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The plan was revealed to local Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser during an exchange in the Scottish Parliament. |
“There is a lot of interest among residents living in Pitlochry and Highland Perthshire about what is being proposed with Pitlochry Community Hospital,” he said. |
Mr Fraser has asked Ms Freeman for more detail about the proposal. “I welcome the commitment to public engagement and look forward to hearing more details as they emerge,” he added. |
The proposals are being drawn up by the Perth and Kinross Health and Social Care Partnership. A spokeswoman said: “We are exploring a range of options to make services more sustainable and accessible for patients. |
She said: “Planning for the development of a hub in Pitlochry Community Hospital is in the very early stages. |
The partnership intends to work closely with GPs and residents throughout the planning process. “We are planning for a new care and treatment hub to be in place at Pitlochry Hospital before the end of the 2019,” the spokeswoman said. |
In the meantime, the MIIU remains open. Opening hours, which have been restricted for several months, will extend at the beginning of April from 9am to 6pm on weekdays and 9am to 9pm at weekends. |
Matthew Good and Our Lady Peace joined forces for a crosscountry concert tour, but don’t suggest they’re trying to recapture their past glory days. |
While both acts reigned supreme on Canada’s rock scene for a significant chunk of the 1990s, Good and OLP frontman Raine Maida insist they’re short on sentimental feelings for the era. |
“If there’s the one thing both me and Raine didn’t want to do it’s get caught in the nostalgia vortex,” said Good, ahead of Saturday’s concert at Budweiser Gardens. |
“It’s a pretty easy thing to do.” Yet both artists realize their fans expect to hear favourites from the heyday of MuchMusic and Canadian rock radio when they rose to popularity. |
Our Lady Peace delivered a string of memorable hits during the period, including Clumsy, Superman’s Dead and One Man Army, while Good’s namesake band knocked out rousing anthems Hello Time Bomb and Load Me Up. |
Since then, they’ve both released several albums of material — Our Lady Peace recently released the EP Somethingness Vol. 2 and Good released Something Like a Storm last fall — they incorporate into the joint tour. |
Each night, both acts will play separate sets before coming together for an encore. |
The run of 20 shows wraps up in Abbotsford, B.C., March 31. |
You both insist you’re avoiding the “nostalgia vortex” on this tour, but with the 1990s so popular right now, is playing into the era really a bad thing? |
Maida: I think there’s such a stamp on the ‘90s because there was so much great music. It’s probably about that time now when people start feeling nostalgic. But we’re still making new music. I mean this new album is the best stuff that OLP has ever done, and I’ve heard a bunch of Matt’s record and I can say the same f... |
Many tour stops land in smaller Canadian cities. You’re both well-versed with the road, so what’s it like hitting up lesser travelled areas? |
Good: I’ve been back and forth across [Canada] maybe 64 or 65 times. Back in the old days, we toured by van, out of Vancouver to Toronto — 16 shows in a row sleeping at night with somebody driving, eating at gas stations. Nuts. |
Do you long for those days? |
Good: No, no. Not at all. (Once I was in Quebec City) and found myself sitting there literally about to have a nervous breakdown. And as I was losing it, I literally wrote on a napkin the entire first half of [the song] Everything Is Automatic. So at least I got something out of it. |
Maida: There’s a mentality to that time in an artist’s life. I was talking to Win Butler from Arcade Fire about this and he said: “When you go on stage it’s like a battle.” We used to have that as OLP in the early days, especially when people didn’t know us, but we have to get on stage and it’s like you’re going to war... |
A lot has changed in the music industry since you guys came onto the scene. Whether it’s streaming music or social media, how are you navigating this new world of technology? |
Good: My outlook on what I do hasn’t changed at all. It doesn’t matter the delivery system or what social-whatever is out there. In a way, I miss people not knowing anything about you, but in another way, as someone who already experienced that era, and gets to live through the transition of it all, it’s kind of intere... |
Maida: We’re both old school in the sense you care about the craft first, whereas, if you’re starting now, you definitely have your Snapchat and your Instagram happening before you become an artist. They reverse engineer where it’s like: “We need to become popular, we need to have 100,000 subscribers and then I’ll beco... |
Good: There’s people who model jeans with massively more followers than we have. |
Maida: There’s a 14-year-old kid on my son’s basketball team who has 150,000 Instagram followers. He’s a great basketball player, but it’s just like, what the (expletive)? That’s so beyond. |
What: Our Lady Peace and Matthew Good. |
Tickets: $53.75, $63.75 and $83.75 (plus fees) available at the box office, online at budweisergardens.com or by calling 1-866-455-2849. |
I have a question for you. Why are there never any articles about the quality of teachers at Eastern? You’ve run articles about the Adjunct Lecturers getting together and forming a union, but the tenure most professors have has never been questioned. |
If we are to assume Adjunct Lecturers are competent teachers, and if we can assume the current crop of tenured professors aren’t, then why aren’t we doing something about this inequity? What is the point of those surveys they have us fill out at the end of the semester if they don’t correct anything? I’d like to see so... |
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (AP) Excess sewer water again made its way into the Niagara River, two months after tourists saw black-colored water near Niagara Falls, state officials said. |
The Niagara Falls Water Board said it reported to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation that excess sewage was discharged on Wednesday when its wastewater treatment plant’s processing capacity was exceeded during a rainfall. |
The department said the resulting “badly discolored” river water violated the state’s water quality standards. |
“These continued violations are wholly unacceptable,” the DEC said in a statement. It said the maximum penalty for water quality violations is $37,500 per day, per violation. |
Many older U.S. wastewater systems have similar problems. The board said the upgrades can be too costly for local municipalities to shoulder alone. |
In late July, a foul-smelling discharge turned the water near the base of Niagara Falls an alarming shade of black during a busy tourist weekend. |
The state fined the water board $50,000 and said the agency would have to make changes at the plant and obtain state approval before any future discharges. |
Local water officials blamed that incident on the outdated equipment, as well as miscommunication between employees. |
June 2, 2015 The vote comes two days after controversial provisions of the Patriot Act expired because the Senate was unable to overcome maneuvers by Sen. Rand Paul, who voted against the bill Tuesday. |
Americans Say They Want The Patriot Act Renewed ... But Do They, Really? |
June 1, 2015 A new poll says Americans want NSA data collection renewed. Yet another recent survey says Americans want better controls on what kind of data the government can collect. What's going on? |
May 31, 2015 Unable to overcome parliamentary maneuvers by Sen. Rand Paul, the Senate adjourned and let three provisions of the Patriot Act expire at midnight. |
May 23, 2015 The Senate worked late into the night but failed to agree on extending government surveillance programs under the USA Patriot Act before adjourning for the Memorial Day holiday. |
May 19, 2015 If you haven't been paying attention, here's a primer on the changes Congress is considering making to U.S. surveillance practices. |
May 13, 2015 The USA Freedom Act would extend many parts of the surveillance legislation while also barring the NSA's massive collection of Americans' phone data. The measure's fate in the Senate is uncertain. |
May 7, 2015 A three-judge panel said Congress did not intend to give the National Security Agency the authority to collect metadata about Americans' phone records in bulk when lawmakers wrote the Patriot Act. |
A claim by the British National Party that it is 'defending Britain's Christian culture' has been called 'absurd' but also 'dangerous' by the religious thinktank Ekklesia. |
One leaflet asks voters: "Are you concerned about the growth of Islam in Britain? Make Thursday 4 May Referendum Day." It adds: "We owe it to our children to defend our Christian culture." |
This is not the first time that Ekklesia has countered such claims by the BNP. In the run up to the European elections, Ekklesia's director Jonathan Bartley exposed the arguments of a BNP press officer during a debate on Radio 5 Live. |
The thinktank observes what it sees as a growing trend for the BNP to employ religious arguments. It also notes that the far right party appears to be involving itself with extreme Christian groups - and suggests that some of these groups are making it too easy for them to do so. |
Recently BNP members have been observed taking part in protests outside theatres against 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'. |
Ekklesia's director Jonathan Bartley said; "The claim that the BNP are in some way defending 'Christian culture' is absurd. As the main Christian denominations in this country have repeatedly pointed out, the far right's policies are completely at odds with the Christian faith." |
"There does however appear to be a worrying trend for the BNP to try and use religion in this way - and churches clearly have a crucial role to play in exposing their arguments." |
Labour MPs are reportedly urging their party's leaders to take more seriously the threat from the BNP in its working-class heartlands. |
Mainstream parties say the BNP's campaigning has become more sophisticated. The party is using telephone canvassing for the first time and playing down its hostility to blacks and Asians in order to focus on Muslims. Other campaign literature contrasts the jailing of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza for inciting murder and ... |
The BNP, which now has 19 councillors, is expected to focus efforts in areas where it has performed strongly in the past such as parts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and east London, where it won 35 per cent of the vote in recent by-elections in Barking. Its share of the vote rose from 1 per cent at the 19... |
Labour MPs are worried that the BNP could capture more council seats by exploiting the disenchantment with the Government among traditional Labour supporters and stoking fears about the Muslim community. The MPs fear that Tony Blair's determination to retain the support of Middle England could leave Labour vulnerable t... |
Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, said: "The BNP's pitch is to be more Labour than New Labour with a virulently anti-Muslim agenda." He said Labour's strategy of targeting swing voters in marginal seats was "diametrically at odds" with the need to reassure traditional supporters about the Government's record. |
Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting, called on Labour to agree pacts with Liberal Democrats and Greens under which one of them would take on the BNP in its target seats and the others would stand down. Such a strategy helped to defeat the BNP in a Barking by-election last year, when it tried to exploit the London bombings. Mr K... |
Ian McCartney, the Labour chairman, said: "The BNP's strategy is straight out of the Nazi textbook. Their tactics are becoming increasingly sophisticated but they always involve blaming one part of the community for local problems. They take up legitimate grievances and they exploit those issues for their own racist ai... |
A BNP spokesman said it would campaign mainly on local issues and denied it was "exploiting" recent events. "We are saying that there are worries in society about these issues," he added. |
Ever since the state of Israel was created in 1948, Shimon Peres, who has died aged 93, was at or near the centre of action. A protege of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, Peres became premier himself on three occasions, foreign minister for another three, and state president from 2007 until 2014. He fas... |
For 15 long years after it fell from power in 1977, Peres led the Labour party. In the early 80s, he resuscitated Israel’s economy, and in 1994 shared the Nobel prize for his role in the efforts to create peace in the Middle East through the Oslo accords. In the same year, he cemented Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan.... |
A simple listing of achievements only hints at the phenomenon that was Peres. The Jerusalem Report news magazine called him “Israel’s only world-class statesman, perhaps Zionism’s last pragmatic visionary”. Peres wrote 11 books, read poetry voraciously, and could quote from Old Testament prophets, French literature and... |
And yet, despite all his talent, there was something tragic about the man. Peres contested five elections without winning a single outright victory. His longest tenure as premier was two years, and came while he was in an awkward alliance with his Likud enemies. He lost the Labour leadership on the eve of the party’s r... |
Some of his initiatives were halted before they had got going, such as his 1987 London agreement with King Hussein of Jordan. Others collapsed because opponents chipped away at the scaffolding, as with the Oslo accords. Even when in 2000 he stood for state president – the ultimate consolation prize for veterans – Kness... |
All the same, Peres campaigned well into his 80s. No sooner had the media written him off as a “serial loser” than he would pop up again as a saviour in a time of crisis. He was used to playing the long game. In 2007 Katsav resigned in disgrace amid charges of sexual improprieties, and Peres was elected president in hi... |
“I am a child of the generation that lost one world and went on to build another,” Peres once wrote. |
Son of Yitzhak and Sarah Persky (he later Hebraised the family surname), he was born in Vishneva, then a largely Jewish town located in the borderlands between modern Belarus, Poland and Lithuania. His New York-born cousin Betty Perske, one year his junior, went on to achieve fame as the actor Lauren Bacall. Shimon’s m... |
At 15 Peres joined the Ben Shemen agricultural youth village, a crucible of future Israeli leaders. He soon met the Ukrainian-born Sonia Gelman and wooed her by moonlight with readings from Marx’s Das Kapital. The couple married in 1945 after Sonia had served as a nurse and driver with the British Army in Egypt. She be... |
In 1950 Peres travelled to Washington as military attache. By 1953, aged 29, he was director of the entire defence ministry, an office he held until 1959. Peres helped plan the Sinai campaign of 1956. In 1957, he successfully lobbied the French government for a nuclear reactor, and established a hi-tech intelligence un... |
Israel later promised that it would not introduce atomic weapons into the region – “at my urging”, wrote Peres. Though he conceded that Arab leaders saw his creation, Israel’s secret Dimona plant in the Negev Desert, as “a worrisome fuzzy deterrent”, Peres the politician enjoyed creating such deliberate ambiguities. |
In 1959 Peres was elected to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, for the ruling Mapai party (forerunner of Labour) and immediately became deputy defence minister. He bought Israel’s first US weapons, but resigned in 1965 with the prime minister, Ben-Gurion. Their breakaway Rafi party proved unsuccessful, winning only ... |
Israel gained the Palestinian-populated territories of Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 war – an acquisition that was to change its politics more profoundly than was realised at the time. In 1969 Peres was charged with developing these areas, and absorbing new eastern European immigrants. He then served in turn as co... |
Appointed defence minister that June, Peres immediately plunged into the intricacies of negotiating a second interim Sinai treaty with Egypt. He also opened a “good fence” border crossing with Lebanon, revitalised the IDF after the near-humiliation of the 1973 war, allowed legally questionable settlements on the West B... |
Peres thus won the dubious privilege of becoming Labour’s first-ever opposition leader. He then saw Begin negotiate the historic peace agreement with Egypt that he had expected to make himself. Rabin’s memoirs decried Peres for betraying him in 1977, and Begin was able to exploit the spat to triumph at the 1981 polls. ... |
Likud’s ill-fated Lebanese war of 1982 allowed Peres to tap into national unease. He fought the 1984 elections to a dead heat, and duly headed a national unity government, agreeing that he would hand power to Likud’s pugnacious new leader, Yitzhak Shamir, after two years. As prime minister, Peres made up for lost time.... |
He had first met King Hussein in 1974. Their mutual respect was clear from the outset. Peres felt that a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation could break the stalemate in the territories, and bring peace to Israel, and in 1987 negotiated with the king in London. Shamir, angry that Peres had “gone behind his back”, quash... |
Israel’s 1988 election took place against the backdrop of the Palestinian intifada (the uprising against Israel in the occupied territories). It ended in deadlock, and led to another unsatisfactory “unity government”. Peres rejected Shamir’s endorsement of settlements and, in 1990, sought to topple the government. At t... |
Miraculously, their enmity turned to partnership, with Peres, the foreign minister, as the engine and Rabin, the prime minister, as the gears and brakes (or so Peres later described it). A longtime foe of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Peres now persuaded Rabin to consider talks with the PLO leader Yasser Arafa... |
For two years, Peres worked furiously to keep the imperfect peace on track. Given the problem of settlements, it was, he quipped, an attempt “to turn an omelette back into eggs”. He negotiated directly with Arafat, turned the “Gaza and Jericho First” proposals agreed at the White House into reality, drafted the 1994 Pa... |
But Israeli fury at persistent terrorism prompted demonstrations against the Rabin-Peres administration. In 1995, Yigal Amir assassinated Rabin at a peace rally. Peres, Amir’s other intended target, was just metres away. He took over as prime minister on a wave of sympathy. With hindsight, Peres’s decision not to call ... |
Support for Peres evaporated when successive bomb attacks killed dozens in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and talks with Syria came to naught. Likud warned: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Arab states feared that his dream of a borderless Middle East spelled Israeli economic colonialism by stealth. Peres’s retaliatory invasion... |
Peres chided “Bibi” for “111 days of verbiage”, and held on as party chairman until Barak ousted him in 1997. After Labour’s victory in 1999, Barak gave Peres the nebulous portfolio of “regional co-operation minister”, but sidetracked him over the peace process. Peres had meanwhile founded a centre for peace in his nam... |
In 1998 he wrote forewords to four books on the 50th anniversary of Israel’s independence. He also released For the Future of Israel, a series of philosophical conversations with the author Robert Littell. Where other Israeli politicians grudgingly accepted a Palestinian state as inevitable, only Peres argued in Le Mon... |
Although many Israeli leftists felt outraged at his “betrayal”, experienced Peres-watchers knew that his personal friendship with Sharon counted for more than ideological congruence. Less charitable souls felt that his overvaulting ambition had once again trumped his principles. Similar charges resurfaced in 2005, when... |
As Israel’s ninth president, he helped restore his nation’s battered reputation. He became the first Israeli head of state to address a Muslim state legislature when he spoke to Turkey’s national assembly in November 2007. Turkey and Japan supported his “valley of peace initiative” for economic revival and joint indust... |
Most unusually for an Israeli president, Peres became his nation’s top diplomat. He asked Palestinians and Arab nations to join in “a great journey towards a world built on logic and intellect, not land”. He negotiated directly with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, on behalf of a taciturn Netanyah... |
Nonetheless, Peres still engendered controversy. In his inaugural presidential speech he bluntly stated that Israel had to “get rid of the territories”. He averred that he had changed his position, not his beliefs. Although many hailed him as a man of vision and peace, Israeli rightists flayed him for playing into the ... |
For their part, the Israeli left accused Peres of acting as a figleaf for an obdurate Likud administration. They were dismayed when in 2009 he defended Israel’s continuing attack on Gaza. Days later he found himself at the centre of an unseemly row with the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the Davos world... |
“Over the years,” wrote the Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell, “Shimon Peres … destroyed everything of value [in Labour].” Other leftists blamed him for initiating with Oslo II the settlement bypass roads that seemed to render a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Peres repeatedly called Abbas a serious and true p... |
After leaving the presidency in 2014, Peres continued work for his peace centre. When Israeli authorities denied the centre tax-exempt status because it trained doctors from Gaza, the centre suspended its application and continued with its programme, which by 2015 had helped 250 personnel. As late as November 2015, his... |
Peres was an intriguingly contradictory figure: a romantic in a cynical age, an Israeli icon with a Polish accent and francophone sensibility, who carried about him the taint (deserved or otherwise) of political chicanery. Unlike holiness, he told David Frost, politics is built on compromise. Nor was he above taking au... |
He certainly brought a touch of aesthetic philosophical discrimination to the world of politics. His books included The Next Step (1965), David’s Sling: The Arming of Israel (1970), Entebbe Diary (1991), The New Middle East (1993), Battling for Peace (1995), The Imaginary Voyage: With Herzl in Israel (2000) and Ben Gur... |
He is survived by his daughter, Zvia, sons, Yonathan and Nehemia, and six grandchildren. |
• Shimon Peres, statesman, born 1 August 1923; died 28 September 2016. |
• This article was amended on 28 September 2016. An earlier version said that Peres was survived by his wife, Sonia. She died in 2011. |
What do you think Shimon Peres' legacy will be? |
Martin Weiss: Two recent mega-events — the Wall Street collapse in 2008 and the Washington response in 2009 … the debt implosion and then the money printing explosion — are mind-boggling in their dimensions. |
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