmental & Occupational Sciences. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health and the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries would have been responsible for conducting inspections, she said.

In Washington state, where there are far more chemical sites than there are inspectors, the state labor agency generally opens investigations based on complaints or incidents, Baker said.

Baker noted that the Washington company, Nippon Dynawave, was the subject of two investigations by the state labor and industries agency, although the issues were not related to the current situation, and it had fires in recent years.

Federal agencies provide some oversight

Federal regulators require facilities that store or use hazardous chemicals to maintain a “safety data sheet” that details the hazards and offers guidance on the emergency response. Businesses must share that information with state, tribal and local officials. Under an EPA right-to-know rule, the companies must allow fire departments to conduct inspections upon request.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has established protocols for industries that use or store highly dangerous chemicals, known as Process Safety Management standards. They involve inspections, training, special work permits, operating procedures and emergency planning and response.

While the GKN Aerospace plant in Garden Grove, California, would fall under this type of regulation due to the materials it used in its manufacturing process, it was not immediately clear whether the Longview paper mill had to follow the Process Safety Management protocols.

The public danger from some chemicals isn’t always clear

Stephen Lester, a public health expert and the former science director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, said he is concerned that there aren’t clear standards for exposure levels. One of the primary standards is for workplace exposure, and there isn’t a proven standard for how much of a chemical it is safe to be exposed to after a spill or explosion.

“Without these health-based guidelines, you’re ending up with some person making the judgment about what’s acceptable and what’s not,” said Lester, who has spent more than 40 years helping communities assess their health risks.

And the workplace standards are based on an average man, so they don’t account for children or the elderly or anyone with a compromised immune system.

“It’s a very tough situation. I don’t envy the scientists and the toxicologists in the position of advising the decision makers because that person’s going to have to make a judgment call in their best opinion based on what information he knows and he’s been able to research and generally accept it about the exposure to these chemicals,” Lester said.

Slack, the popular workplace instant message service, began experiencing “severe” lag on Wednesday afternoon, according to the company.

“The Slack Engineering team is currently investigating severe latency impacting all Slack services,” Slack wrote on its website just after 4 p.m. Pacific time. “We’ll provide an update as soon as we have more information to share and apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.”

A company dashboard showed problems impacting the service’s login, messaging, notification, search and API capabilities.

More than 3,000 problem reports about Slack had been logged by monitoring site Downdetector around the time of the announcement.

“We continue to investigate the issue, and are‌ implementing fixes to restore services,” the company wrote on its site later on Wednseday. “We’re starting to see some improvements from the fixes implemented so far. We’ll provide another update as soon as we have more information, and again we are sorry for the inconvenience this is causing.”

The Independent has contacted Slack for comment.

Online, Slack users traded notes about the impact of the issue.

“Slack is down, I guess it’s time to pack up for the day,” Kevin Bailey, founder of the healthcare start-up Understood Care, wrote on X.

”Slack is having an incident that’s not reflected in their status page,” AI strategist Patrick Kolencherry wrote on X prior to the announcement from the company.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated with new information.

Two major roads in Cambridgeshire are closed due to a huge lorry fire.

Firefighters are on the scene working to tackle the blaze as the A14 and A11 are partially shut.

The A14 is closed eastbound between J33 (Milton) and J37 (Exning) and the A11 northbound is closed between the A1304 (Six Mile Bottom) and the A14 at J36.

National Highways Traffic Officers are also on scene assisting with traffic management.

This is a live news story, follow below for further updates.

She is up against southern noir crime fiction novelist SA Cosby, known as Shawn Andre Cosby, whose book King Of Ashes has been shortlisted for an unprecedented three Dagger awards, including Gold, the Short Story Dagger and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, which recognises the best thriller of the year.

The family hope to one day be able to thank the donor in person

A Northern Ireland mum says she’s “incredibly grateful” to the stranger who saved the life of her “bubbly, sporty little boy” that meant he’s now back to a normal childhood.

It comes as new data released today by blood cancer charity DKMS UK reveals that 6.1% of 16-55’s in Northern Ireland are registered as potential stem cell donors with DKMS – almost double the UK average of 3.1%.

As the UK marks World Blood Cancer Day on May 28, DKMS is calling on people across Northern Ireland to take action, and help to give people with blood cancer and serious blood disorders a second chance at life by joining the stem cell donor register – which takes just a few minutes.

One person who relied on a matching donor is ten-year-old Dylan Hume. Dylan is a bubbly, sporty little boy from Newtownabbey. Before he became ill in 2024, he loved playing football alongside his friends with St Mary’s FC in Glengormley, where his dad Ross is a coach.

Dylan was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, a rare and life-threatening blood disorder : part of his treatment included a platelet transfusion nearly every week to keep him alive. Doctors said that he needed a stem cell transplant if he was going to recover. Sadly, none of his family were a match, so a search began to find a stranger who could save his life.

His family and friends worked with DKMS UK to sign people up to the stem cell donor register, to find out if they were a match for Dylan, or someone else who was also waiting to find their matching donor. In 2025, they held a donor registration event at Glengormley Integrated Primary School, where more than 300 people joined the stem cell register in a single day.

Eventually, his family received the life-changing news that a donor had been found – a total stranger was a match, and had agreed to come forward and donate their stem cells. Dylan was very ill by this stage, but a few days before World Blood Cancer Day last year, he was finally well enough to receive his life-saving transplant at a hospital in Scotland.

All the family knows at this stage is that the donor was a man in Europe. After one more year, they may be able to find out more about him, and they hope to one day be able to thank him in person.

His mum Claire said: “Dylan has just had his one year post-transplant birthday, and is doing incredible. His road to recovery post-transplant has had a few bumps, with a hospital admission shortly after we returned home to Belfast, and some adjustments and new medications.

“As always, Dylan has faced these head on with his fierce determination, so he can get back to a normal childhood.”

Every 14 minutes, someone in the UK is diagnosed with blood cancer. For many patients, a stem cell transplant from a matching donor is their best or only chance of survival – but only a very small proportion of the UK population are currently registered as potential donors.

In recent months, Dylan’s condition has improved significantly and he hit a huge milestone – he has finally been able to go back to school.

“Getting to go back to school and be with his classmates has been a huge boost for him,” said Claire. “He is now enjoying the freedom of playing outside with his friends and getting his fitness back on track for his upcoming sports day!”

Dylan and his family are marking World Blood Cancer Day with DKMS UK by encouraging people to order a free swab kit via the DKMS website ( dkms.org.uk ), complete simple mouth swabs, and return them to be added to the register.

Claire added: “There isn’t a day goes by that we don’t think about how incredibly grateful we are to Dylan’s donor and every member of the various medical teams, charities, family and friends that have supported Dylan and us as a family throughout these past two years.

“I will continue to urge people to consider signing up to the stem cell donor register so that they can help people like Dylan who deserve the chance to continue their amazing lives. It brought us so much comfort to know that from the thousands of people who registered in support of Dylan – some of them will be a match for other people in our position.”

Signing up to the stem cell donor register is a quick and easy process involving some painless mouth swabs: if you are aged 16-55 and in general good health, you’re eligible to join the register with DKMS.

If you are then matched with someone needing a transplant, in nine out of ten cases donating is a simple, non-surgical procedure, similar to donating blood platelets – with support throughout from DKMS.

DKMS spokesperson Bronagh Hughes said: “For World Blood Cancer Day, we’re calling on people across Northern Ireland to get on the stem cell donor register, which is so simple to do. When a patient needs a stem cell transplant, most will not find a donor in their immediate family.

“Patients like Dylan will rely on finding a stranger on the donor register who is a compatible stem cell match, and who can offer them hope of a second chance at life.

“Joining the register means that you could offer that lifeline for someone in their time of greatest need. Most people will never be called to donate, but if you are, you have the potential to save someone’s life, and DKMS will support you every step of the way.”

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What happens when a leader suddenly disappears? In politics, business and other human organisations, leadership transitions can trigger intense power struggles. Rivals compete for control, alliances shift and institutions can become unstable.

Similar dynamics occur throughout the animal kingdom. Our new research on tropical paper wasps, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, shows just how chaotic leadership struggles can be – but also how societies can remain stable even while conflict rages.

Many animal societies revolve around a single dominant breeder. In cooperative paper wasps, as in many other social wasp species, dozens or even hundreds of females live together in a colony. But reproduction is usually controlled by one dominant individual: the queen. The other females help raise her offspring by foraging for food, feeding larvae and defending the nest.

Unlike in honeybee, yellowjacket wasp or ant colonies, however, these helpers are not sterile. If the queen disappears, any of them could potentially take over and become the next breeder. Often there is a queue – ladies-in-waiting, hoping to be queen. But succession isn’t always predetermined, and in some cases, it can become a contest.

How is the contest settled?

It was in a derelict building in Panama that we found the answer to this question. We experimentally removed queens from 19 wild colonies of the tropical paper wasp, Polistes canadensis, and watched to see what happened next.

The effects were immediate. Aggressive interactions between females increased sharply as several of them competed for dominance. The colony’s usual patterns of behaviour broke down and its dominance hierarchies rapidly became unstable. Rather than a smooth transfer of power, succession turned into a period of widespread conflict involving many members of the colony.

At first glance, this kind of turmoil looks risky. Fighting takes time and energy, and wasps distracted by conflict might neglect essential tasks such as foraging for prey, feeding larvae and maintaining nest structure and hygiene. Violent fights over leadership have been reported in other paper wasps, resulting in societal collapse.

But that wasn’t what we observed.

Despite the chaos, the colonies continued functioning. While some wasps fought to be queen, others avoided the conflict and instead stepped up their investment in foraging and brood care. They ignored the conflict and kept the colony running.

Cooperation didn’t disappear – it was redistributed.

One surprising finding was that the peaceful wasps didn’t appear biologically different from the fighters. In many animal societies, traits such as body size, age or position in the hierarchy help predict who will compete for leadership. For example, in meerkats the largest and oldest females are most likely to inherit the dominant breeding role. In naked mole rats, females already high in the hierarchy fight hardest when the queen dies.

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Of mice and matriarchs: the female-led societies of the animal kingdom

But in our wasp colonies we found no clear differences in body size, age or previous status between individuals that fought and those that stepped back.

This suggests the behaviour may reflect strategic decisions rather than fixed roles. Some wasps may judge that competing for dominance offers them a good chance of producing their own young, while others may gain more by assuring the survival of the brood, which are typically the wasps’ siblings. Investing in the survival of your close relatives is an alternative reproductive strategy and explains the evolution of helping behaviour in animal societies.

Cooperation during conflict

Social insects are often portrayed as perfectly organised societies with rigid rules. Honeybee and ant colonies, for example, typically have sterile workers, leaving little competition over who becomes the next queen. But paper wasps are different. Workers retain the ability to reproduce, and in the tropical species we studied there appears to be no “next in line” when the queen disappears.

Aggression-driven succession might seem too costly for a society to tolerate. Yet our results show it can work, so long as some animals compensate for the disruption by maintaining essential tasks. Even during intense leadership battles, cooperation can persist if some members adjust their behaviour to keep the system functioning.

The balance the wasps in our study maintained may be a common feature of social systems more broadly. When power struggles intensify, stability depends upon those who keep crucial work going in the background.

It’s easy to get distracted when political rivals are fighting it out, but, perhaps we should be shining a light on the unsung heroes who quietly keep things ticking over.