North Macedonia’s president says he has signed a decree renaming the army to correspond with the new name the country took in February to end a decades-long dispute with neighboring Greece. President Stevo Pendarovski said on Thursday 5 July 2019 the decree specifies that army uniforms will now bear the name “Army of the Republic of North Macedonia.”

Pendarovski serves as supreme commander of the armed forces as part of the largely ceremonial presidency he assumed in May 2019. The governments of Greece and what was then Macedonia agreed last year to add “North” to the younger country’s name in exchange for Greece dropping its objections to its northern neighbor joining NATO and the European Union.

The workshops “Aboriginal Place Names – Our Language Matter – First People Of The Millewa-Mallee Aboriginal Corporation” will provide opportunities for Traditional Owners to promote the importance of local Aboriginal languages in the place naming of roads, geographic features and localities. By Traditional Owners, they understand a descendant of the tribe or ethnic group that occupied a particular region before European settlement, especially when that occupation is recognised by Australian law. Importantly, participants from Local Government Areas and emergency services, in addition to planners and surveyors will be supported to explore ways for establishing strong professional relationships with Traditional Owners to enable future collaborative naming activities.

Day and time: JULY 16, 2019 9:00 AM – JULY 16, 2019 3:30 PM

Address: Alfred Deakin Centre, 190 Deakin Avenue, Mildura, Australia

The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China asked local authorities to act prudently and appropriately in a campaign against improper geographic names. Relevant regulations and guidelines of the campaign should be strictly observed to prevent the campaign from being expanded in an arbitrary manner, said the ministry.

The focus of the campaign is names of newly built residential areas and major projects, which had a negative social impact and stirred strong public reactions. Launched in December 2018, the campaign mainly targets four types of improper toponyms, including those featuring exaggeration, unrelated foreign elements, strange vulgar words and repetitive names. The campaign is an important measure to improve the management of geographic names and promote the fine cultural tradition embedded in such names.

This Wall Street Journal article looks at the trend of Southern American schools changing their name from “Robert E. Lee” to, well, any other “Lee” or similar name.

Many school districts are wrestling with sometimes contentious debates over being named for Confederate figures, while also facing tight budgets. The solution, they are finding, can be picking someone with a similar name. Districts began naming schools for Confederate figures after the Civil War, with an uptick in the 1950s and 1960s. Several dozen school districts have dropped Confederate school names in recent years.

In the Houston Independent School District, officials changed a school named for Confederate soldier Sidney Lanier to the late Bob Lanier, a former mayor of the city. The Austin school district’s Robert E. Lee Elementary is now Russell Lee Elementary, named for a Depression-era photographer.

Oklahoma City Public Schools wasn’t sure whether its Lee Elementary was even named for Robert E. Lee, because the school never carried the full name. But after the 2017 discovery of board minutes from the early 1900s that listed a portrait of Robert E. Lee as a gift to the school, officials figured the school must be named for the Confederate general. It changed the name to Adelaide Lee, after an Oklahoma philanthropist, in 2018.

Want to know more? Click through to read the rest of the article!

NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, now rests on Hidden Figures Way. The street was renamed in June 2019 in honor of Katherine Johnson, the late Dorothy Vaughan and the late Mary Jackson, three women who helped put astronaut John Glenn in orbit by calculating his flight trajectory by hand.

Hidden Figures is the name of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book on the subject, as well as a movie. Both the book and movie tell the story of not only the work the women did, but also the challenges that black women faced at NASA in the 1960s.

“Here we are, 50 years after the landing of the Apollo 11 Moon lander, celebrating those figures who were, at the time, not celebrated,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at the ceremony.