BeatlesWatch: It was 55 years ago today.......................

On 28 July 1968, the Beatles went on a ‘mad day out’ around London with photographers Don McCullin and Stephen Goldblatt, to generate some publicity pictures. During the shoot, they visited St Pancras Old Churchyard in Camden, site of a Christian place of worship since perhaps the fourth century and nestling beside the lost River Fleet.

They sat on this bench – life was so exciting in those days. At the time the band were making the White Album, or more correctly Double Album, and already on the road to breaking up. 

South America's Great War

150 years ago, just as the American Civil War was drawing to its close, Latin America’s deadliest war was just getting going. The War of the Triple Alliance pitted Paraguay against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

The war was sparked by a coup in Uruguay in 1864, which Brazil and Argentina backed. Paraguay had been involved in boundary and tariff disputes with its powerful neighbours for years, and its dictator, Francisco Solano López, believed the coup threatened the regional balance of power so he went to war with Brazil.

Brazil joined up with Argentina and the new Uruguayan government to form the Triple Alliance, and they declared war on May 1, 1865. The fighting ended five years later in Paraguay’s total defeat. About 400,000 died, and the effect on Paraguay was devastating as the population was reduced from about 525,000 to just 221,000, of whom only 28,000 were men. There the conflict is known as the ‘Great War’.

An exhibition of remarkable photographs of the war is now being toured around Paraguay. They were commissioned by a Montevideo photo shop owner, who had spotted how well scenes of Civil War battlefields had sold in the US.

Building a police state - 2

If you wanted to take a picture of a policeman, Sunday would have been a good day for it – in fact, the last good day. From now on if you photograph one of our friendly coppers, you could find yourself sent to gaol for 10 years. It’s all part of a new law presented by Labour as essential to – you’d never have guessed – the War on Terror. Oh sorry, the alleged Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told Labour MP’s they mustn’t call it that anymore.

Still, lighten up you might say, Labour would never use the law to prevent, for instance, the exposure of wrongdoing by a policeman, or to arrest a harmless tourist who didn’t understand that Britain was now a police state. Oh no? Opposition MP Damian Green had his offices searched by anti-terrorist police for exposing inconvenient truths about the Labour government, an 80 year old Auschwitz survivor who dared question Jack Straw was silenced under anti-terrorist legislation, and anti-terrorist laws have been used by police to question 7,000 trainspotters just in the North-East of England! God knows how many have been stopped over the whole country.

I could go on. No wonder even Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, now thinks it’s all getting out of hand, and has protested at the way Labour is stoking up people’s fears in order to destroy our civil liberties. Mind you, our MP’s must have kicked up a hell of a stink when that “snap a bobby, go to gaol” law was going through Parliament. Funnily enough, I don’t remember hearing a peep out of them.