It was with great sadness that the Board of Trustees learned of the death of Sir Ludovic Kennedy, one of the Society's Distinguished Supporters.

Margo MacDonald MSP is to deliver a keynote speech at the Humanist Society of Scotland’s annual conference on Saturday 7th November 2009.

The MSP’s keynote speech will focus on her campaign to have an individual’s right to die with dignity enshrined in Scottish law through her proposed introduction of the End of Life Choices Bill in the Scottish Parliament over the coming months.   

The British Humanist Association (BHA) has echoed the Government’s response to a debate on the 4th November 2009 in the House of Lords on the BBC, Humanism, and Thought for the Day, saying that it ‘hopes the BBC has been listening’. The debate, called by Lord Harrison, and in which a number of peers declared their interest as ‘Happy Humanists’, took place on the eve of the BBC Trust’s deliberations on whether to allow non-religious contributors to the Today programme’s…

“Since I don’t believe in any God may I be excused from Christian assemblies and use the time to study for my highers which are rapidly approaching.”

This simple request, made by a sixteen year old pupil at a Scottish school in 2009, was rejected by the rector. Just one in a long catalogue of instances in which the law is being broken which were reported to the meeting held by the Glasgow Group of the HSS on Sunday 10th…

THEY are a rejection of God and officialdom at a time when marriages are at their lowest level since Victorian times. While traditional religious and civil weddings in Scotland declined by nearly 1,000 last year, the number of couples opting for a humanist ceremony surged by 45 per cent, official figures showed yesterday, writes Alastair Dalton in The Scotsman

Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate…

Baroness Butler-Sloss, the judge who gave lifelong anonymity to James Bulger’s killers, has said that the public should be “more merciful” to child criminals, reports The Daily Telegraph

The greatest problem of writing historically is that the story has not ended, writes Robert Fisk in The Independent

Landmark review finds 'shocking' failures to investigate and prosecute effectively / Forensic medical evidence should be gathered by NHS, not police, ministers urged, reports Robert Verkaik, Law Editor of The Independent

The Lords is for people of all faiths and none: there is no space for reserved benches for the clergy, writes Polly Toynbee in The Guardian

The head of a leading charity has accused the Government of deliberately ignoring an epidemic of poor mental health among asylum seekers, because admitting it would mean allowing greater numbers to stay in the country, reports Stephen Naysmith in The Sunday Herald…