SCOTLAND’S first commercial gold producer has announced that “substantial progress” has been made towards mining more than 20,000 ounces of gold a year. Source

  Polling by YouGov has indicated that if a snap general election were called, the SNP would be the official party of opposition in Westminster following a crushing defeat for the Tories.  This is based on opinion polling for the UK and Scotland which shows Labour would win 529 seats…

SCOTLAND’S governments must make it clear how businesses will be supported as a recession looms, the Scottish Chambers of Commerce Source

  Clearly, there are no direct comparisons between the way Jamaica became part of the British Empire and Scotland. Many British businesses and individuals participated in the slave trade and huge profits were brought back. Scotland’s participation in that trade has only recently begun to be acknowledged . Nevertheless, Scotland has…

Blaze on North Guildry Street during early hours. …

THE Care Inspectorate has given the home until October 21 to improve. …

A GOVERNMENT U-turn on freezing alcohol duty will seriously affect the whisky business, industry bodies have said. …

Business for Scotland didn’t comment when the Sustainable Growth Commission report was published. It was too conservative for us on spending, undersold Scotland’s economic potential – both for growth and in wellbeing terms – and the conditions for the introduction of a Scottish pound were overly restrictive. We have no such reservations about today’s economic […] Source

Glasgow Cool of Art: 13 books of fire at the Mackintosh Library, by Johnny Rodger, The Drouth, 2022, pp 170.  For all their remarkable persistence, cities are made from fragile components. Buildings, roads, railways, pavements, sewers, canals, bridges, parks, telegraph poles… every part of the great glorious mess demands constant human attention otherwise it will […] Source

The new Adam Curtis documentary ‘Trauma Zone’ is about the build-up to the Putin era. Its premise is the idea that for a very long time everyone in that society knew that nothing really worked anymore but there was nothing they could do about it. “In 1992 Russia began an experiment in extreme capitalism…” As […] Source

I only ever met Robbie Coltrane once. That was in 2005, when I interviewed him for the Herald newspaper a week or so before he opened in Peter McDougall’s short play, The Brother’s Suit. We met in the now long closed BBC Club, a stone’s throw from BBC Scotland’s then HQ on Queen Margaret Drive […] Source

SOLAR panels cause confusion in UK Government circles. Truss, along with her Environment Secretary Ranil Jayawardena, wants to ban solar panels on certain (normally agricultural) land in England – 58% is the figure being restricted. Source